The primary object: one person who carries everything

A newborn cannot keep itself warm. It cannot find food and cannot tell whether the place around it is safe. Someone does all of this on its behalf. Psychology calls that someone the primary object: one person who, in the first months of another person’s life, holds more functions than any adult job title ever will.

Everything that happens later can be read as one long process. The child takes those functions back, one by one, at different speeds, and some of them are never fully taken back.

This sounds like a topic for a parenting book. It is also a precise description of how adults buy, whom they trust, and why a foreign company entering Russia often speaks to the wrong person in the room.

Why one person holds everything at first

The primary object is usually the mother. The reason is practical: the child is physically unable to survive alone and has to receive everything it needs from outside. Four functions matter here.

The first is feeding. Without an outside source of food, the organism does not live. The second is protection: an infant cannot recognise a threat or move away from it. The third is warmth, because the body does not yet regulate temperature the way an adult body does. The fourth is orientation, which has two sides. Someone has to decide where it is safe to be, and someone has to decide where to go next. The child can do neither.

At the start of life all four sit in one person. This is not an ideal of motherhood. It is a technical necessity: a helpless organism survives only when outside support is gathered in a single place.

What growing up actually means

From this follows the main task of all later development: the gradual transfer of these functions from the primary object to the person. There is no single moment of separation. There is a long process of taking over. The child learns to feed itself, to protect itself, to handle cold and heat, to find its way around a territory and to decide where to move.

In this frame, being an adult has little to do with knowledge or age on a passport. It is a count. How many of these functions does a person carry alone, and how many are still handed to someone outside? That someone can be a partner, a manager, an institution, or any figure who has quietly taken the place of the first one.

The capable adult who waits for permission

Here is a familiar picture. An adult handles professional work with ease. Yet again and again this person cannot decide alone whether the current job is safe to stay in, whether the relationship is, whether the city is. They wait for someone outside to say: stay, or go.

This is rarely a weak character. It is the orientation function, never fully taken over, still being handed outward decades after the first carrier stopped being physically present. The same person may feed and warm themselves perfectly well. Only the ability to read the space of possibilities stayed at the infant’s level of delegation.

Why the functions return unevenly

The four functions do not come back as a package, and they do not come back on schedule. One may be mastered early and completely. Another may stay delegated for decades. A third returns in jumps, usually during a crisis.

This explains a paradox that everyone has met. A person looks fully independent in one area of life and strangely helpless in another, asking for outside permission to do something small.

When, in a couple, a family or a working team, one person keeps carrying a function the other never took back, the everyday word for it is codependency. Often that word misses the point. What is happening is a direct continuation of the old role: someone physically carries protection, orientation or warmth for a person who has not yet reclaimed it.

The buyer who asks someone else

Now move this into a purchase. A buying decision contains a question the buyer rarely says aloud: is this place safe to step into? A new supplier, a new product, a new contract is unfamiliar territory. Whether the buyer judges that territory alone or hands the judgement to someone else depends on how much of the orientation function they carry.

Most Western marketing is built for the buyer who judges alone. The funnel assumes a person who searches in Google, reads reviews, compares three vendors and decides. Content, landing pages and ads all speak to that independent evaluator. In markets where this assumption holds well enough, it works.

In Russia the same funnel often breaks at one step. The buyer searches in Yandex, reads the site, and then does something the funnel does not track: asks a person. A boss. A familiar integrator. A colleague in an industry chat in Telegram. A friend who once worked with a foreign vendor. The question put to that person is the one from the nursery: is it safe here, and where should I go?

I want to be careful about what I am claiming. The mechanism is universal, and plenty of Western buyers also ask a colleague. The difference I mean is one of weight and visibility. With a foreign supplier, which arrives with an unclear future and no local track record, the question of safety grows larger, and the outside voice decides more. Much of that conversation happens in private messengers and phone calls, where no analytics system sees it.

What this means for a company selling into Russia from abroad

If the orientation function in a purchase is often held by someone other than the buyer, the practical consequences are fairly direct.

First, find out who that someone is. For your category it may be the head of a department, a systems integrator who installs your equipment, a distributor, or the unofficial expert of a professional community. You will not learn this from Metrica reports or search queries. You learn it by asking customers how the decision really went, which is the job of customer research, done before the budget is spent.

Second, speak to that person as well as to the buyer. Materials written for the independent evaluator answer the question “is this product good”. The person holding orientation asks a different question: “is it safe to bring this supplier in, and will I look foolish if it goes wrong”. That question calls for other proof: who in Russia already uses you, how you handle payments and delivery, who answers the phone in Moscow time, what happens if something breaks.

Third, stop measuring only what you can see. When a large share of the decision passes through a trusted person, last-click reports will credit the search ad that caught the buyer at the end and miss the recommendation that sent them there. This is one reason plans for entering the Russian market that copy the home-market channel mix tend to underfund the slow, relationship-based part of the work.

Fourth, do not treat the dependence as a flaw to be fixed by persuasion. A buyer who needs someone else’s permission is not stupid or slow. A particular function was handed outward long ago and still is. Pushing that buyer harder usually produces a polite pause while they go and ask again.

When the supplier becomes the carrier

The idea also works in reverse, and here it is uncomfortable for sellers. Sometimes the supplier ends up as the client’s primary object. The agency decides for the client what is safe. The consultant tells them where to go. The account manager carries the client’s protection and orientation for them.

For a while this is normal and even necessary. A foreign company that has just entered Russia may truly be unable to judge the local territory, and someone has to hold that function during the first months. The trouble begins when it never ends. To carry someone else’s protection or orientation without end is not care over the long run. It keeps the other side in the position of someone who cannot act.

Such a relationship looks stable and is fragile. The client stays because leaving feels unsafe, not because the work is good. The first time the carrier stumbles, the whole dependence turns into resentment. Healthy service hands the function back, even when that is inconvenient for both sides: it teaches the client to read their own numbers, to judge a risk, to decide without asking.

Name the function

For a person who notices a chronic need for someone to say “it is safe here” or “move over there”, shame is useless. More useful is an honest name: which of the four basic functions has not yet been taken back? Once named, the function becomes a task rather than a vague feeling of immaturity.

The same holds for a company. The question to ask about a Russian buyer is less “why won’t they decide” and more “who holds this decision for them, and which part of it”. Once that is named, it becomes a research task with an answer.

The hands that once carried everything

No adult status, no job title and no diploma cancels the simple fact that once, everything rested in one person’s hands. Growing up is about slowly taking it back, function by function, rather than forgetting it. Some people take everything back by thirty. Some never reclaim the territorial function, even in old age. The difference lies less in willpower and more in which part was once handed over completely and is still waiting to be returned.

Your buyers are those same people. Somewhere in each purchase sits a part of the decision that still belongs to someone else.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Первичный объект: зачем ребёнку один человек, несущий всё