Between Meaning and Meanings, Between Motive and Motivation

On One Possible Aspect of the Relations between Literature and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This is an attempt to think of poetry as a version of the Winnicottian transitional object. Poetry emerges in the space between the individual and the other. The fact of its being composed out of words does not necessarily suggest a typical act of symbolization, pointing rather at a thing-made-up-from-words. This verbal object carries the marks or scars of the history of relations between the author and their significant others. The poem, therefore, rather than being an object of meaning is an object of meaningfulness. The poem’s content (or meaning) is also located outside its boundaries, in a conversation between the poet and her significant others (object relations).