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(deferred because occuring after the mother has observed the child’s response and before the child knows how to speak of it himself) which by designating the child’s relation to others cathected by him “identifies and constitutes the I” (p 97). For Winnicott, the object also plays an essential role in the birth of a functioning psychic apparatus, one capable of distinguishing fantasy from perception. The object manages this transformation and construction through two main kinds of interactions with the infant. There is firstly the “found-created” of the empathetically timed maternal offering which appears just when the baby needs it. Then, the object’s “survival” to being “used” as the object of drives helps the baby differentiate his wishes from external reality. Winnicott (1960 b, p. 141) claims that for the infant instinctual impulses and affects are as foreign to the ego as a thunderclap. It is through a successful negotiation of the two categories of interaction of “created-found” and the “use of the object” (1953, 1969) that the child gradually subjectifies drive and distinguishes it from environmental forces. Thus the particular character of the “meeting” between the child’s spontaneous object-directed thrust and the parent’s “response” can be said to literally mold the subject’s intrapsychic experience. Before the drive can be felt as a part of oneself, it must arc through the external other’s response; in this manner, rather than simply “inborn”, for Winnicott drive is essentially “constructed” in the relationship with the other. Another major Winnicottian insight into the object’s role has been intensely studied by Green (1975, 1985, 2005, 2007, 2011), that is, the quality of psychic presence offered by the external care-taking other. Too much and too little both overwhelm the nascent ego with stimulation, handicapping the transformative potential of the nebenmensch . Green pointed out that the Winnicottian “capacity to be alone in the presence of the other” (1958) required of the good-enough parent a capacity to remain at an optimal distance, that is, optimally absent. This absence Green says is not loss but “potential presence, a condition for the possibility not only of transitional objects but also of potential objects which are necessary to the formation of thought” (1975, p 14). In this reading of Winnicott, Green creatively extends the Lacanian two-fold insight into the role of “absence” in psychic life: that language is founded on the capacity to represent an absent object and/or to abstract oneself from its concrete presence, exemplifying distinction between the dyadic phantasmic plenitude of the Imaginary and the triadic castration of the Symbolic. Green (2007) eventually coined the term “objectalisation” to refer to the capacity “in a solitude peopled by play” to generate a new category of objects by investing elements in the external world and in the transitional space of culture and ideas with drive. Further deepening his appreciation of absence at the core of psychic structure, Green (1999) came to the notion of the “work of the negative” to describe the many different ways in which the ego defends itself against disruption. These are examples of qualitatively different psychic processes which differ in the extent to which the subject is able to “absentify” the object inside itself, that is, to symbolise the object rather than needing its concrete presence or substitute. Thus what is at stake is not an incorporation of the object but the creation of an “absence” at the heart of the self (Pontalis, 1988). Green calls this a “structuring emptiness”, similar to the space inside a
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