Overview
transitional object
Quick Reference
In psychoanalysis, a term introduced in 1953 by the English psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971) to denote a familiar object, such as the hem of a blanket, from which an infant between 4 and 12 months old derives comfort, especially while falling asleep, its significance sometimes re-emerging in later life, especially in a period of depression. Winnicott considered it to lie ‘between the thumb and the teddy bear’ inasmuch as it is almost inseparable from the infant, like a thumb, yet in reality is an external object, like a teddy bear. Subsequent writers have generally interpreted the term to refer to an object that a child treats as something halfway between itself and another person, thus including a teddy bear as a typical example.
