The Use of an Object

The distinction Winnicott drew in his 1968 paper, delivered to a hostile New York audience that rejected it, is more radical than ordinary language suggests. Relating to an object is a subjective experience: when I relate to you, I experience you as part of my own psychic world, a projection of my needs and fantasies. Using an object requires the recognition that the object exists independently — that it has its own properties, its own limitations, its own existence not dependent on mine. The developmental movement from relating to using requires a moment of destruction: the infant destroys the mother in fantasy — bites, rages, rejects — and if the mother survives without retaliation or collapse, the infant discovers that she is real, that she exists outside omnipotent control. Only then can she be genuinely used.