ABSTRACT
This chapter isolates the trace in the adult of the earliest experience of the object: the experience of an object that transforms the subject's internal and external world. It identifies the infant's first subjective experience of the object as a transformational object, and addresses the trace in adult life of this early relationship. A transformational object is experientially identified by the infant with processes that alter self experience. The search for symbolic equivalents to the transformational object, and the experience with which it is identified, continues in adult life. One of the most common psychopathologies of the transformational object relation occurs in the schizoid self, the patient who may have a wealth of ego strengths but who is personally bereft and sad without being clinically depressed. The search for the transformational object, in both narcissistic and schizoid characters, is in fact an internal recognition of the need for ego repair and, as such, is a somewhat manic search for health.
