Changes

==Melanie Klein==

As the [[child]]'s visual apparatus develops, so also does his capacity to perceive people as whole [[object]]s rather than collections of separate parts.

==Sigmund Freud==

[[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]].

==Jacques Lacan==

[[Lacan]]'s focus on the [[part-object]] is clear evidence of the important [[Klein]]ian influences in his work.

[[body]] as a [[part-object]] is not any [[biological]] given but the [[signification|signifying]] [[system]] of [[language]].

In addition to the [[partial object]]s already discovered by [[psychoanalytic theory]] before [[Lacan]] (the [[breast]], the [[part-object|faeces]], the [[phallus]] as [[imaginary]] [[object]], and the [[part-object|urinary flow]]), [[Lacan]] adds (in 1960) several more: the [[phoneme]], the [[gaze]], the voice and the nothing.<ref>{{E}} p.315</ref>

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 development around 1963-4 of the concept of ''[[objet petit a]]'' as the [[cause]] of [[desire]].