A Contemporary Version of Object Presenting

Day-to-day clinical practice with children and the observation of actual parent / child relations have led us to try to circumscribe contemporary issues concerning children’s almightiness by taking as our reference the dimensions of the maternal function that Winnicott divides into “holding”, “handling”, and “object presenting”. However, we allow ourselves to examine its elements separately, that is to say, by looking extensively into the third of these dimensions, that of “object presenting”.This reflection draws on sessions with a child and his two parents in a CMPP [Psychological Medical Center for Children], and is set out under two perspect ives: that of a theoretical development of the concept of “object presenting”, putting it to the test of contemporary issues of relationships between parents and children; and the exploration of an atypical clinical situation of this contemporary logic.Dominant discourses and ideologies are not at work on subjectivity primarily, because the parents were not its transmitters, but secondarily: the effect of encounter between a psychopathological problematic and what “the capitalist discourse” promotes, notably through the widespread use of images, by way of the subject’s relationship with the object of desire.