ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the infant's destruction of an object—that is, a person or the representative of a person—and with the object's survival of the destruction. Donald Winnicott once said about the transitional object that it was not so much the object itself that was important as the use the baby made of it. Winnicott, looking at babies playing the spatula game, knew that the infant who is dismissed in the second stage is upset at the loss of the spatula, but once the third stage has been reached the infant can be taken away and can leave the spatula behind him without being made to cry. The age range for which Winnicott found the spatula game appropriate—that is, five to thirteen months—is interesting because it is during this period, the developmental psychologists tell us, that object permanence as a cognitive achievement becomes consolidated.
