Taking a breather from our moment’s unrelentingly grim headlines, Abby, Patrick, and Dan return to a favorite analytic thinker – Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) – and begin the first of a two-part episode on one of his most famous papers, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1951/1953). Winnicott’s ostensible subject here is infantile development, and specifically the attachment very young children frequently develop towards a particularly favored object, whether that be a blanket, a stuffed animal, or the like. But Winnicott also imbues an infant’s “lovie” with profound significance that goes beyond its material incarnation. Rather than being just another plaything, it holds an essential role in the development of a child’s incipient subjectivity, and demands that we think beyond binary distinctions between subject and object, inside and outside, and self and other. As a “transitional object,” it even suggests a kind of template for sophisticated adultg activities ranging from artistic creation to religious rituals to sexual fetishism to addiction and more. Close reading the first six pages of the essay, Abby, Patrick, and Dan unpack Winnicott’s deceptively simple prose and delightful lists, exploring how play is in fact neither frivolous nor merely the province of children, but in fact something much more serious, and thinking through the implications of Winnicott’s idea of “transitional phenomena” for psychotherapy, education, aesthetics, and more.
Works Cited:
Donald Woods Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon,” in Playing and Reality (essay originally published in 1951; Playing and Reality, 1971)
Also as mentioned in the episode, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research’s Annual Social is June 4th! Abby is on the host committee and we’ll both be there – come join us to support BISR?
For more details and tickets: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/events/2026-annual-institute-social/
And a link to Abby’s summer Brooklyn Institute class, Theories of Consent: Subjectivity and Sexual Ethics: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/theories-of-consent-subjectivity-and-sexual-ethics-2/
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A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:
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