The Poem as a Transformational Third: Commentary on Paper by Barbara Pizer

This commentary focuses on how psychoanalysts may theorize the therapeutic action of reading and hearing poetry. It is argued that poetic action is a densely layered one-and two-person process that achieves its psychological effects by potentiating the mental space that is “thirdness,” in Jessica Benjamin's (2004) lexicon.

Beginning with ideas about how poetry works on a single subjectivity, Goldner then considers the complex intersubjective and mutative processes that are set in motion when an analyst reads a poem to a patient. Building on Bollas's (1987) construct, the “transformational object” and on Ogden's (1998, 1999) and Akhtar's (2000) theories of poetic action, the author proposes that poetry can be usefully understood as a “transformational third.”