Emotions Elicited by Inanimate Objects: Exploring Children's Attachment to Toys

In 1971, Heinz Kohut established the theory of self-psychology, which examines the self and the self-object. The self-object reacts in such a way that the self feels identified, respected, and understood. A self-object is a person or thing that is an extension of the self. Despite the fact that it is physically distinct from the body, it is considered as if it were a part of the self. This foundation is critical for understanding how humans develop attachments to inanimate objects. Attachment to inanimate items and the accompanying emotions require an element of imagination since lifeless objects are, by definition, objects that cannot reciprocate. Emotional imagination, according to Ben-Ze'ev, must mimic reality and understand abstract relationships. Whereas in imagination we are aware of a content that may or may not correspond to a content in reality, the problem of correspondence is irrelevant in conceptualization, but the issue of coherence is critical. The emotional function of imagination includes what are known as positive illusions, or illusions that are good to us.¹ Getting linked to an inanimate thing therefore functions as a positive illusion since the feelings evoked most of the time assist to replace some emotional void.

Donald Winnicott coined the term "transitional-object" in 1953 to describe the objects (such as toys and blankets) to which children commonly establish profound, long-lasting attachments. Winnicott hypothesised that such transitional-object attachments are an important stage of ego development that leads to the formation of a sense of self.² As a result, it is possible to argue that Winnicott's transitional-object is a form of self-object. Subsequent theorists have connected the transitional-object to processes of separation and individuation, the emergence of memory, and the ability for object interactions and empathy. Being an extension of the self, the object must survive instinctive love and loathing while also appearing to the child to have vitality or reality of its own that derives from neither outside nor inside,³ and is not a delusion. Children end up anthropomorphizing inanimate objects like toys, despite understanding that they aren't sentient. According to research, children talk more about the item's thoughts and emotions and address the object as if it had feelings. Speaking about the interior states of others helps children to develop social skills that they may use when dealing with people, which might possibly benefit children's overall emotional development.⁴ Parents, according to Kohut, can act as a self-object. When the parent is absent, the transitional-object functions as a self-object. According to Mahler,⁵ the usefulness of the transitional-object rests in its capacity to allow the child to physically move away from the mother while yet holding on to a portion of her. Thus, the kid stays symbolically connected to the Mother while being physically and psychically independent from her.⁶ Tolpin is concerned with the psychological structures that emerge during the separation-individuation stage and contribute to the construction of a cohesive self. Tolpin uses Kohut's notion of 'transmuting internalisation' to explain how the process represented by the transitional-object attachment culminates in the construction of a psychic structure. As a new-born grows in size and activity, the mother is unable to provide the total sensation of physical merging achievable with the new-born. As a result, the infant learns to identify something calming with the mother's actions, and when she is not around, utilises its own actions to seek solace. In the process, it transfers the calming characteristics of the mother to some object at hand, giving itself the ability to reconstruct the lost symbiosis,⁷ which may explain why the relation with toys is usually that of a friend or parent. It has been proposed that such attachments emerge as a result of child-rearing methods such as the degree of physical contact, sleeping arrangements, and the extent to which children must cope with repeated separations from their mothers. Object attachment rates were shown to be much lower in cultures where children spend much of their time in close proximity to their mothers.⁸

Because the object of play is inanimate, a kid has significantly more power over it than the mother.⁹ Thus, the child tends to project feelings on the toy that arise from its own vulnerabilities, and the toy, despite its own passivity, has the ability to affect the child's behaviour. The same static face of the toy can evoke a variety of emotions in the child because the emotions prompted by the toy originate in the child's mind, but because the child is ignorant of them, the emotions become a feature of the emotion-space between the toy and the child. This is reinforced by post-Cartesian theorists, who typically regard the face as an inherently inexpressive surface that may be regarded as expressive through interpretation, deduction, or projection.¹⁰ This suggests that the child is not entirely conscious of the act of playing because it is being impacted by the feelings in the emotion-space. This is what distinguishes a child's act of playing from a play in the theatre, as the performer is fully aware of the pretence. The actor projects emotions in the proscenium, and the evolved emotions, which are characteristic of the proscenium, elicit emotions in the audience; nevertheless, the audience cannot do the same to the actors; however, the part of the child that is conscious of the act of playing may explain why children frequently destroy toys. According to Derrida,¹¹ the child destroys toys when it realises that it has almost been deceived by the mother and that the toys are just there to compensate for the mother's absence. Baudelaire takes a different approach, suggesting that the desire to reach the 'soul' of the toy is linked to toy destruction,¹² which may also be ascribed to the emotions created by the emotion-space disguised as the emotions of the object, leading the child to believe they are genuine.

When the child comes of age, there is an emulative alienation from the hither to the self-object i.e. the toy, leading to further alienation from the Self. The question remains, what does the self-object transform into, when confronted by the society?

References

• Ben-Ze'ev, Aaron. The subtlety of emotions. MIT press, 2001.
• Charles, Baudelaire. "Morale du joujou." Oeuvres Completes 2 (1853).
• Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass, 1980.
• Fortuna, Keren, Liora Baor, Salomon Israel, Adi Abadi, and Ariel Knafo. "Attachment to inanimate objects and early childcare: A twin study." Frontiers in psychology 5 (2014): 486.
• Hashmi, Salim, Ross E Vanderwert, Hope A Price, and Sarah A Gerson. "Exploring the benefits of doll play through neuroscience." Frontiers in human neuroscience 14 (2020): 560176.
• Litt, Carole J. "Theories of transitional object attachment: An overview." International Journal of Behavioral Development 9, no. 3 (1986): 383–399.
• Mahler, Margaret S. "Rapprochement subphase of the separation-individuation process." The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1972): 487–506.
• Passman, Richard H. "Attachments to inanimate objects: Are children who have security blankets insecure?" Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 55, no. 6 (1987): 825.
• Tolpin, Marian. "On the beginnings of a cohesive self: An application of the concept of transmuting internalization to the study of the transitional object and signal anxiety." The psychoanalytic study of the child 26, no. 1 (1971): 316–352.