Starting from Winnicott's notions of transitional objects and phenomena, the real father, who is invested with a use-value and a practical law and is conceived in this way by the child, is posited as the transitional object par excellence. In appropriate circumstances, the father and his law, in their status as transitional objects, are substituted by the symbolic father and the law that he re presents. In adverse circumstances in which the symbolic substitution is not successful, they continue to be transitional objects, and in the worst cases they become fetish objects. These three vicissitudes account for symbolic, imaginary and real violence, whose agents are the collectivity, the comunity and the individual.