{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03550295857988166, 'fraction_numerical': 0.023668639053254437, 'mean_word_length': 5.313432835820896, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
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.”