Stickers

Last Christmas, my mom gave Helena some stickers.  Not very exciting ones -- I think they came as a bonus with an Audobon Society mailing or something -- but they had pretty pictures of birds on them.  And ever since, Helena has been obsessed with stickers, and will leave behind all of the rest of her beloved painting and drawing supplies (click here for some reflections on her art) just to post some kind of a silly cat on top of a painting she's been working on for hours.  Last week, when Rita found some stickers for her in a stationary store, I think I began to understand this compulsion a little better.

As Helena has stuck her stickers on any surface she can find, I've also been reading Donald Winnicott, the British children's psychoanalist from the 1950s.  Winnicott is most famous for his theory of the transitional object, a way to think about blankets and pacifiers and other stuff that kids come to abopt between 1 and 4 years old.  According to the theory, these things are not really things -- they have no full existence separated from the child), but they aren't just the kid, either.  They are a transition from the child's earliest ideas about the world (that it is all a part of the baby, and she is omnipotent over it (an idea that Helena still seems to have from time to time, as I wrote last week)) to a more adult division between subject and object, an "I" and a "world."

The transitional object is almost part of the baby, but it also has a bit of autonomy; it isn't entirely under her control.  We may be able to see this better in toys, which seem to be under our control, but then suddenly they aren't: the kite or the ball dashes and bobs where we didn't want it to; the dolls engage in conversation and suddenly one "says" something that the child playing with them had never planned.  Toys are also part-me, part-other.

I think the sticker may play the same role.  On the one hand, Helena controls it: she gets to take it off the pad and then put it somewhere, and she gets credit for the art she makes with a sticker (I remember my mom's reaction to Helena's first "sticker-art," full of oohs and ahhs).  At the same time, she didn't make the sticker, and certainly couldn't draw the birds and frogs and mermaids that she sticks on paper. Stickers are also under imperfect control: accidentally put a corner of the sticker down on paper, and it only comes off by tearing, and won't ever be useful again.  The fold and twist in ways we don't expect. And once stuck onto the paper, you'll never get it off (though, as Helena has learned, if you stick it onto  plastic, sometimes you can recover it).  In the world of art, the sticker plays the role of the transitional object.

I just wish we could find a way to help her work through these ideas of omnipotence in other areas: I think it would save us a lot of crying fits when we say "no."