Winnicott's Subjective Object: Merging experiences as preconditions of being

The author explores the clinical meaning of D. W. Winnicott's concept of subjective object. He describes an adult patient marked by the failure of her primary nurturing environment because of unworked-through grief and severely traumatic experiences that predated her birth. This failure forced the patient into a sort of “impossibility of being.” The author describes how an erotic transference represented an impulse for development and transformation for her because it took the shape of “holding” her embryonic capacity to experience illusion within the analytic relation. Last, the author illustrates how the gradual construction of the analyst as a subjective object allowed the patient to begin to work through both the traumas inherited from her primary environment and the unthinkable anxieties connected to them.