Changes

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 [[object]]s rather than collections of separate parts.

However, whereas [[Klein]] defines these [[object]]s 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."<ref>{{E}} p.315</ref>

In other words, in the [[unconscious]] only the [[pleasure]]-giving function of these [[object]]s 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 [[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>   These [[partial object]]s all have one feature in common: "they have no specular image."<ref>{{E}} p. 315</ref>   In other words, they are precisely that which cannot be assimilated into the [[subject]]'s [[narcissistic]] [[illusion]] of [[lack|completeness]].

[[Lacan]]'s conceptualization of the [[part-object]] is modified with the development around 1963-4 of the concept of ''[[objet petit a]]'' 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]]''.<ref>{{S11}} p. 104</ref>