True/False Selves, Potential Spaces and Holding Environments.

The purpose of my analysis of sampled texts authored by Edgar Allan Poe is to examine the extent to which a fictional work secures a transitional area for writers and readers, which both compels and undoes aesthetic strategies of containment and defense. The relationship between writer and readers will be shown to be negotiated by a text which accommodates a finite shared illusion and shared reality. Donald Winnicott's notions of potential space, transitional phenomena, true/false self, holding environment, along with his views on creativity will be proven to articulate well with Poe's writings, offering a new perspective on the fact that cryptic referentiality does not result in fiction being judged purposeless. In a paradoxical way, fiction may be deemed to allow readers, by their "non-interfering presence", to experience the unutterable as being voiced. Which goes to show that Poe was consistent, throughout his writings, in the attempt at finding that place where "physical philosophy" broke down and the potential space of imagination took over. In literature, various aspects of form and convention perform correspondent tasks as containers: the language and meter for a poem; frame for a painting. Whenever these holding environments are transgressed or they are unstable, vexation and anxiety may ensue. Arguably, Poe provided the readers with a framed potential space, which suggests one trait of trauma narratives as a psychological genre: it can demonstrate the failure of psychic defenses (or strategies) while strengthening its readers' skillfulness in negotiating those strategies. Poe's tales occupy our own potential space (as a result filling it) with manifestations of its own violation, closure, or emptiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]