The transformational object

We know that because of the considerable prematurity of human birth, the infant depends on the mother for survival. By serving as a supplementary ego (Heimann, 1956) or a facilitating environment (Winnicott, 1963), she both sustains the baby’s life and transmits to the infant, through her own particular idiom of mothering, an aesthetic of being that becomes a feature of the infant’s self. The mother’s way of holding the infant, of responding to his gestures, of selecting objects, and of perceiving the infant’s internal needs constitutes her contribution to the infant‒ mother culture. In a private discourse that can only be developed by mother and child, the language of this relation is the idiom of gesture, gaze, and intersubjective utterance.