The Seba library treats Blanket in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Winnicott, D W, Klein, Melanie, Levine, Peter A.).
Soon after weaning at five to six months he adopted the end of the blanket where the stitching finished… This very early became his ‘Baa’… This is a typical example of what I am calling a transitional object.
Winnicott establishes the blanket-corner as his canonical exemplar of the transitional object — the infant’s first ‘not-me’ possession, bridging inner psychic reality and the external world following weaning.
, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis
the endless strip of blanket represented an endless stream of words, and it occurred to her that these were all the words I had ever said in the analysis and which I now had to swallow. The strip of blanket was a hit at the woolliness and worthlessness of my interpretations.
Klein reads a patient’s dream-blanket as a vehicle for the full devaluation of the primal object, condensing envious contempt for the analyst’s interpretations into the material figure of something woolly and worthless to be ingested.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
I put Pooh Bear under a blanket and placed Sammy on the bed next to him.
Levine employs the blanket as a therapeutic containment device in child trauma work, using it to create a manageable scene of concealment that allows titrated re-enactment of a traumatic hospital experience.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
Those patterns go out into space. They envelop people. Surround them in texture… It is like a cashmere blanket of sound.
Keltner cites a musician’s metaphor of musical awe as a ‘cashmere blanket of sound,’ deploying the blanket’s tactile envelopment to capture the skin-level, beyond-language quality of collective musical experience.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
he stretched himself out and lay there with his racoon-skin blanket, quite a fear-inspiring object to look upon. His whole body was covered with the racoon-skin blanket and he had long branching horns on his head.
In the Winnebago Trickster cycle, the racoon-skin blanket functions as a disguise enabling sacred deception, the blanket as total bodily covering producing a numinously frightening, liminal appearance.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
I am concerned with the first possession, and with the intermediate area between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived.
Winnicott frames the broader theoretical context within which the blanket as first possession is situated — the intermediate area between subjective inner reality and objective perception.
, Playing and Reality, 1971aside