Judy writes:

>
>~ I wonder if part of the problem is that all "modern" US research and 
>probably most research in "developed" countries in general, has been 
>done with 
>children who are artificially fed in ways that do not follow human norms 
>established over millenia. I've often wondered about this when reading about
>the  "critical importance" of a "comfort object" like a  stuffed animal or
>blanket.

This is again part of my current area of study :)

The 'transitional object' was first described by the British D.W. 
Winnicott, who came to psychology  and paediatrics via  Freud, and 
was  one of the pioneers of psychoanalytic theory as applied to 
infants and children.

He was, I think, the first to coin the phrase 'transitional object' 
for comfort blankets and so on. The 'explanation' of the transitional 
object is rooted in Winnicott's psychoanalytic understanding .

It's more complicated than being a 'mother substitute' or 'symbol' - 
it is the child's first object that he understands actually belongs 
to him, but is *not actually* him....and this has psychic echoes of 
his realisation that 'mother' is 'not me' . This realisation  is a 
stage of *psychic development* as well as a purely cognitive 
understanding.

Much of Winnicott's  work  emerged from direct observation,  done at 
a time when most British mothers would at least start off 
breastfeeding (40s and 50s) and then moving into a time where fewer 
of them would do more than token bf (60s).

Hs writings, including the later ones, place breastfeeding at the 
heart of *normality*, though we in the lactation world can't really 
claim him as 'one of ours' because he doesn't have much to say about 
the social context of bf. He will have observed many babies who were 
weaned prematurely, or whose feeding was scheduled - but he didn't 
(as far as I can see from the reading I have done by and about him) 
understand how very different 'Western' breastfeeding is from what 
'Nature' (and the baby) 'expect' to happen.

Presumably babies who are breastfed and cared for the way 'Nature 
expects'  will reach the same stage of 'knowing that which is not me' 
- I have no idea if they have  (or need) the equivalent  of a 
blanket. Maybe the Western baby, as Judy speculates, reveals this 
psychic developmental stage in a different way.

I have just seen this study, which sounds interesting:

Relations between children's attachments to their mothers and to 
security blankets

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15382970

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK

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