Click Here to Read: Concerning the Life Cycle of Transitional Objects
by Rudolf Ekstein.
TRANSITIONS AND GENERATIVITY: EKSTEIN ON ERIKSON AND WINNICOTT By David James Fisher, Ph.D.
Occasionally, an essay appears that is designed to enchant, to strike an emotional chord, to stimulate thinking, to make surprising linkages, while simultaneously serving as an exercise in self-analysis. This late essay by Rudolf Ekstein (1912-2005) does all this and more. As the title suggests,
this essay juxtaposes two strong, analytic thinkers, Erikson and Winnicott, who emerged from different analytic schools and culture, and who are rarely associated together in the analytic literature.
Ekstein’s imaginative and emotionally resonant piece is packed with telling vignettes, personal disclosures, and autobiographical fragments, while drawing on his rich clinical experience and his ability to handle conceptual ideas preciselywithout being pedantic. Readers witness a master teacher teaching a master class with the lightest of touch. This is a teacher we want to learn from, one with whom we wish to open up a dialogue. He offers an elusively simple, but profound argument, namely that individuals depend on transitional objects throughout the life cycle, that the concept is operative beyond the psychological storms and stresses of the infant’s separation from the mother’sbreast and oral dependency needs. Throughout the life history of the personality, from infancy to adolescence, to early adulthood, to maturity, to old age, individuals employ transitional objects, which perform different functions and condense different meanings.
Winnicott perceptively described the infant’s need to construct a space through the use of a blanket, teddy bear, or toy to tolerate the excruciatingly painful feelings of separation in the absence of his mother. The transitional object allows the fragile infant something palpable and external to himself to hold onto; this permits him to endure the terrors of abandonment, the loneliness and isolation of loss, to cope with the miseries of extreme dependence, helplessness, longing for love, and the anxiety inflected desire for mutual recognition. Closely faithful to the spirit of Winnicott’s writing, Ekstein holds that the transitional object is useful not only to describe normal as well as pathological phenomena, but is also helpful in understanding the creative and adaptive strategies of traumatized individuals in many phases of life experience.
To illustrate, Ekstein poignantly describes how three cohorts and he suffered massive dislocation and the violent rupture of their lives as a result of the fascist occupation of Austria. Transitional objects helped these vulnerable individuals to survive and to reconstruct their lives, despite living in a highly precarious and uncertain situation. Opening up a transitional space allows the individual to forge a creative response and partial solution to existential anxieties being faced in extreme situations in life, including key moments of rites of passage. Distinct transitional objects helped to mediate moments of crisis and potential fragmentation.
Late in his life, Ekstein was a bridge builder; he looked for linkages in the different schools of psychoanalysis, emphasizing areas of agreement in the various theories that often postured against one another. He viewed many disagreements in the history of psychoanalysis as sectarian and petty, often hiding personal and narcissistic agendas, privileging power interests over genuine scientific disagreements—or most importantly, oblivious to what was in the best interests of the patient. When I was a candidate in the 1980’s, he was one of the few training analysts who belonged to both medically dominated institutes in Los Angeles. As a lay analyst who was both an insider and an outsider, Ekstein’s membership in several institutes went with a refusal to invest himself in sterile doctrinal struggles or emotional polemics that were no longer relevant to the generation of sound clinical practice in the present.
In this paper, Ekstein constructs a transitional space between Erikson’s ego psychology, that is, the school of psychoanalysis that he was educated in during his training in Vienna in the 1930’s, and the clinical insights embedded in the tradition of the Independent British object relations school. I believe that he was also identified with Winnicott’s style of personal playfulness, warmth, independence, spontaneity, and willingness to be himself in all situations, including withchildren and patients, even with colleagues. He admired Erikson’s attempt to integrate the social and historical with the psychoanalytic, identified with his artistic sensibility, and not least embraced the concept of the life cycle. For Ekstein, the life cycle implied that the individual’s search for identity and dignity was a life-long quest, something unending, conflictual, unreachable, and potentially rich in news areas of self-awareness and growth.
When I was in analysis with Ekstein, I observed a woodcut from Erik Erikson, above the couch, adjacent to a photo of Freud. It was a beautiful image of the Madonna and child. It was personally inscribed, “To Rudy, Best wishes, Erik.” This art object permitted Ekstein to commune with Erikson and perhaps his lost mother. It was also a transitional object keeping alive a relationship, mediating between fantasy and reality, the inner world and the external world, possibly between Christian and Jew, culminating in this essay.
Transitional objects allow the individual the time and space to separate and differentiate, to let go of significant but not always primitive, introjected objects. They allow the vulnerable individual to construct an imaginary space for play, spontaneity, personal affirmation, self-soothing, and ultimately for the expression of courage. Courage refers to the capacity to endure pain and loss, to verbalize massive trauma rather than endlessly repeat trauma. At the highest level, it encouraged the individual to function responsibly in the world and in one’s own surround.
In the vignettes presented here, Ekstein speaks of his adolescent son’s wish to let go of feeling like a child, his desire to be grown up, symbolized by the wish to have age appropriate transitional objects. All of this exists in a dynamic continuum where the adolescent, caught between the regressive pulls of childhood and the uncertainties of adulthood, desires to be free and self-reliant, while continuing to be dependent on early objects and early sources of holding and security. The adolescent wish stems from a desire to be less supervised and monitored by parents and teachers, less burdened by the parents’ desire for the child to follow their own desires, less circumscribed by parents who are not always attuned to the adolescent’s aspirations and emerging ideals.
For the elderly the transitional object works to establish affective experiences of memory and linkages to the past; it also embodies a desire to transmit a powerful legacy to the younger generation to pass on insights and strategies to permit survival in an increasingly dangerous world. Looking toward the future, the transitional object may generate some hope that the next generation might find valid forms of commitment to justify their existence. Ekstein loved the quote from Goethe about the younger generation’s readiness to inherit the legacy from the parents. Inheritance is of course an ambivalent venture. Partly, it meant holding on to the traditions and values of the elders that still made sense, that still resonated emotionally for the next generation. Partly, it also required the younger generation to negate, preserve, and recreate that inheritance to make it meaningful to the present and future.
A good-enough analyst is also a transitional object when he establishes an adequate form of holding environment, when there is an ambience of understanding, safety, confidentiality, provision, and emotional attunement to correct deficits in family relationships or self organization. These new experiences, often moving and life transforming, are condensed in the person of the analyst. Like a transitional object, the analyst functions to be of use to the analysand, to assist in the process of healing and repairing. But he too is someone who can be dropped at an appropriate time, just as the child discards the teddy bear.
This elegant, evocative essay has a special importance to me. In writing this piece to introduce and comment on it, I realized how it served as a transitional object for me—and on several levels. I had just concluded a ten-yeartraining analysis with Rudy Ekstein in the spring of 1989. This was our first post-analytic encounter and collaboration. His essay was written for and published in an in-house organ of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute that I would eventually edit. In that same number, I wrote an essay on Bettelheim, about whom I would subsequently write a book. Bettelheim and Ekstein were close friends, so there is a bridging function going on here, as well as the creation of an analytic third. The publication of my Bettelheim piece in the same issue as Ekstein’s transitional object piece allowed me to continue the painful work of grief at the end of the analysis. In addition, it encouraged me to let go of him purely as a transference figure as my analyst, gradually evolving into a real relationship as colleague and associate. This assisted me to become an active society member, joining the faculty and developing into a respected contributor to the literature. Now I am trying to link past, present, and future by keeping Ekstein’s memory alive through the posting of his essay, hoping it will reach a larger and more contemporaneous public via the internet.
Lastly, my analysis concluded before I began my own family in 1991. Like Ekstein, I have a son and a daughter. When his essay first appeared, I lacked the lived experience of being a parent, was unable to appreciate his developmental clarity and psychological astuteness about parenting. Rereading it now I realize that he still speaks to me about the pleasures and poignant losses of parenthood, the ups and downs of watching our children grow up, of their need to separate and differentiate from us. We also observe the sometimes-painful process of our children getting into struggles in life, sometimes getting stuck, and their own often messy journey of establishing a professional and personal identity, as well as a cohesive sense of self. Ekstein, following Erikson and Winnicott, understood how parents needed to promote the child’s differentiation from the parents in order to find their own distinct voices and specific meaning in their own lives.
This is a truly beautiful paper. Perhaps most beautiful of all is Ekstein’s loving and tender depiction of his daughter Jean and how she encountered the teddy bear Winnicott. Her brief encounter with the British analyst provoked associations to Erikson, becoming part of her father’s self-reflection and ultimately part of the wisdom literature of psychoanalysis.
David James Fisher, Ph.D., 1800 Fairburn Avenue, Suite 203, Los Angeles, CA 90025, djamesfisher@aolcom.