Infants' attachment to inanimate objects. A cross-cultural study.

Winnicott ( 1953) was the first investigator in the Western literature who paid due attention to the rather common phenomenon of a “security” blanket. In his report he introduced the term “transitional object” and described it as the first not-me possession of a child which plays an important role in ego development. Since then, many reports on this topic have appeared, mainly in the psychoanalytic literature (Stevenson, 1954; Provence and Ritvo, 196 1 ; Provence and Lipton, 1962; Schaffer and Emerson, 1964; Coppolillo, 1967; Greenacre, 1969; Fintzy, 1971), with a few experimental studies (Weisberg and Russell, 1971; Gershaw and Schwarz, 1971). Tolpin (1971) hypothesized that a “transitional object” aids the child in the separation-individuation process, and Busch et al. (1 973) rigorously defined and described the “primary transitional object.” Most recently, Passman and Weisberg (1 975) reported that mother and blanket share similar functional properties in reducing fearfulness and generating exploratory behavior of the children in an experimental setting. Most of the observations reported in the literature have been limited to Western culture, as seen in England and the U.S.A., and were primarily concerned with the characteristics and functions of the transitional object. Little is known concerning the rates at which infants develop attachment behavior toward inanimate objects and how this behavior