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The great contribution [Freud] has made to our understanding of literature does not arise from what he says about literature itself but from what he says about the nature of the human mind: he showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.
Insofar as the transitional object is a first not-me, it is so without any sharp sense of exteriority. It is perhaps an incipient other, otherness in the process of being born, not yet wholly other. It is expressive of a primary creative process at the origin of symbolic experience and is itself a vehicle for creative experiencing. As neither wholly self nor other nor wholly outside these terms, it is itself symbolizing experiencing emerging as such.
I suggest that the time has came for psychoanalytic theory to pay tribute to this third area, that of cultural experience which is a derivative of play…. It is of great importance in our assessment of the lives rather than the health of human beings. (The other two areas are inner or personal psychic reality and the actual world with the individual living in it.)
This excursus starts out from and returns to a fragment of testimony quoted by Robert Jay Lifton in his magisterial work, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. Spoken by a survivor whom Lifton identifies as “the professor of English,” it arrested my attention and wouldn't let it go until I had followed it through the alien territory of the Eliot text that it cites, and into what only in retrospect could I think of as the dialogic relations of faith in