Objects, Tips, Children, and Art

In the 1940s, British psychoanalysts developed a psychoanalytic theory that came to be called "object relations." This theory is now more or less at the heart of all movements in psychoanalysis, where in Britian or here. There's no need to explain the in's and out's of object relations. But as the name implies—it does have to do with objects. Most often, these objects are people. (Mother is the most oft-cited example.) In that sense, objects is a strange word to use, since the theoretical emphasis is mostly on the "relationship" between child and mother, and how it's really impossible to understand individual psychology without seeing that the self is constructed out of an emotional dyad—that is, out of object relations.

Psychoanalysts are also interested in the more mundane sorts of objects (or "things"); but they are prinicipally referring to the so-called transitional objects. There are elaborate theories of such objects, but it's safe to say that the most famous transitional object is the teddy bear. This object is not the mother, obviously, and yet the child gives to the stuffed animal (or blanket or whatever) a kind of significance akin to his or her mother; and it's "transitional" because it's a way of taking a step toward self-sufficiency and away from symbiosis with the mother.

All of this emphasis on mother is disturbing to me, since I am a father and I have a daughter and—setting aside my wife's breasts (a kind of fetish object for psychoanalytic theorists)—I, too, serve as an ideal, nontransitory object for my daughter. In any case, she is just over a year-old and teaching me things about objects, whether in psychoanalytic usage or in the more ordinary usage. In short, my daughter is immensely interested in objects; and either she is particularly promiscuous in her object choice, or psychoanalytic theory is deficient in emphasizing the one (and one only) transitional object. Another way of putting it: psychoanalytic theory assumes, perhaps a little too easily, the symbolic significance of objects. Objects obviously mean something to my daughter, and yet I'm not sure I can separate the meaning from the object (as you might with mother and the teddy bear). Which is to say: my daughter's curiosity seems to go beyond the scenario that psychoanalysis has traditionally explored.

Right now, she's interested in any number of things, some of which are pictured above. In terms of categories—or as best I can decipher these things—she's particularly interested in tops and bottoms and how they touch one another, or work together for purposes of concealment: things that snap down in some fashion or, instead, go in a circle (such as a bottle cap). I’m struck by this because I am myself not so interested in objects, or at least my interests in objects has become obscure to me. (There is, of course, the way that objects are famously the prime interest of adults—in terms of their value and function as good or bad fetishes. But this seems a slightly different thing. Christopher Bollas, by the way, is the psychoanalytic theorist who deals with these kinds of objects—that is, their continuing importance in telling us who we are.) Mostly, I'm just surprised by the level of interest that my daughter (anyone's daughter?) has in objects per se. Her daily life is largely a matter of investigating such objects, playing with them, hoarding them, manipulating them for reasons practical and anything but practical.

And so I end up wondering why it is that I don't notice objects. Right now I have in front of me on my desk, for example, a mini-tripod . It's very difficult for me to see this object as anything other than a three-dimensional answer to a functional need—that is, the thing I put my camera on if I don't have sufficient light and I have to worry about things holding still for longer exposures. Past that, the object means nothing to me. Or so I think. In fact, it's a neat little object—complicated, flexible, leggy, with muted tips of a kind. You can imagine someone from a much different culture coming across this object and seeing it differently—that is, experiencing it differently. As my daughter might.

Duchamp's urinal is the easiest example of this happening in art, though I'm wondering whether this is, in fact, what most of art is mostly about. Objects are taken or created that are then contemplated in ways that they are not so contemplated in normal life. Context is everything. We do not approach urinals, usually, and think of design and color and smoothness and so on; we simply have something we need to do—take a piss—and we get on with it. Art has a way of slowing things down. Photography, a kind of art, does this too—literally; you take a picture, and you've captured a moment or an object, and then you stare at it in ways that you wouldn't normally. Babies do this as well, when they stare at people's faces for periods of time that would constitute rudeness in adults.

One way to think about this is to think about tips. People are obviously interested in tips. (Some of us are even, maybe, obsessed.) But we're also blind to them. (One interesting question: why the blindness? There must be some reason for it that goes beyond "information overload") To think about tips, or to catalog them--isn't this a way of returning to the perceptual methods of a young child. And not just because the first tip was a nipple, as psychoanalytic theory might suppose, but because children have a way of seeing things…

I was going to say...seeing things new. But that assumes something old, and children don't yet have enough experience under their belts. Seeing things as they actually are? That, too, seems wrong and impossible, as though perception were valueless, as though children were innocently free of distortion or blindness. As though any attempt to deal with the significance of tips required you to think, as adults often do, that there's a good explanation as to their significance. And so here, admittedly, I'm left confused. Confused by my daughter, who is seeing things, and experiencing the shapes and sizes and colors and contours of objects in ways that I can't fathom; and confused by myself, someone interested in tips—in seeing things that are not normally seen, or seeing things that are seen but not fully perceived or appreciated—who doesn't fully understand why.