The psychoanalytic paradox: the self as a transitional object

I have focused upon a group of patients whose biological needs for nurture and comfort were adequately met but whose mothers never related to them beyond simple caretaking. They never smiled at their children inasmuch as they derived no pleasure from playing with them or in their emerging sense of aliveness. From both the analyses of mothers and these patients, it appears that the mothers used their children as transitional objects. In turn, the children's emotional development became fixated in the in-between transition space. This fixation led to specific types of character structure and ego defects. Early development levels did not form a smooth continuum with higher later acquired adaptive ego states. There seem to be extensive lacunae in the middle layers of the psychic apparatus which manifested themselves as defective modulating elements. These patients showed extremes of behavior, marked polarities of sane, sensitive rationality to psychoticlike irrational episodes. There were no transitional gray areas between black and white. They exhibited a peculiar kind of fragmentation or splitting in which connecting bridges between higher and lower levels were missing. There are many such patients who seek treatment. However, they present special problems in therapy which can be explained in terms of the psychoanalytic paradox. The psychoanalytic paradox refers to a treatment impasse caused by an imbrication of psychopathology and various attributes of the psychoanalytic method. The mother's attitude toward her infant child has some similarity to the low-keyed objective analytic attitude, what has been sometimes referred to as analytic neutrality. These patients require different modes of relating which indicate that the therapist is, unlike the mother, very much concerned with their patient's developing autonomy and their entering and exploring the external world. These variations of analysis are not modifications or deviations of analysis. They are elements of the analytic process necessary for the treatment of specific types of psychopathology. Just as each patient is unique and the transference manifests itself in a particular fashion which then causes the analyst to make certain interpretations, the variations of technique discussed in this article address themselves to the construction of a holding environment appropriate for this group of patients.     

Object perception and object naming in early development

Among our most fundamental capacities are those that allow us to perceive, categorize and name objects. Recently, controversy has surrounded the question of how young children learn names for objects, in particular, the relative roles of perception and higher-level world knowledge. It is well known that adults depend strongly on conceptual knowledge in a variety of categorization tasks, including object naming. We argue, however, that perception may play a special role in early object naming and, in particular, that certain kinds of world knowledge known to guide adult naming may come to guide naming only rather late in development. Building early mechanisms of naming on a perceptual foundation that may be encapsulated, and thus shut off from more reflective processes, may explain in part why young children can easily and rapidly learn names for things from the adults around them, despite the fact that adults and children may possess very different conceptual organizations.     

The development of features in object concepts

According to one productive and influential approach to cognition, categorization, object recognition, and higher level cognitive processes operate on a set of fixed features, which are the output of lower level perceptual processes. In many situations, however, it is the higher level cognitive process being executed that influences the lower level features that are created. Rather than viewing the repertoire of features as being fixed by low-level processes, we present a theory in which people create features to subserve the representation and categorization of objects. Two types of category learning should be distinguished. Fixed space category learning occurs when new categorizations are representable with the available feature set. Flexible space category learning occurs when new categorizations cannot be represented with the features available. Whether fixed or flexible, learning depends on the featural contrasts and similarities between the new category to be represented and the individuals existing concepts. Fixed feature approaches face one of two problems with tasks that call for new features: If the fixed features are fairly high level and directly useful for categorization, then they will not be flexible enough to represent all objects that might be relevant for a new task. If the fixed features are small, subsymbolic fragments (such as pixels), then regularities at the level of the functional features required to accomplish categorizations will not be captured by these primitives. We present evidence of flexible perceptual changes arising from category learning and theoretical arguments for the importance of this flexibility. We describe conditions that promote feature creation and argue against interpreting them in terms of fixed features. Finally, we discuss the implications of functional features for object categorization, conceptual development, chunking, constructive induction, and formal models of dimensionality reduction.     

Multidimensional shape similarity in the development of visual object classification

The current work examined age differences in the classification of novel object images that vary in continuous dimensions of structural shape. The structural dimensions employed are two that share a privileged status in the visual analysis and representation of objects: the shape of discrete prominent parts and the attachment positions of those parts. Experiment 1 involved a triad classification task in which participants at each of three different ages (5 years, 8 years, and adult) classified object images from two distinct stimulus sets. Across both sets, the youngest children demonstrated a systematic bias toward the shape of discrete parts during their judgments. With increasing age, participants increasingly came to select both the shape and the position of parts when classifying the images. The findings from Experiment 2 indicate that the local shape bias observed in young children's classifications is not merely a consequence of a discrimination advantage for that dimension. Results are discussed in relation to corresponding age-related changes in other functional contexts of visual processing.     

The role of the object in drive cathexis and psychosexual development.

Alternate axes are explored in the orthodox formulation of drive cathexis and psychosexual development, with implications for corresponding object relation modes engendered by these processes. Somatic and defensive aspects are shown to impact on the function of the "other" as the individual matures. The separation/individuation process is subsumed into this overall developmental continuum, and the centrality of the object as a focus in cathexis and drive delineation is critically evaluated. The homeostatic notion of equilibration is appealed to in synthesizing the factors emerging from the analysis.     

The role of object violation in the development of visual analysis

The present study investigated whether sensitivity to object violations in perception as well as in action would vary with age. Five-, 6-, and 11-yr.-old children and adults solved tasks which involved perception only, motoric indication of parts, actual assembly of parts, and drawing of a violated figure. In perception, object violation was the only factor showing change across age groups, with violations being increasingly noticed. In composition tasks involving motor components, object violation was just one factor besides quantity of parts and type of segmentation contributing to task difficulty and showing increase in performance across age groups. Analysis of object violations in visual structure required abilities similar to those needed when analysing shape interference. Improved visual detection and graphic construction of object violation seemed not to occur because segmentation increased quantitatively but more likely because fast perceptual processes came under scrutiny.     

Remote control,umbilical cord and beyond: The mobile phone as a transitional object

This paper investigates mobile phone use as a medium of inter‐generational communication. Research on teenage mobile phone use has tended to focus on its peer group functionality. In this paper, the mobile phone is examined as a transitional object in parent–teen interrelationships. Specifically, drawing on ethnographic work conducted in Israel among teenagers between 2000 and 2006, the paper focuses on mobile telephones as physical objects that can connect people and mediate relationships. It is shown that, for parents and their teenage children, the mobile phone is important more for the possibility of communication and less for the text or voice conversation it actually carries. Analysis focuses also on the role of the mobile phone in enabling inter‐generational distance and intimacy, attending to the complicated ways in which the mobile phone is employed by parents and their teenage children. It is argued that the analysis of mobile phone practices needs to take directly into account the specific cultural contexts of production and consumption, as culture, technology and family mutually shape one another.     

Cognitive development in object manipulation by infant chimpanzees

This study focuses on the development of spontaneous object manipulation in three infant chimpanzees during their first 2 years of life. The three infants were raised by their biological mothers who lived among a group of chimpanzees. A human tester conducted a series of cognitive tests in a triadic situation where mothers collaborated with the researcher during the testing of the infants. Four tasks were presented, taken from normative studies of cognitive development of Japanese infants: inserting objects into corresponding holes in a box, seriating nesting cups, inserting variously shaped objects into corresponding holes in a template, and stacking up wooden blocks. The mothers had already acquired skills to perform these manipulation tasks. The infants were free to observe the mothers' manipulative behavior from immediately after birth. We focused on object–object combinations that were made spontaneously by the infant chimpanzees, without providing food reinforcement for any specific behavior that the infants performed. The three main findings can be summarized as follows. First, there was precocious appearance of object–object combination in infant chimpanzees: the age of onset (8–11 months) was comparable to that in humans (around 10 months old).Second, object–object combinations in chimpanzees remained at a low frequency between 11 and 16 months, then increased dramatically at the age of approximately 1.5 years. At the same time, the accuracy of these object–object combinations also increased. Third, chimpanzee infants showed inserting behavior frequently and from an early age but they did not exhibit stacking behavior during their first 2 years of life, in clear contrast to human data.     

Infant development of configural object processing in visual and visual-haptic contexts

Infants’ visual processing of objects is characterised by a developmental trend from a predominantly analytical to a configural processing mode. In two studies with 6- and 8-month-old infants, we sought to replicate this finding in a purely visual condition (inspecting objects), and to examine how far redundant visual-haptic information present in a visual-haptic condition influences the processing mode. Infants were familiarized with two objects differing in three dimensions (texture, size and shape). At test, infants were presented with a familiar object, a switch object consisting of a recombination of familiar dimensions, and a novel object, and looking times were measured. Results indicate a transition from analytical processing at 6 months to configural processing at 8 months in the visual condition. In the visual-haptic condition, both age-groups displayed configural processing. Thus, redundant visual-haptic information seems to enhance object processing.     

A model of the development of the early infant object concept

A computational model is proposed for the early stages of development of the object concept in infancy. Stages in development are represented as a sequence of grammars or rewrite rules that parse a set of perceptual phenomena. The infant's changes between developmental stages can be described by differences between the grammar rules that model each stage. The program replicates five studies by Bower et al on the development of the object concept and reaffirms the primacy of rest and motion parameters as explanatory invariants in early object-concept development.