ABSTRACT
In adult life to seek the transformational object is really to recollect an early object experience, to remember not cognitively, but existentially through intense affective experience, a relationship that was identified with cumulative transformational experiences of the self. In the aesthetic moment, the subject briefly re-experiences through ego fusion with the aesthetic object, the sense of the subjective attitude towards the transformational object, but such experiences are only memories, not actual recreations. The search, however, for such symbolic equations of the transformational object and the experience with which it is identified continues in adult life. One may imagine the self as the transformational facilitator, and one may invest themselves with capacities to alter the environment that are not only impossible but downright embarrassing on reflection. Though the search for transformations and for the transformational objects is perhaps the most pervasive archaic object relation, it bears restressing that the search is not out of desire for the object per se.
