Literature as transitional object. Between omnipotence and the relinquishing of magic investment

Abstract Donald Winnicott’s model of the tolerance for paradox offers a new perspective on Edgar Allan Poe’s pieces of literature and on the fact that ambiguous reference in fiction does not result in its being perceived as meaningless. In the present article, I argue that Edgar Allan Poe’s writings sought to resurrect the satisfying illusion of what Donald Winnicott termed “the transitional phase”. In a sense, literature is the space where remnants of the subject’s illusion of totally creative power over things and objects, its sense of omnipotence, must negotiate with and confront the reality principle. By being referential to a world to which it does not refer, fiction sets up the very condition which, according to Winnicott, founds the emergence of the self. Fiction thus may allow readers, in a paradoxical way (by their “non-interfering presence”), to experience the unspeakable as having a voice.


Introduction
Isomorphisms 1 between fictional episodes and psychoanalytical "formulas" reflect what Mary Jacobus and Julia Kristeva, for example, declared about the subtle affinities between the two.Mary Jacobus, in The Poetics of Psychoanalysis, thinks that psychoanalysis "both loves and envies what it sees in literature," 2 while Kristeva personifies literature itself as jealously retaining its enigmas.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan joins their ranks with the declaration made in her book Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, according to which "[w]e continue to dream of a convergence of psychoanalysis and literary criticism because we sense that there ought to be, that there must be, some correspondence between literary and psychic process," 3 that aesthetic structure and form, ABOUT THE AUTHOR Daniela Cârstea is Lecturer at the University of Bucharest, Romania and a grantee of the Fulbright Commission (Emory University, 2007-2008, Institute of Liberal Arts).Dr. Cârstea holds a PhD in trauma studies, relational psychoanalysis and American literature.Her published work and presentations are largely focused on creative processes as transitional phenomena and negotiations of anxiety in the discourse of trauma.She teaches literary critical theory, British literature and a graduate course on trauma studies and relational psychoanalysis.She is co-editor (since 2011 to date) of the University of Bucharest Review and reviewer for several journals.including literary tropes, must somehow coincide with the psychic structures and operations they both evoke and appeal to.All in all, the three of them (Jacobus, Kristeva and Rimmon-Kenan) seem to agree on an important statement, namely that psychoanalysis matters to "literal" critics because it stands as a constant reminder that the attention to form, properly conceived, "is not a sterile formalism but rather one more attempt to draw the symbolic and fictional map of our place in existence" (Rimmon-Kenan, 1987, p. 16).
In this article, I propose to examine the extent to which Poe's discourse of trauma inhabits the potential space between reader and writer, by resorting to a theoretical framework put forth by Donald Winnicott.I will suggest that the relationship between the writer and the reader is indirect and is mediated by the text, which must accommodate a limited shared reality and shared illusion.Donald Winnicott's concepts of transitional phenomena and potential space, and his views on creativity have been as many conceptual reasons why they were deemed to articulate well with Poe's writings.
I intend to show that Donald Winnicott, himself an object-relations theorist, provides us with the basis for understanding Poe's writing, because his thesis is founded upon the assumption that transitional objects are "selected" or "created" to aid particularly in the containment and modulation of annihilation anxieties.The transitional object, with its paradoxical ambiguity, "cushions the fall from a world where the desires omnipotently actualise their objects to one where desires require accommodation to and collaboration of others to be fulfilled" (Winnicott, 1984: 72).Ira Konigsberg, discussing transitional phenomena, claims that there is always a strain in our relating inner and outer reality, but it is this intermediate area that gives relief from this strain (Transitional Phenomena, Konigsberg, 1996, p. 873).A transitional object is both inner creation and outer presentation, with no attendant anxiety about its ontological status.
In these terms, the fictional world of Edgar Allan Poe becomes a field of transitional phenomena in which the characters serve as commentary for the author's beliefs and allegiances.This is, of course, pure Winnicott-the implication being, once again, that "things" or "objects" become endowed with magic and with meaning, they acquire transitional qualities.This is to say that these potential spaces of imagination exist for Edgar Allan Poe in a form of creative and verbal opportunity.And, in some ways, literature is the space where remnants of the subject's illusion of totally creative power over things and objects, its sense of omnipotence, must negotiate with and confront the reality principle (Carstea, 2023).

Methodology
The choice in methodology, namely the employing of the tools put forth by relational psychoanalysis rests heavily on the fact that relational psychoanalytic models best contextualise the individual within a world in the aftermath of a traumatic episode, which is more often than not the case of Poe's characters.
Of necessity, the following brief summary of Donald Winnicott's theory of transitional objects and potential space will be simplified and therefore not capture Winnicott's ideas in all their complexity.However, my aim is to describe the development of the use and function of symbols, which is connected to the use and function of literature.The ensuing linkages will lay the groundwork for the analyses of Edgar Allan Poe's tales throughout this article.

Winnicott's transitional objects and potential space
According to Winnicott, creative activity originates in an imaginary potential space that is found between the person's inner reality and the real world.Early in life, if needs are met, the subject is seldom prodded into recognising the reality of others, the separation of outer from inner, or the distinction between fantasy and reality.The child subject then develops psychological structures that will help bear frustration and maintain the sense of continuity, their function being only a symbolic one, as Craig Miller (1992) holds in his Winnicott Unbound (446).In Hope and Dread, Mitchell (1993) considers that the relative richness of life and satisfaction go hand in hand with the balance between discontinuity and continuity, the dialectic between integrity in the experience of self and multiplicity.If there is too much discontinuity, there is also a dread of dislocation, splitting, fragmentation, or dissolution.(Harry Sullivan, 1953, spoke of a dread-filled dimension of experience he termed the "not me").
Melanie Klein had described the child's process of symbolization in its fantasies whereby partobjects and a source of anxiety are transformed into, and hence symbolized by, new objects which themselves become a source of anxiety and must then be symbolized.The concept of anxiety is clearly needed in considering the dynamics of the process.Melanie Klein strongly emphasized that the loss of the original object, together with the dread of it, is what prompts the search for a substitute.
The process continues, creating a constant need for new external objects to act as such tokens: "Thus, not only does symbolism come to be the foundation of all phantasy and sublimation but, more than that, upon it is built up the subject's relation to the outside world and to reality in general" (The Selected Klein, 1986, p. 238).Winnicott (1988) uses the notions of "transitional objects" and "transitional phenomena" to designate "the intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy bear, between primary creative activity and projection of what has already been introjected" (Collected Papers 2).It is the time when the child begins to take an external object, a piece of a blanket or cloth, for example, to hold as a replacement for the mother's body.Winnicott's next point about transitional phenomena is significant: Its fate is to be gradually allowed to be decathected, so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo.It loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between "inner psychic reality" and "the external world as perceived by two persons in common," that is to say, over the whole cultural field.(Collected Papers, Winnicott, 1988, p. 5) Ira Konigsberg, discussing transitional phenomena, claims that there is always a strain in our relating inner and outer reality, but it is this intermediate area that gives relief from this strain (Transitional Phenomena, 1986, p. 873).
The term transitional object, disambiguated for rookies in psychoanalysis by Stephen Mitchell and Margaret Black in Freud and Beyond (Mitchell & Black, 1995), does not imply the progression from dependence to independence, but "the transition between two different modes of organising experience, two different patterns of positioning the self in relation to others" (128).A teddy bear, for instance, becomes a unique appendage to the child's self, it is not a mere substitute for the mother.Paradoxically ambiguous, the transitional object "cushions the fall from a world where the desires omnipotently actualise their objects to one where desires require accommodation to and collaboration of others to be fulfilled" (Mitchell & Black, 1995, p. 128).Lewis Kirshner, in Rethinking Desire (2005) perceives both similarities and dissimilarities between Jacques Lacan's objet petit a and Winnicott's concept of the transitional object, both of which are situated in a developmental process.Lacan's objet petit a arises out of a successful mirror phase between the infant and its mother, everything depending, as with Winnicott's transitional object, on the successful negotiation of an earlier process with the real mother.
Transitional objects and phenomena, as described by Winnicott, are thought to be the first "not me" possession, yet this is so "without any sharp sense of exteriority" (Eigen, 1981, p. 414).As Michael Eigen hypothesises, it is an incipient other, not yet entirely other, but otherness in the process of being born.It is indicative of an elementary imaginative process, which lays the foundation for symbolic experience, thus becoming "a vehicle for creative experiencing.As neither wholly self nor other, nor wholly outside these terms, it is itself symbolizing experiencing emerging as such" (416).
Abbott Bronstein conceives of this transitional phase as a "normative and desired step toward more complete psychological development in both emotional and cognitive spheres", because the "object" is often characterized by its touch, smell, texture, and durability (The Fetish, Transitional Objects and Illusion, Bronstein, 2002, p. 243).The child uses the object for comfort and imbues it with special value, particularly when there is an increase in anxiety, like in times of transition.Thus, the subject fends off, according to Winnicott, the unbearable anxieties of annihilation and disintegration that accompany the separation anxieties.
Winnicott stressed that the articles used as transitional objects are "selected" or "created" to aid particularly in the containment and modulation of annihilation and depressive and separation anxieties.

Transitionality and object-usage in Poe's fiction
"[The potential space] can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living" (Winnicott, 1981, p. 104).
Everything Winnicott writes about the compliance of the false self condition suggests or states directly that the experience of "creative living" capitalizes on what is unique to the individual and stems from that incommunicable inner core.The transitional area taps this "sacred" individuality by keeping in touch with the fantastic inner core, or the primitive inner reality."In the condition of transitionality, there is access to the subjective in Winnicott's special sense of 'primitive,' meaning before linkage with the outer world through the reality principle, which ensures that that objectivity has meaning to the self" (Meline, 2004, p. 27).
In conclusion, keeping to Winnicott's usage, and recognizing the importance of the environment for whatever might come to be termed "the individual," we might say that the transitional experience is subjective but interactive, so that the self also has meaning to the world.

Discussion
A case can be made for Poe's total reliance on sources outside the South: on the exotic, sensational stories of the Gothic tradition and on the tales of escape and adventure so popular at the time.There is no doubt that Poe belongs to the tradition of aberrant literature-Romantic, Gothic, and subsequently Symbolist and Surrealist.To say this, though, is not to exclude or deny the Southern dimension, as Richard Gray contends.
There is the simple fact that, while he was sublimely indifferent to the Southern landscape, and made very few references to its social and political institutions, he tapped many of the secret fears and guilts of his region.His fiction is soaked in the imagery and frequently shaped by the obsessions of the place where he spent most of the formative years of his infancy and childhood.The South appears in his tales, not as a convenient setting nor as the object of direct, critical analysis, but as a shaping influence -an ancestral voice so deeply submerged in the text that only its distant echo can be heard.(The Problem of Regionalism, 2001, p. 81) One way in which Gray considers this ancestral voice makes itself heard is through the structure and feeling, the frame of values, that shapes every tale, and that, just occasionally, Poe makes explicit.Not surprisingly, the values are profoundly "conservative" ones, in Gray's qualification: a distrust of change, a sense of evil, a hatred of abstractions, a preoccupation with the past, a rejection of the ideas of perfectibility and progress, and a belief in hierarchy (Gray, 2001, pp. 81-2).
In stories like "Some Words with a Mummy", "The Colloquy of Monos and Una", and "Mellonta Tauta," Poe brings these ideas into the foreground.The sense of human imperfection, for instance, that Southern apologists, and Poe, invoked in defence of the status quo (things should be left alone, the argument went, because nothing is perfect and meddling would only make matters worse), this is central to "Eureka".It is here transformed into the vaguely metaphysical belief that all created life is evil, because it involves fragmentation-the emanation of the imperfect Many from the perfect One.
Although Poe never worked out a systematic relationship between his political and philosophical thought, or relied entirely the South for his conceptual framework, the Southern argument seems to have been indispensable to him, it created that transitional area which helped formulate its perceptions and language: the means by which he saw and constructed the world.
There is no irony, no sense of what Jeffrey Folks might call "over-determination," in Poe's attempts to picture the arabesque in actual life or to discover the truly "pittoresque" in its original sense, as in "Landor's Cottage" (In a Time of Disorder, Folks, 2003, p. 11).There is only the admission of the extreme difficulty of achieving this condition of abstract order in the face of the devastating power of death.But death is not equated with writing-it is alleviated by the sort of composition that Poe performed almost continuously.
The insecurity of such traditional bases of order as Poe had available to him is particularly significant in light of the increasing concern of Poe and his contemporaries with emerging sources of disorder, as Folks holds.The destructive potential of contagion was felt in Poe's age more acutely than ever before-partially on account of a newly-found public awareness of the presence of an invisible world of microorganisms and of the potential benefits of immunization.In August 1849, Poe himself survived infection with cholera (though he died two months later, apparently of unrelated causes) during the epidemic that, according to Smith (2000), in four months killed over five thousand people in New York state alone (Gothic Radicalism,412).
Against this backdrop, Poe's imaginings of life after death-various and often contradictory in their natures-are hardly flights from reality, they are an intelligible response to a horrible actuality of danger.His many "paeans" to death, such as "Lenore" ("the queenliest dead that ever died so young"), are, according to Folks, "exhortations of hope in the face of a seemingly omnipresent doom" (In a Time of Disorder, Folks, 2003, p. 11).
It is becoming clear that Poe sought to resurrect the satisfying illusion of the transitional phase.Of course, one might argue that all literature shares this project, given the ontogenesis of the symbol in the intermediate space.Support for this position may be found in recent psychoanalytic theory, which holds, even more sweepingly, that all creativity is prompted by this impulse: for the artist, the work is a transitional object through which s/he re-creates a former perfection (Kohut, 1986, pp. 57-61).They are not just symbols, distant and sophisticated relatives of the transitional object, they are potential transitional objects themselves, with the capacity to carry us back to the very brink of at-oneness.
Symbolic landscapes are characteristic of Poe's work."The Valley of Unrest", for instance, presents a scene which is more mindscape than landscape.By combining objects mysteriously, restlessly, still air, and flowers resembling grieving human eyes, "The Valley of Unrest" epitomizes the condition of grief, rather than merely describing it.The valley is in fact a state of mind, like the settings of "The Haunted Palace," "The Dream-land," "Ulalume," and a number of the "poetic" tales.
Poe's magical investment in the transitional object, as evidenced in such stories is relinquished, though, and the author begins to assume a more objective relationship with the world, as I will attempt to show in what follows.At the same time, he never lays aside the magic of the transitional object entirely, since, as Winnicott held, man's capacity to make symbols grows out of the intermediate space.
While the act of creation can be seen as taking place in the transitional or potential space, the fictional object itself may be interpreted as a transitional object of sorts, as "a link between inner and outer worlds, belonging wholly to neither, yet clearly pertaining to both" (Schneider Brody, 2001, p. 244).
Reading Eureka as a potential space might seem, initially, ill-suited because of certain features that place it in conflict with the way Poe practiced and defined poetry.According to him, the pursuit of poetry is the "rhythmical creation of beauty," and most of his verse compositions (for instance, "The Raven", "The Bells"), bear this assertion out.In Eureka, Poe's concern is less with a structuring of the world, and more with an evocation of it, consequently its pursuit is less the "creation of beauty" and more an examination of beauty, an "inquiry into its mechanism" (Harris, 2000, p. 6).Beauty here is that of abstract forms, the "formation of social and material relation" (Yoshida, 2022, p. 36).
In the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe refers to poetry as not "the faculty of ideality", but "the means of exciting it in mankind" (The Drake-Halleck Review, Poe, 1965, p. 511).It follows that poems cannot be just the expression of the "poetic sentiment", but rather that which elicits it, by instilling an awareness of the order of things, of "design" (ibidem, p. 508).This depiction of design as different from its execution is evidence of the separation between an actual and an ideal, potential state.
One could argue that, in doing so, Poe's aim is not to encourage an adjustment of the actual so as to augment its similarity to the potential, but to indicate that the ideals are and have always been there all along behind the real.This idea is emphasized in the Drake-Halleck review, published in the Southern Literary Messenger: To look upwards from any existence, material or immaterial, to its design, is, perhaps, the most direct, and the most unerring method of attaining a just notion of the nature of the existence itself.We find certain faculties implanted within us.For example, we discover in all men a disposition to look with reverence on superiority, whether real or suppositious.Phrenologists call it veneration.And although, preserving its nature, it becomes perverted from its principal purpose (divine worship), and although, swerving from that purpose, it serves to modify the relations of human society -the relations of father and child, of master and slave, of the ruler and the ruled -its primitive essence is nevertheless the same, and by a reference to primal causes, may at any moment be determined.(Poe, 1965, pp. 509-10) Eureka's thesis is simple: the entire universe is always moving toward either oneness or multiplicity, toward unification or differentiation.
According to Daniel Hoffman, "the cosmology of 'Eureka' and the narrative of Pym both seem to revolve around fantasies of incorporation" (Poe Poe, Hoffman, 1973, p. 172).The subtitle of "Eureka", "An essay on the material and spiritual universe", alongside its "general proposition", as Poe calls it, enhanced through italicization: "In the original unity of the first thing lies the secondary cause of all things, with the germ of their inevitable annihilation" seem to point to this very fact.In Freudian cosmogony, the organic is hypothesized as preceding the inorganic, and, as a consequence, all things are deemed to tend to return to their original state, which would entail that death was the aim of all life (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud, 1920).
The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is, neither more nor less than that of the absorption, by each individual intelligence of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own.That God may be all in all, each must become God.(ibidem, p. 479) In an appended entry to "Eureka", Poe stated: If we read closely, Poe's trope is "absorption," implicating fantasies of ultimate introjection in which the cosmos and the bodily ego become indistinguishable.Transitional phenomena can be deemed to offer a third alternative to what appears to be mutually exclusive options, a bridge between the inner and outer worlds, previously discontinuous, because the transitional object is always a combination of the two, and even, one which is "more than the sum of its parts" (Schneider Brody, 2001, p. 114).To all intents and purposes, literature seems to have provided a "third alternative" for Poe, whose struggle with the conflict between needs for closeness and distance, separateness and unity, is revealed through his writings.
Winnicott calls the early phase in the process of coming to use objects "object-relating", meaning that objects are perceived as an extension of, part of the subject, as "bundle(s) of projections" (CP, Winnicott, 1988, p. 88).The transition from "object-relating" to "object-use" presupposes "the subject's placing of the object outside the area [of its] omnipotent control, the subject's perception of the object as an external phenomenon, not as a projective entity, recognition of it as an entity in its own right" (ibidem, p. 89).We can add to our comprehension of what Winnicott has achieved through his formulation of object usage, Michael Eigen believes, if we realize that we are dealing with two distinct visions regarding the importance of the other as other (The Area of Faith, Eigen, 1981, p. 413).His account pivoted around the capacity for concern and basically retained, in a reworked version, the guilt dynamics characterizing the depressive position put forth by Klein.
Winnicott differentiates between object relating and transitional experiencing through introjective-projective operations by a unit self.This is how he describes the former mode of colligating: In object-relating the subject allows certain alterations in the self to take place, of a kind that has caused us to invent the term cathexis.The object has become meaningful.Projection mechanisms and identifications have been operating, and the subject is depleted to the extent that something of the subject is found in the object.(Playing and Reality, Winnicott, 1981, p. 88) Winnicott can be deemed to position this manner of object relating between transitional experiencing and object usage, as an intermediate phase.Though meaningful, the object is not yet understood as entirely other.Instead, the subject manifests a continuous tendency to harness any budding sense of otherness to its omnipotence, as could be construed to happen in such tales as "The Man That Was Used Up" and "Some Words with a Mummy", where the earlier mentioned relinquishing of the magical investment can be witnessed.
Splitting is perhaps Poe's preeminent strategy of representation, or his favoured mode of defense.It shapes Roderick Usher's trajectory, with the fracturing of his psyche, his family and his mansion, in one catastrophic gesture.In "The Fall of the House of Usher", there is no rational solution to splittings, and the latent psychotic area of dissimilar objects becomes actuality.Poe's dramatization parallels, one could argue, the theory of psychoanalysis.This is, of course, pure Winnicott-the implication being, once again, that things and objects acquire meaning, become endowed with magic, acquire transitional qualities.This is to say that these potential spaces of imagination exist for Edgar Allan Poe in a form of creative and verbal opportunity.And, in some ways, literature is the space where remnants of the subject's illusion of totally creative power over things and objects, its sense of omnipotence, must negotiate with and confront the reality principle (Carstea, 2023).With Poe, then, the "recognition of [the object] as an entity in its own right" is a result of the subject's fantasized destruction of the object, an essentially dialectical process (Winnicott, 1988, p. 249).According to Winnicott, the object's destruction in fantasy prompts the discovery of its otherness, its reality, and it works both ways: "the subject is becoming destroyed in fantasy as fantasy and is felt as real because of this, at the same time its realness makes fantasy destructiveness possible" (Stephen, 1986, p. 416).
Eventually, the formation of a new space is thus prompted, an area where the subject can relate to the object "in some basic way outside boundaries, 'wholly other.'"And this is no longer a potential space, but an "area of faith," as Michael Eigen terms it.The process enables the individual "to live a life in a world of objects," all the while being mindful, Winnicott cautions, of the fact that "the price has to be paid in acceptance of the on-going destruction in unconscious fantasy relative to object-relating" (Playing and Reality, Winnicott, 1981, p. 90).
Briefly, the object's survival is the crucial factor in this scenario, since it doesn't retaliate against the subject's destructive fantasies.Concomitantly, the backdrop is provided for the subject's rediscovery of the object as external to, distinct from him/herself, together with a recognition of the destructive nature of its fantasies.This moment is captured by Winnicott in a dramatized form: After "subject relates to object" comes "subject destroys object" (as it becomes external) and then may come "object survives destruction by the subject."But there may or may not be survival.A new feature thus arrives in the theory of object relating.The subject says to the object: "I destroyed you," and the object is there to receive the communication.From now on the subject says: "Hullo object," "I destroyed you.""I love you.""You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you." "While I am loving you, I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy."(Collected Papers, Winnicott, 1988, p. 251) This "I love you" doesn't make up for "I destroy you," but rather "turns the latter to good use" (The Sword of Grace Eigen, 1995, p. 28).
In the Winnicottian scheme of things, this moment represents, in Rudnytsky's words, "a kind of rebirth for the subject in the recognition of the object's reality" (Transitional Objects, Rudnytsky, 1993, p. 251).The object's lack of retaliation, its survival from destructiveness, its being "there to receive the communication" are everything.Because the object can thus "contribute in to the subject, according to its own properties" ( CP Winnicott, 1988, p. 90).It is what enables the object to be used, to be read as sign.

Conclusions
In this article, I have used the theory of Donald Winnicott and the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe to examine how a work of fiction provides a transitional area between writers and readers.A Winnicottian formulation of transitional objects and potential spaces reveals dynamics connected with Poe's concern for coherence, unity-those features of the integrated self that formed his only defense against madness and death.It is, in sum, an expression of Poe's struggle for coherence and purpose.
In his tales, Poe provides his readership with a framed potential space, which might suggest that the feature which wedges trauma narratives within the psychological genre, is that they play out the collapse of psychic defenses or strategies, at the same time bolstering the readership's ability to take control of those very strategies.Poe's tales fill their readers' potential space (thereby occupying it) with marks of their own emptiness, violation or closure.
In conclusion, Winnicott's model of the tolerance for paradox and mirroring offers a new perspective on Poe's pieces of literature and on the fact that ambiguous reference in fiction does not result in its being perceived as meaningless.Rather than considering the reader's acceptance of inconsistency in fiction as being merely the "suspension of his disbelief," to be accounted for by fiction's inconsequentiality, such an attitude should be seen as the manifestation of a fundamental psychological ability to "remain with the paradox and to experience it as meaningful" (Elata & Priel, 2009, p. 39).
By being referential to a world to which it does not refer, fiction sets up the very condition which, according to Winnicott, founds the emergence of the self.Fiction thus may allow readers, in a paradoxical way (by their "non-interfering presence"), to experience the unspeakable as having a voice.