Transitional Object

Definition

The transitional object is psychoanalysis's name for an actual thing onto which feelings for significant figures are transferred — Winnicott's teddy bear (the example Spankie's chapter supplies) being the type case, the fetish object (a woman's stocking, per Spankie's note on Freud's "Fetishism," 1927) its pathologized neighbor. Spankie defines the family: "Objects play an important role in psychoanalysis: the word is used to both describe representations of significant figures within the psyche, as in mother object or love object. Feelings for such figures are transferred onto actual objects, as in a transitional object or fetish object. Functioning to both provide pleasure and ward off anxiety, such objects represent a complex emotional content to their owner as well as any formal representation." The concept gives interior design's object-world a psychical depth: the object in the room is never only its formal representation — it is also the carrier of transferred feeling, which is why Freud's desk objects (the Osiris celebrating Totem and Taboo's completion, the Centaur recalling a trip and the hybrids of dreams, the Baboon of Thoth stroked "in the same way he stroked his pet dogs") resist being read as a code and instead work emotionally — "a secure creative space that allowed Freud to think and to write."

Key Thinkers

• Donald Winnicott — the concept's origin (Playing and Reality, 1967; the teddy bear as transitional object, cited in Spankie's note 12) — (page needed: see log).
• Ro Spankie — the concept's interior-design application: the sixty-five desk objects as transitional-family objects whose "stories relate to both the character they assume and their role in Freud's life" (2018).
• Sigmund Freud — the theory's source ("Fetishism," 1927) and its demonstration case: the collector-occupant whose desk objects functioned as audience, refuge, and idea-stabilizers (via Spankie).

Related Concepts

• Facilitating Environment — the concept's environmental counterpart: the arrangement the transitional objects create (Winnicott underwrites both, via Spankie).
• Symbolic Ecology — the neighboring empirical account: the household object as "concrete symbol" in meaning-networks (Csikszentmihalyi); the transitional object adds the psychical transfer the symbol-account lacks.
• Psychoanalytic Setting — the room the objects inhabit and hold: the desk-room as the setting's theory-side.
• Memory — the object as mnemonic: the visual connection from desk to couch "aiding recall"; the objects as "markers or signposts to his thoughts" (Fliess, via Spankie).
• Objectivation 'In Itself' and 'For Itself' — Heller's parallel account of the everyday object-world: the object as species-essential self-reproduction vs. the psychically charged object of psychoanalysis.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the founding source: "Objects play an important role in psychoanalysis: the word is used to both describe representations of significant figures within the psyche, as in mother object or love object. Feelings for such figures are transferred onto actual objects, as in a transitional object or fetish object. Functioning to both provide pleasure and ward off anxiety, such objects represent a complex emotional content to their owner as well as any formal representation"; the anti-hieroglyph caveat — "There is no Oedipus on the desk and few of the Egyptian figures that make up the majority of the figurines are mentioned in Freud's writing"; the object-biographies (Osiris/Totem and Taboo 1913; Centaur/Innsbruck; the Baboon of Thoth stroked "in the same way he stroked his pet dogs"; Loe Kann's totemic Egyptian figurine, note 14).
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the concept scaled up from object to house, via note 1: "'The capacity to create such an illusion [of transitional phenomena] defends the child against the anxiety of being alone, without the mother', Laurie Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis, Harper Collins (New York), 1993, p 178" — the transitional-phenomena claim Winnicott's concept carries, here restated through Adams and applied to the dwelling itself ("the dwelling could be considered a creative 'space' that defends the individual against the anxiety of being alone," p. 358). See transitional-space, potential-space, dwelling.
• Design and Order in Everyday Life (Csikszentmihalyi 1991) — the empirical neighbour: the household object as "concrete symbol"; meaning-networks of domestic life.

Open Questions

• Spankie rejects the hieroglyph model (no shared code) but keeps the emotional-content model: can transitional-object logic scale from a child's teddy bear to sixty-five museum-grade antiquities — or does collecting transform the mechanism (connoisseurship, memory, gift-relations) into something else?
• The objects' associations are "not so direct" and mostly private (gifts, trips, habits). Is the transitional object therefore always partly illegible to outsiders — and does that illegibility explain both the museum's temptation (hieroglyph) and its failure?
• Fuss & Sanders read the same collection as a surveillance apparatus ("a phalanx of ancient figurines… arranged to face the patient"); Spankie reads the same objects from the other side of the desk as the writer's audience and refuge. Are the figurines transitional objects for Freud and watchers for the patient simultaneously — one arrangement, two psychical functions?
• Does the concept give interior design a testable claim — that an interior's objects can be evaluated by the pleasure/anxiety economy they hold — or does the privacy of associations make it unteachable?