M104 

Consumer items
as transitional objects

Robert M. Young is a Kleinian psychoanalyst, author and editor of journals and e-resources.  His book Mental Space is available on line, and in it he expands on Winnicott’s original concept of transitional objects in infancy.  Transitional objects are described by Young as precursors of adult cultural life, and relevant to adult anxieties and the use of consumer items for consolation. [i]  

From this Young develops his argument towards consumer items.   In health, the early infant attachment to transitional phenomena fades, but ‘a need for a specific object or a behaviour pattern that started at a very early date may reappear at a later age when deprivation threatens.’[ii] In adolescence or adulthood the blanket or teddy may be replaced by other objects that carry significance and offer comfort.  Young says this ‘applies to all sorts of special things. Everyone’s list will be different, but these days walkmans have this quality for many adolescents, as do portable computer games.’[iii]This applies particularly to ‘objects that evoke the qualities of luxuriousness and comfort’ from bath oils and chocolates to music or cars.  But also mundane objects such as today’s equivalents of the Filofax – diaries, electronic or telephony equipment - because they ‘give the illusion that one has one’s life under some sort of control.’[iv]This relates very closely to what Tabine was discussing under ‘transitional experience’.

It is easy to relate to this, remembering ones own emotional investments in specific things at various times. The trouble with this line of thought is that what began as a discussion of our first ‘not me’ possession very quickly includes the whole of human culture and the world.  Young comments that the advertising industry makes use of the knowledge that we gain comfort from objects and is able to sell us just about anything because of this, and that  ‘the more we are deprived of deep satisfactions in an alienated society, the more we

comfort ourselves with such things.’[v]

It could be that all object relations are potentially transformational.  Perceived from the idealistic position of self, individuality and psychology, it is also acceptable (and aesthetic) to seek origins for present behaviour in childhood experience.   Alternatively consumer items could be left to semiotic and structuralist theories for interpretation, which are far more deterministic, describing the way in which humans are born into the ‘signifying order’ of a culture, which enfolds and moulds the biological neonate, with little choice or awareness. 

Semiotic theories describe all social practice as signifying.  Not only do all speech acts transmit additional messages through gesture, posture, clothing, social context etc, but all aspects of our environment signify meanings to us also.  Due to our cultural experience we habitually read meaning into all objects, sounds and situations encountered, including the slightest gestures or omissions.  Additionally, memory, affect, sensory experience, state of health, and context affect our understanding and reading of the world. 

This takes us a long way from the pre-linguistic peace and quiet of Winnicott's liminal spaces, and our infantile separation anxieties that meet material reality in the potential space as transitional objects.