Taylor, Graeme J. (1987).  Psychosomatic Medicine  & Contemporary Psychoanalysis.  (click preceding link for information on purchasing from Amazon). Madison, CT:  Intl. Univ. Press

Excerpts are below. 

30--Deutsche--Through a process of "retrojection" the lost object becomes symbolically represented in some body part that is cathected with aggressive and libidinous energy, therefore modifying its physiological function.

52--Schmale related helplessness to the late oral period in which self and object are just beginning to be differentiated and the infant no longer perceives the mother as an automatically all-providing object.

61--If an object has been enlisted as a participant in the externalization of an internal object relationship, object loss is likely to be experienced as a loss of the part of the self which was projectively identified with the object. A deficiency in object representations may render a person more dependent on an external object (a selfobject) for important psychological (and possibly biological) regulatory functions.

63--Citing Shore, 1980, p. 295:

• We all live in a rich and nutrient broth of selfobjects. Our edges overlap a great variety of narcissistically invested things and places as well as people. Our favorite chair, a painting with special personal appeal, a faithful car and hard-won parking spot--all of these help us to orient ourselves and know who we are. When they are they are taken away or damaged or fail us in some way, we lose something of ourselves.

70--Investigators have shown that hidden within the interactions between infant and mother are a number of processes whereby the mother “serves as an external regulator of the infant's behavior, its autonomic physiology, and even the neurochemistry of its maturing brain.” It now appears that the infant's responses to separation are due not only to the breaking of an attachment bond but also to the withdrawal of the previous biological and behavior regulation supplied by the mother.

118--Rigid dependency upon an external object or group of external objects are experienced as the external stabilizers of an ego threatened with disintegration.

140--Within the early self-selfobject unity, many of the mother's behaviors have a soothing effect upon the infant by satisfying bodily needs and facilitating successful regulation of tension.  According to Kohut (1977), it is the infant's repeated experience of merger with the empathic material selfobject, along with the optimum (nontraumatic, phase-appropriate) failures of the selfobject, that lead to psychic structure building and the internal representation of the self-selfobject unity.

As a result of transmuting internalizations, the child gradually develops the sense of a cohesive self & the mother is relinquished as an essential selfobject. The regulating functions that were performed earlier by the mother are then performed by the child's own psychic structure.  As Kohut (1971) explained:

           with each of the mother's  minor empathic failures, misunderstandings, and delays, the infant withdraws narcissistic libido from the archaic imago of unconditional perfection (primary narcissism) and acquires in its stead a particle of inner psychological structure which takes over the mother's functions in the service of the maintenance of narcissistic equilibrium, e. g., her basic soothing and calming activities; and her providing physical and emotional warmth and other kinds of narcissistic sustenance.

141—Winnicott: The infant project onto the transitional object feelings and meaning that are originally attached to the mother-infant unity as well as the experiences associated with this unity.  The transitional object therefore represents both the infant and the mother. The transitional object reduces the infant's anxiety and tension by symbolically evoking a reunion with the absent mother.

144--Since Winnicott introduced the concept, the transitional object has been thought to reduce the infant's anxiety and tension by symbolically evoking a reunion with the absent mother.

145--Brody suggests that the cloth transitional objects that form part  of the infant's bed environment (e. g., a cherished blanket) are "experienced as integral to the infant's own body and not to an aspect of the mother." The TO may also be conceptualized as a selfobject, which is by definition experienced as part of the self even though recognized as "not-me."

147--In Tustin's opinion (1981), the early reciprocal regulatory interactions between mother and infant help preserve the illusion of "oneness" and "shelter the infant from realizations which are more than his elementary neuro-mental apparatus can deal with" (pp. 6-7).

147--In the autistic phase, objects in the outside world are experienced as an extension of the infant's body and its physiological activity, especially in terms of the tactile sensuous experience they provide.

148--(Discussing Tustin):  Premature separateness is experienced by the infant "as  a loss of part  of his body and not as the loss of the mother and her breast" (p. 97).  As Tustin indicates, "it is pre-verbal and pre-conceptual" and it is experienced by the infant as a hole or wound which the child seeks to plug through the pathological use of autistic objects.  This conception is consistent with Hofer's discovery that  the infant's bodily responses to separation from the mother are not part of an emotional response but  are due to the withdrawal of biological and behavioral regulators that use sensorimotor pathways.

149--When sensuousness remains unregulated and untransformed into dreams, fantasies and play (i. e., transitional phenomena), it may become directed toward bodily organs and functions and result in hypochondria or psychosomatic disease.

149--Like Tustin, Ammon describes disturbances in the early mother-infant relationship that produced a psychic structural defect that is later experienced as a "hole in the ego" which the individual attempts to plug with a somatic symptom or by a rigid dependency on a drug or person who functions as a psychic stabilizer. Such patients seem to require repeated sensory experiences to regulate psychological states and perhaps also to help maintain physiological homeostasis.

150--Like the selfobjects described by Kohut, the transitional object initially functions as though it were part of the infant's mental structure, although external to it.  When deprived of his transitional object at a time of need, the tension-filled infant fragments as he loses his sense of inner cohesion. In Tolpin's view (1971), the transitional object provides a transitional form of psychic structure which, by the process of transmuting internalization, gradually becomes part of the child's own inner structure and helps maintain the cohesiveness of the ego and of the self.

164--Gaddini (1987)

It is as though the child was making himself into the symbiotic nursing mother-infant unit through his bodily behavior and compensating for the loss of sensations associated with earlier body experiences with mother" (104--von Kries speaks of the "hypnoidal symbiotic ego state)."

252--Ammon (1979), in describing psychic structural deficits in "psychosomatic" patients referred to their

rigid dependency upon an external object or upon a group of external objects that are experienced as the representation of an internal object and function as the external stabilizers of an ego threatened with disintegration.  (p. 118)

285--Weiner & Hofer have recently suggested that  some individuals fail to achieve the usual and proper level of self-regulation.  Like the infant, they continue to rely excessively on another person to maintain their psychobiological equilibrium."

288-9--Cobb conceptualized social support in terms of information feedback leading a person to believe he is loved and cared for, esteemed and valued, and belongs to a meaningful network of communication and mutual obligation.  As Wolf observes, these are relatively silent  needs that one  becomes aware of only when they are not met:

As long as a person is securely embedded in a social matrix that provides him with a field in which he can find the needed mirroring responses and the needed availability of idealizable values, he will feel comfortably affirmed in his total self with its ambitions and values. (p. 128)

When this social matrix is disrupted, even people with strong selves tend to fragment and develop symptoms of anxiety, depression, hypochondriasis, paranoia, or somatic disease. For purposes of research, Thoits (1982) defines the social support system as “that subset of persons in the individual's total social network upon whom he or she relies for socio-emotional aid, instrumental aid, or both.”

296--In the psychoanalytic treatment of patients with structural psychic defects, the role of the regulatory selfobject is transferred onto the analyst, who is expected to perform the functions of the patient's missing psychic structure.  Psychoanalysts are familiar with the druglike dependency of patients with "primitive" personality organizations and the anxiety, depression, and rage they often show in response to separations from therapy, especially at weekends and during the therapist's vacations.

The tendency for some of these patients to develop a physical illness at these times (especially respiratory tract infections) may be conceptualized in terms of the withdrawal of psychobiological processes hidden within the therapeutic relationship.  As Hofer has suggested, the physiological responses to the withdrawal of the interpersonal regulatory processes are analogous to the withdrawal responses of narcotics addicts after separation from repeated drug injections.

301--Like the analyst's couch, the reclining chair on which the patient lies while receiving relaxation training or biofeedback corresponds to the background self object of primary identification that Grotstein has identified as an important subcategory of selfobjects.  According to Grotstein, the background selfobject corresponds to Winnicott's concept of the "environmental mother" who supports the infant from birth onward and promotes in the infant "a sense of being and of safety.

Individuals who have experienced a premature disruption of the sense of primary "at-oneness" with the mother during infancy may have a defective sense of background selfobject and are prone to feelings of fragmentation and disorders of regulation. As patients learn to relax, the couch or chair which supports them from behind may be experienced as a "holding" background selfobject which restores the experience of primary "at-oneness" and promotes further self-regulation of physiological processes. The self-regulatory therapies focus the patient's attention on his own body and on his relationship to himself as an object.