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What kinds of things can literature do to us? Can it ignite or foster transformative psychic processes? Might its embodiment of imaginative and otherworldly spaces invite us into more expansive ways of seeing and being?
Some years before I began articulating these questions, while suffering an acute crisis of faith studying theology at an evangelical seminary, I found myself in a small bookshop on a gray, rainy February afternoon weaving through display tables, heavy with the dread that the “ugly, broad ditch” separating reason from faith would for me, like Gotthold Lessing, ultimately prove uncrossable. A thin paperback with a glossy cover picturing a well-worn beige leather chair placed on a vertical axis—seemingly suspended in mid-air—caught my eye. The graceful script above the chair, Come to Me, issued its own pull. Flipping the seductive image to read the back cover, the first of the blurbs consisted of a single sentence: “I feel as though before discovering Amy Bloom, I was lost, and now I'm found.” Irresistible.
Now, close to two decades later, I still recall the allure of the reviewer's words. And in retrospect, I recognize within them something akin to a salvific promise that I was not yet ready to relinquish. In a sense, perhaps I am still not. It does not escape me that the questions animating my present research swirl around literature's power to transform us. When I teach psychoanalysis to undergraduates, I include literature, indeed sometimes stories from the very collection of Amy Bloom that “found me” during my dark night of the soul. Inversely, when teaching literature courses, psychoanalysis proves an invaluable resource for exploring with undergraduates the liminal space between playing and reality, that which I here term “imaginative thirdness.” My conception of this thirdness is indebted to