Part-object

part-object (objet partiel) According to Melanie Klein, the infant's

underdeveloped capacity for perception, together with the fact that he is only

  concerned with his immediate gratifications, means that the subject begins by

relating only to a part of a person rather than the whole. The primordial part-

object is, according to Klein, the mother's breast. As the child's visual

  apparatus develops,    so also does his capacity to perceive people as whole

objects rather than collections of separate parts (see Hinshelwood, 1989: 378-

80).

      While the term 'part-object' was first introduced by the Kleinian school of

psychoanalysis, the origins of the concept can be traced back to Karl Abra-

  ham's work and ultimately to Freud. For example, when Freud states that

partial drives are directed towards objects such as the breast or faeces, these

  are clearly part-objects. Freud also implies that the penis is a part-object in his

  discussion of the CASTRATION COMPLEX (in which the penis is imagined as a

separable organ) and in his discussion of fetishism (see Laplanche and

Pontalis, 1967: 301).

      The concept of the part-object plays an important part in Lacan's work from

early on. Lacan finds the concept of the part-object particularly useful in his

criticism of object-relations theory, which he attacks for attributing a false

   sense of completeness to the object. In opposition to this tendency, Lacan

  argues that just as all DRIVEs are partial drives, so all objects are necessarily

partial objects.

      Lacan's focus on the part-object is clear evidence of the important Kleinian

   influences in his work. However, whereas Klein defines these objects as partial

   because they are only part of a whole object, Lacan takes a different view.

They are partial, he argues, 'not because these objects are part of a total object,

   the body, but because they represent only partially the function that produces      -

   them' (E, 315). In other words, in the unconscious only the pleasure-giving          -

   function of these objects is represented, while their biological function is not

represented. Furthermore, Lacan argues that what isolates certain parts of the

body as a part-object is not any biological given but the signifying system of

   language.

      In addition to the partial objects already discovered by psychoanalytic

   theory before Lacan (the breast, the faeces, the PHALLUS BS imaginary object,

   and the urinary flow), Lacan adds (in 1960) several more: the phoneme, the

   GAZE, the voice and the nothing (E, 315). Thesgobjects all have one feature in

   common: 'they have no specular image' (E, 315). In other words, they are

precisely that which cannot be assimilated into the subject's narcissistic

   illusion of completeness.

      Lacan's conceptualisation of the part-object is modified with the develop-

   ment around 1963-4 of the concept of OBJETPETITA as the cause of desire. Now

   each partial object becomes an object by virtue of the fact that the subject takes

   it for the object of desire, objet petit a (Sll, 104           From this point on in his

   work, Lacan usually restricts his discussion of part-objects to only four: the

   voice, the gaze, the breast and faeces.

A Kleinian term that "has never been subjected to criticism since Karl Abraham introduced it."^[1]

References