Because my musings can be confusing, even to me, I sink back to ground level.

When a parent sees two children in the sandbox fighting over the same toy, each child desiring the same thing that the other desires, one can hardly see how this selfish behavior has any adaptive advantage. This type of desire will tear the band or the village apart.

So the parent separates them, taking the thing away, and tells them to get along, little realizing that her behavior provides a clue to the tykes that there is another “thing”, or maybe not even a “thing”, perhaps, an “object”, that allows them to both fight and get along.

This is their earliest introduction to “an object that brings them into relation”.