"Winnicott claims that the ability to engage in these social relationships develops out of the preverbal mother-child dyad, wherein the individual sees the external world as a part or projection of herself. In order to develop a real relationship with people and objects outside herself—and in order to experience him or herself as authentic—the individual must learn to see her environment as something external to her; in effect, she must make the world that exists outside of her real (a necessary precursor to feeling herself a real member of the real world).3 This is accomplished through the mediating function of what Winnicott calls transitional objects. Strictly speaking, these are neither outside the individual, nor a part of her; rather, they exist as subjective objects, essentially extensions of the individual that exist in her imaginative world. In order to enter the real world, where other beings are as real as the self, the individual must fantasize the destruction of the transitional object. The object survives this destruction because of course it does not exist wholly in her mind, and as a result the child recognizes that there is a difference between her subjective world and the world "out there." In this way the child learns that objects outside her have an independent life, and so she is able to enter into relationship with the external world," (Gilson 634).