Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [33]
He calls this class of scary things "the uncanny." Consequently, Freud writes, "we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche ['homely'] into its opposite das Unheimliche, for this uncanny is really nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."
In his essay, Freud pushes the idea of the uncanny much farther than I do. He describes the fantasy of being mistakenly buried alive as "the most uncanny thing of all"—remarking that psychoanalysis has revealed that fantasy to be a transformation of another, originally nonterrifying fantasy qualified "by a certain lasciviousness"—that of intrauterine existence.
Thus the womb, "the former Heim [home] of all human beings," is the ultimate unheimlich place. This might also suggest why, while not literally a return to the womb, my profound reconnection with my mother—experienced as an adult through my childhood dolls—seemed uncanny.
I was eight when I got my Barbies, well past the age of appropriating them as what psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott termed "transitional objects." But Mattel's research shows that today kids get Barbies earlier, usually about age three. Thus, Barbies, in the psyches of toddlers, can function as transitional objects—which warrants a closer look at Winnicott's concept.
During the months following birth, a baby doesn't grasp that its mother is separate from itself. Embodied by her ever-nurturing breast, the mother is an extension of the child; she can be magically conjured up by the child whenever the child wants—or so the child believes. As the child develops, however, it must face the fact that this just isn't so—not, for the child, a happy idea. It isn't just the physical weaning, having to give up a stress-free means of satisfying hunger. It's also the trauma of becoming independent, of losing the blissful, boundariless connection to Mom.
This, says Winnicott, is where transitional objects come in. They are, for a child, his or her first "not me" objects. The child imbues them with elements of the self and the mother; and they symbolize, for the child, that relationship, which is coming to an end.
There aren't hard and fast rules about transitional objects: They can be as stereotypical as Linus's security blanket in Peanuts or as idiosyncratic as a piece of string. Nor are there rules about the age at which children appropriate them. Sometimes a baby will attach itself to a toy in its crib; sometimes an older child—such as Linus—will endure the ridicule of schoolmates rather than renounce his object. But the objects, Winnicott has pointed out, aren't fetishes; having them, for kids, is normal behavior.
Significantly, though, the transitional object "is not just a 'not me' object, it's also a 'me' object," said Ellen Handler Spitz, who has written on the phenomenon in Art and Psyche. "If she loses it and is put to bed without it, she may have a tantrum and be devastated. Like the transitional object, the Barbie doll leads the child into the future by enabling her to detach, to some extent, from the mother. At the same time, because the doll is a little woman, it represents the relationship with the mother." A transitional object can also be a child's bridge to future aesthetic experiences. This is because the child often sucks, strokes, and mutilates it into "a highly personal object," the way an artist fashions artwork out of clay.
LEGALLY SPEAKING, THE BARBIE DOLL IS A WORK OF ART. Mattel copyrighted Barbie's face as a piece of sculpture, not because the doll was intended to be a unique object, but because it wasn't. The manual processes in Barbie's creation—the sewing-on of hair, the painting of lips— might permit a variation or two; thus hair and makeup were not copyrighted. But the duplication of the doll's body was mechanical and, therefore,