In hypertext criticism when students don't 'get' a hypertext they 'bite the breast' claiming the irrelevance of hypertext rather than questioning the adequacy of their own reading schemas. This brief work uses object relations psychology and its description of our relationship to art, and idea of the breast as a ‘transitional object’ for the child as a model for describing such criticism. The transitional object is that thing that the child uses to mediate its first experiences of itself as an entity separate in the world.