The Idea of the Third
Initially, the idea of the third passed in to psychoanalysis through Lacan (1975), whose view of intersubjectivity derived from Hegel's theory of recognition and its popularization by the French Hegelian writer Kojève (1969). Lacan, as can best be seen in Book I of his seminars, saw the third as that which keeps the relationship between two persons from collapsing. This collapse can take the form of merger (oneness), eliminating difference, or of a twoness that splits the differences—the polarized opposition of the power struggle. Lacan thought that the intersubjective third was constituted by recognition through speech, which allows a difference of viewpoints and of interests, saving us from the kill-orbe-killed power struggle in which there is only one right way.
In many analytic writings, theory or interpretation is seen as the symbolic father with whom the mother analyst has intercourse (Britton 1988; Feldman 1997). Not only in Lacanian theory, but also in Kleinian, this may lead to a privileging of the analyst's relation to the third as theory and of the analyst's authority as knower (despite Lacan's warning against seeing the analyst as the one supposed to know), as well as to an overemphasis on the oedipal content of the third. Unfortunately, Lacan's oedipal view equated the third with the father (Benjamin 1995b), contending that the father's "no," his prohibition or "castration," constitutes the symbolic third (Lacan 1977). Lacan equated the distinction between thirdness and twoness with the division between a paternal symbolic, or law, and a maternal imaginary. The paternal third in the mother's mind opens up the sane world of symbolic thirdness (Lacan 1977).
I agree that, in some cases, we might speak of someone's letting go and accepting the full blow of the reality that mother has her own desire and has chosen father, and this might indeed constitute one kind of surrender to the third (Kristeva 1987). I respect Britton's (1988, 1998) idea, and its adaptation by Aron (1995), that the triangular relation of a child and two others (not necessarily father and mother) organizes the intersubjective position of one subject who observes the other two in interaction. But unless there is already space in the dyad, unless the third person is also dyadically connected to the child, he cannot function as a true third. He becomes a persecutory invader, rather than a representative of symbolic functioning, as well as a figure of identification and an other whom mother and child both love and share.
The only usable third, by definition, is one that is shared. Thus, I contend that thirdness is not literally instituted by a father (or other) as the third person; it cannot originate in the Freudian oedipal relation in which the father appears as prohibitor and castrator. And, most crucially, the mother or primary parent must create that space by being able to hold in tension her subjectivity/desire/awareness and the needs of the child.
The Problem of Oneness
The issue of maternal subjectivity, as we have known for some time, is relevant to critiquing developmental theories that postulate an initial state of oneness between mother and baby (Benjamin 1995b). A fascinating point can be found in Lacan's (1975) critique of object relations theory. Regarding Balint's idea of primary love, Lacan objected that, if the intersubjective third were not there from the beginning, if the mother–baby couple were simply a relation of oneness, then mother could nurse unstintingly in total identification with baby, but there would then be nothing to stop her, when she was starving, from turning the tables and eating the baby.4 Thus, the child is actually safeguarded by the parental ability to maintain aspects of subjectivity that are crucial to suspending the child's immediate need without obliterating the difference between I and thou. In a related vein, Slochower (1996) argues that we must consciously bear the knowledge of pain in giving over to the patient, who cannot bear our subjectivity.
This ability to maintain internal awareness, to sustain the tension of difference between my needs and yours while still being attuned to you, forms the basis of what I call the moral third or the third in the one. It is analogous to the ability to project the child's future development (in other words, her independence), which Loewald (1951) considers a parental function in his famous paper 4 Shockingly for us today, Lacan (1975) alleged that Alice Balint portrayed certain aborigines as doing just that. on therapeutic action. The sustained tension of difference helps create the symbolic space of thirdness. This third in the one is exemplified by the mother's ability to maintain awareness that the child's distress will pass, alongside her empathy, by holding the tension between identificatory oneness and the observing function. This mental space of thirdness in the caretaker must be, I believe, in some way palpable to the child. As a function, in both its symbolic and soothing aspects, it can be recognized and identified with, then made use of by the child or patient.
I propose that the analyst can only soothe—that is, help regulate—the patient by maintaining this position of thirdness. And if the analyst does not eventually convey the third in the one to the patient, if she gives from a position of pure complementarity (the one who knows, heals, remains in charge), the patient will feel that because of what the analyst has given him, the analyst owns him; in other words, the analyst can eat him in return. Further, the patient has nothing to give back, no impact or insight that will change the analyst. The patient will feel he must suppress his differences, spare the analyst, participate in pseudomutuality or react with envious defiance of the analyst's power.
The flip side of this absence of thirdness is that the analyst, like a mother, may feel that her separate aims, her being a person with her own needs, will kill the patient. She then cannot distinguish between when she is holding the frame in a way that is conducive to the patient's growth and when she is being hurtful to the patient. How can she then bear in mind the patient's need to safely depend on her, and yet extricate herself from feeling that she must choose between the patient's needs and her own? Such a conflict may occur when an anxious patient repeatedly calls on weekends, or when the analyst goes away.
Let me illustrate the dynamic that is instituted when the patient's world is organized by the choice between submitting to being eaten or murdering the other. Rob, a patient in his forties, grew up as his mother's favorite, the one who existed to fulfill her expectations, her perfectionist demands, her unfulfilled ambition—in short, to live for her desire. Rob married a woman who is committed to being a perfect, self-sacrificing mother, but who refuses sex; thus, Rob can never fulfill his own desire as a separate person, nor can the couple come together as two bodies in the oneness of attunement.
Rob forms a deeply passionate attachment to a woman at his work, and while considering leaving his wife, takes his own apartment. But his wife demands that he swear on the Bible that he will not contact this woman for six weeks while he is considering the situation; otherwise, she will never take him back. Rob has submitted to this demand, but is confused. In effect, he does not know a real third and cannot distinguish a moral principle from a power move. He feels bound to his promise, but also coerced and frightened of losing his wife or his lover. He tells his analyst he feels suicidal.
At this juncture, Rob's analyst, a candidate in supervision, is gripped with terrible urgency as well, feeling that she must protect and save her patient. But she is about to leave for a longplanned week's vacation and finds herself fearing that her leaving might kill the patient. Separation means murder. She feels divided: coerced, but bound to her patient, deeply concerned and afraid to leave, but aware she is caught in an enactment. She cannot get to that feeling of the mother who knows her baby's distress will pass. She wants to be the good mother, available and healing, but can find no way to do this without complying in some way with Rob's notion that he can only stand alone by abjuring all dependency. She will be coerced by Rob as he is by his wife.
Patient and analyst are thus replaying the relationship in which the child must submit to the mother who devours; the mother who leaves destroys the child. The third here is perverted, turned from a commitment to truth or freely agreed-upon principle— e.g., "We need to give our marriage a chance"—to a promise extracted, "Give in to me or else." The wife threatens the patient that he will go to hell for leaving her, thus giving expression to a moral world in which goodness/God is opposed to freedom, where freedom is only possible in a world of moral chaos ruled by the devil. The perversion of the moral third accompanies the kill-or-be-killed complementarity and marks the absence of recognition of the other's separateness, the space that permits desire, the acceptance of loss.
In consultation, the analyst realizes she must bear her guilt for wanting to be separate and to have her own life, just as the patient must bear his. She has to find a way to distinguish between her deep empathy with the patient's fear of abandonment, on the one hand, and submission to him in his urgent, extracting behavior, his demand that she give her life, on the other. In the observational position provided by supervision, it becomes clearer how the interaction is informed by the belief that separating and having one's own independent subjectivity and desire are tantamount to killing, while staying means letting oneself be killed.
The analyst is inspired in the following hour to find a way to talk to Rob about how she has to bear the guilt of leaving him, as he must bear his own guilt. This dispels the sense of do-or-die urgency in the session, the intense twoness in which someone must do wrong, or hurt or destroy the other.
The One in the Third
One of the important questions I want to address here is how we think about the way human beings actually develop this symbolic third. Here I part company with Lacan (1975). The deeper problem with the oedipal view of the father as representative of the third (a concept both Lacanian and Kleinian) is that it misses the early origins of the third in the maternal dyad. Lacan tells us that the thirdness of speech is an antidote to murder, to "your reality" versus "my reality," but his idea of speech misses the first part of the conversation. This is the part that baby watchers have made an indelible part of our thinking. In my view of thirdness, recognition is not first constituted by verbal speech; rather, it begins with the early nonverbal experience of sharing a pattern, a dance, with another person. I (Benjamin 2002) have therefore proposed a nascent or energetic third—as distinct from the one in the mother's mind—present in the earliest exchange of gestures between mother and child, in the relationship that has been called oneness. I consider this early exchange to be a form of thirdness, and suggest that we call the principle of affective resonance or union that underlies it the one in the third—literally, the part of the third that is constituted by oneness.
For the symbolic third to actually work as a true third—rather than as a set of perverse or persecutory demands, as we saw in the case of Rob—requires integration of the capacity for accommodation to a mutually created set of expectations. The primal form this accommodation assumes is the creation of, alignment with, and repair of patterns, the participation in connections based on affect resonance. Sander (2002), in his discussion of infancy research, calls this resonance rhythmicity, which he considers one of the two fundamental principles of all human interaction (the other being specificity). Rhythmic experiences help constitute the capacity for thirdness, and rhythmicity may be seen as a model principle underlying the creation of shared patterns. Rhythm constitutes the basis for coherence in interaction between persons, as well as coordination between the internal parts of the organism.
Sander (2002) illustrated the value of specific recognition and of accommodation by studying how neonates who were fed on demand adapted more rapidly to the circadian rhythm than those fed on schedule. When the significant other is a recognizing one who surrenders to the rhythm of the baby, a co-created rhythm can begin to evolve. As the caregiver accommodates, so does the baby. The basis for this mutual accommodation is probably the inbuilt tendency to respond symmetrically, to match and mirror; in effect, the baby matches the mother's matching, much as one person's letting go releases the other.
This might be seen as the beginning of interaction in accord with the principle of mutual accommodation, which entails not imitation, but a hard-wired pull to get the two organisms into alignment, to mirror, match, or be in synch. Sander's study showed that once such a coherent, dyadic system gets going, it seems to move naturally in the direction of orienting to a deeper law of reality—in this case, the law of night and day. In using this notion of lawfulness, I am trying to capture, at least metaphorically, the harmonic or musical dimension of the third in its transpersonal or energetic aspect (Knoblauch 2000).
Again, this aspect of lawfulness was missed by oedipal theory, which privileges law as boundary, prohibition, and separation, thus frequently missing the element of symmetry or harmony in lawfulness. Such theorizing fails to grasp the origins of the third in the nascent or primordial experience that has been called oneness, union, resonance. We might think of this latter concept as the energetic third. Research on mother–infant face-to-face play (Beebe and Lachmann 1994) shows how the adult and the infant align with a third, establishing a co-created rhythm that is not reducible to a model of action-reaction, with one active and the other passive or one leading and the other following. Action-reaction characterizes our experience of complementary twoness, the one-way direction; by contrast, a shared third is experienced as a cooperative endeavor.
As I have stated previously (Benjamin 1999, 2002), the thirdness of attuned play resembles musical improvisation, in which both partners follow a structure or pattern that both of them simultaneously create and surrender to, a structure enhanced by our capacity to receive and transmit at the same time in nonverbal interaction. The co-created third has the transitional quality of being both invented and discovered. To the question of "Who created this pattern, you or I?," the paradoxical answer is "Both and neither."
I suggest that, as with early rhythms of sleeping and nursing, it is initially the adult's accommodation that permits the creation of an organized system with a rhythm of its own, marked by a quality of lawfulness and attunement to some deeper structure— "the groove." In "intersubjectivity proper," that is, by the age of ten months, the partners' alignment—as Stern (1985) proposed —-becomes a "direct subject in its own right" (Beebe et al., in press). In other words, the quality of our mutual recognition, our thirdness, becomes the source of pleasure or despair. The basis for appreciating this intention to align and to accommodate may lie in our "mirror-neurons." Beebe and Lachmann (1994, 2002) have described how, in performing the actions of the other, we replicate their intentions within ourselves—thus, in the deepest sense, we learn to accommodate to accommodation itself (we fall in love with love).
The Shared Third
If we grasp the creation of thirdness as an intersubjective process that is constituted in early, presymbolic experiences of accommodation, mutuality, and the intention to recognize and be recognized by the other, we can understand how important it is to think in terms of building a shared third. In shifting to an intersubjective concept of the third, we ground a very different view of the clinical process from the one espoused by those who use the concept of the third to refer to observing capacities and the analyst's relation to his own theory or thinking.
Contemporary Kleinians view the third as an oedipal construct, an observing function, conceiving the analyst's third as a relation to theory rather than a shared, co-created experience with the patient. Britton (1988, 1998) theorized the third in terms of the oedipal link between the parents, explaining that the patient has difficulty tolerating the third as an observational stance taken by the analyst because theory represents the father in the analyst's mind. The father, with whom the analyst is mentally conversing—actually having intercourse—intrudes on an already shaky mother–child dyad. Indeed, one patient yelled at Britton, "Stop that fucking thinking!"
In discussing Britton's approach, Aron (Aron and Benjamin 1999) pointed out that his description of how he worked with the patient shows a modulation of responses, an attunement that accords with the notion of creating the one in the third. The safe shelter that Britton (1998) thinks the patient must find in the analyst's mind may rely on the analyst's observing third, the third in the one, but is experienced by the patient as the accommodating asymmetry of the mother with her baby, the one in the third.
In seeing the third primarily as an intersubjective co-creation, the analyst offers an alternative to the asymmetrical complementarity of knower and known, giver and given to. By contrast, when the analyst sees the third as something the analyst relates to internally, the central couple may become the one the patient is excluded from, rather than the one that analyst and patient build together. I suggest that there is an iatrogenic component to the view of the third as something the patient attacks because she feels excluded. It inheres in the view of the third as the other person—although I take Britton's point that because of the lack of a good maternal container, the analyst's relation to an other may symbolize, or may even feel like, a threat to the patient's connection.
But I think that, most frequently, the other with whom the analyst may be conversing is another part of the patient, the co-parent of the child patient (Pizer 2002)—the part that has often collaborated and joined the analyst and his thinking. As the more traumatized, abandoned, or hated parts of the self arise, this collaborator is experienced by the betrayed child as a sellout, a "good-girl" or "good-boy" false self, who must be repudiated, along with the analyst whom the patient loves.
An Example from the Literature
The effects of the usage of the third as an observing function from which the patient feels excluded, and therefore attacks, are especially well illustrated in a description of impasse by Feldman (1993). He described a case in which the patient was speaking of an incident from childhood in which he had bought his mother a tub of ice cream for her birthday, choosing his own favorite flavor:
When he offered it to her, she said she supposed he expected her to give him some of it. He saw it as an example of the way she never wholeheartedly welcomed what he did for her and always distrusted his motives. [p. 321]
Feldman apparently did not investigate what might have caused the patient to repeat a story that implied his mother "habitually responded ... without thinking, and without giving any space to what he himself was thinking or feeling" (p. 323, italics in original). Feldman argued that the patient's motive was to regain reassurance, to reestablish his psychic equilibrium, and that, when he failed to receive reassurance, the patient needed to emphasize how hurtful the episode had been. Feldman noted that the patient withdrew, feeling hurt and angry. I would speculate that the patient was trying to communicate something that the analyst had missed in assuming that he already understood.
What the analyst understood and proposed to the patient was that the patient could not tolerate the mother's having her own independent observations (much as he, the analyst, felt not allowed to have them; note the mirror effect here). The mother was instead thinking about her son in her own way by using her connection to an internal third. Feldman maintained that he neither "fit in with" nor criticized the patient, but rather showed that he had been able to maintain, under pressure, his own capacity for observing and his way of thinking, and this, he believed, was primarily what disturbed the patient. The patient had "sometimes been able to acknowledge he hates being aware that I am thinking for myself" (p. 324). As is symptomatic of complementary breakdown, Feldman found himself unable to maintain his own thinking except by resisting "the pressure to enact a benign tolerant relationship" (p.325) or to otherwise fit in.
It is notable that Feldman was insightful in recognizing that insisting on "the version of his own role that the analyst finds reassuring may put pressure on the patient to accept a view of himself that he finds intolerable" (p. 326). Feldman accurately described the impasse in which the patient was "then driven to redress the situation" (p. 326) and assert counterpressure.5 What he did not recognize was how his view of the third—in my terms, a third without the one—contributed to this enactment. His case narrative demonstrates that thirdness cannot reside simply in the analyst's independent observation, nor can it be maintained in a posture of resisting the patient's pressure. In effect, this is an illustration of the complementary situation, in which the analyst's resistance—his effort to maintain internal, theoretically informed observation, as though that were sufficient to make a third—led to the breakdown of the intersubjective thirdness between analyst and patient.
My way of analyzing this case would be rather different than Feldman's, by which I do not mean that in the live moment, I might not feel something like the pressure and resistance that he felt, but rather, that I would see the situation differently in retrospective self-supervision. The patient, in response to Feldman's prioritization of "observing" or "thinking," insisted that the analyst was behaving like his mother; in other words, he correctly read Feldman's refusal to mold, to accommodate, to show understanding and give space to what he himself was feeling. The ice cream was a metaphor for the intersubjective third, part of the patient's effort to communicate about what he wanted in treatment—and had wanted in childhood—to share. The mother (or analyst) was unable to see the ice cream as a shareable entity—in her mental world, everything was either for her child or for herself; it was not a gift if it was shared, but was so only if it were relinquished.
How might this dynamic have affected the mother's envy and sense of depletion each time she gave to the patient? How much could she have enjoyed sharing anything with her child? In a world without shared thirds, without a space of collaboration and sharing, everything is mine or yours, including the perception of reality. Only one person can eat; only one person can be right.
The analytic task in such a case is to help the patient create (or repair) a system of sharing and mutuality, in which now you have a bite, now I have one, as when you eat a cracker with your toddler. The toddler may have to insist at times on "all mine," but the delight of letting Mommy take a bite, or letting her pretend to, as well as of playfully pulling the cracker away, is often an even greater pleasure. Feldman's patient was trying to tell him that in their co-created system, the third was a negative one; there was no intersubjective thirdness in which they could both eat, taste, and spit out together.
In my understanding of complementarities, if the analyst feels compelled to protect his internal, observing third from the patient's reality, this generally is a sign of a breakdown already occurring in the system of collaborative understanding and attunement. The analyst needs the third in the one—that is, to maintain independent thinking, but this cannot be achieved by, in effect, "refusing to fit in." In order to receive the patient's intention and to reestablish shared reality, the analyst needs to find a way to fit, to accommodate, that does not feel coercive—the one in the third. The clinical emphasis on building the shared third is, in my view, a useful antidote to earlier, often persecutory idealizations of interpretation—even those modified ones, such as Steiner's (1993) position, which recognizes the necessity of the analyst's accommodation to the patient's need to feel understood, yet considers it less essential for psychic change than acquiring understanding.
Rather than viewing understanding—that is, the third—as a thing to be acquired, a relational view sees it as an interactive process that creates a dialogic structure: a shared third, an opportunity to experience mutual recognition. This shared third, the dialogue, creates mental space for thinking as an internal conversation with the other (Spezzano 1996).
Integration: The Third in the One or the Moral Third
To construct the idea of the shared, intersubjective third, I have brought together two experiences of thirdness, the third in the one and the one in the third. I now want to suggest briefly how we can understand these in terms of what we have observed developmentally in the parent–child relation. We need to distinguish the rhythmic third in the one, the principle of accommodation, from the third in the mother's mind, which is more like the principle of differentiation.
I have suggested that, while it is crucial for the mother to identify with the baby's need—for instance, in adjusting the feeding rhythm—there is the inevitable moment when twoness arises in the form of the mother's need for sleep, for the claims of her own separate existence. For many a mother, this is experienced as the moment of truth, rather like Lacan's kill-or-be-killed moment. Here the function of the third is to help transcend twoness not by self-abnegation, not by fostering the illusion that mother and baby are one; rather, at this point, the principle of asymmetrical accommodation should arise from the sense of surrender to necessity, rather than from submission to another person's tyrannical demand or an overwhelming task.
A mother's pride in how overworked and self-denying she is undermines knowledge of her own limits and the ability to distinguish necessary asymmetry from masochism. Likewise, the mother needs to hold in mind the knowledge that much infant distress is natural and ephemeral, in order for her to be able to soothe her child's distress without dissolving into anxious oneness with it.
An important contribution of infancy research, as Fonagy et al. (2002) have emphasized, is an explanation of how the mother can demonstrate her empathy for the baby's negative emotion, and yet by a "marker"—exaggerated mirroring—make clear to the baby that it is not her own fear or distress. Fonagy et al. argue that mothers are driven to saliently mark their affect-mirroring displays to differentiate them from realistic emotional expressions. The baby is soothed by the fact that mother is not herself distressed, but is reflecting and understanding his feeling. This behavior, the contrast between the mother's gesture and her affective tension level, is perceived by the child. I would argue that this constitutes a protosymbolic communication and forms an important basis for symbolic capacities.
Such an incipient differentiation between the gestural representation and the thing/feeling initiates the symbolic third. It is inherently reflexive, relying on the mother's third—her ability to distinguish her distress from her child's and to represent this as a necessity rather than an urgency in her mind. It is the place where self-regulation and mutual regulation meet, enabling differentiation with empathy, rather than projective confusion. Thus, we see the synergy of the attunement function, the one in the third, with the differentiating, containing function, the third in the one. The mother needs to experience the third in the one, and not just relate to a simple, moral third, because the third degenerates into mere duty if there is no identificatory oneness of feeling the child's urgency and relief, pleasure and joy in connection.
Let me give an example written by someone who was himself a parent and was writing about a parental experience, which is an important point, but even more important to me personally, it was written by Stephen Mitchell, whose subsequent death was a great loss. It represents a statement by a founding relational theorist about the importance of the principle of accommodation to the other's rhythm in creating a shared third. Mitchell (1993) underscored the distinction between submission to duty and surrender to the third, what I am calling the third in the one:
When my older daughter was about two or so, I remember my excitement at the prospect of taking walks with her, given her new ambulatory skills and her intense interest in being outdoors. However, I soon found these walks agonizingly slow. My idea of a walk entailed brisk movement along a road or path. Her idea was quite different. The implications of this difference hit me one day when we encountered a fallen tree on the side of the road.… The rest of the "walk" was spent exploring the fungal and insect life on, under, and around the tree. I remember my sudden realization that these walks would be no fun for me, merely a parental duty, if I held onto my idea of walks. As I was able to give that up and surrender to my daughter's rhythm and focus, a different type of experience opened up to me.… If I had simply restrained my- self out of duty, I would have experienced the walk as a compliance. But I was able to become my daughter's version of a good companion and to find in that another way for me to be that took on great personal meaning for me. [p. 147]
The parent thus accepts the principle of necessary asymmetry, accommodating to the other as a way of generating thirdness, and is transformed by the experience of opening to mutual pleasure. Mitchell asked how we distinguish inauthentic submission to another's demand from authentic change, another way of questioning how we distinguish the compliance of twoness from the transformational learning of thirdness. To me, it seems clear that in this case, the internal parental third, which takes the form of reflections on what will create connection in this relationship, allows surrender and transformation. This intention to connect and the resulting self-observation create what I would call moral thirdness, the connection to a larger principle of necessity, rightness, or goodness.
It would be simple (and not untrue) to say that the space of thirdness opens up through surrender, the acceptance of being, stopping to watch the fungi grow. But I have been trying to show how important it is to distinguish this from submission—to clear up a common confusion between surrender and an ideal of pure empathy, whereby merger or oneness can tend toward inauthenticity and the denial of self, leading ultimately to the complementary alternative of "eat or be eaten." For instance, Teicholz (2001) argued that the analyst's authenticity—which she misconstrues as the relational analyst's demand for the patient's recognition of his subjectivity—is opposed to empathy. This opposition of empathy and authenticity splits oneness and thirdness, identification and differentiation, and constitutes the analytic dyad as a complementarity in which there is room for only one subject (Aron 2001).
I have found that analysts who have worked deeply with patients in a style that emphasizes empathic attunement frequently come for help with stalemates based on the exclusion of the observing third, which now appears as a destructive outside force, a killer that threatens the treatment. This issue is crucial because submission to the persecutory ideal of being an all-giving, all-understanding mother can gradually shift into an experience of losing empathy, of exhaustion. As one supervisee put it, she began to feel so immobilized that she imagined herself cocooned in a condom-like sheath, "shrink-wrapped."
The work necessary here is not that the analyst demand that the patient recognize the analyst's subjectivity—a misunderstanding of the relational position on intersubjectivity (Orange 2002; Teicholz 2001)—but that the analyst learn to distinguish true thirdness from the self-immolating ideal of oneness that the analyst suffers as a persecutory third, blocking real self-observation. The analyst needs to work through her fear of blame, badness, and hurtfulness, which is tying both the patient and herself in knots.
As a supervisor, I often find myself helping the analyst create a space in which it is possible to accept the inevitability of causing or suffering pain, being "bad," without destroying the third. I observe how both members of the dyad become involved in a symmetrical dance, each trying not to be the bad one, the one who eats rather than being eaten. Yet whichever side the analyst takes in this dance, taking sides itself simply perpetuates complementary relations.
The concept of thirdness that joins the one and the third aims to distinguish compliance born of this dance from the acceptance of necessary asymmetry (Aron 1996). However, such necessary asymmetry does not imply a view of the maternal bond as involving only one-way recognition of the child's subjectivity by the parent. Such a view is incompatible with an intersubjective theory of development, which recognizes the joys and the necessity of reaching mutual understanding with the other. One-way recognition misses the mutuality of identification by which an other's intention is known to us. To separate or oppose being understood from self-reflective understanding or understanding the other misses the process of creating a shared third as a vehicle of mutual understanding.
My contention is, then, that we need the third in the one, that is, that oneness is dangerous without the third—but it does not work properly without the flip side, the one in the third. We (Aron and Benjamin 1999) have talked about the need for a deep identificatory one in the third as a prerequisite for developing the positive aspects of the observing third. Without this identificatory underpinning, without the nascent thirdness of emotional attunement, the more elaborate forms of self-observation based on triangular relations become mere simulacrum of the third. In other words, if the patient does not feel safely taken into the analyst's mind, the observing position of the third is experienced as a barrier to getting in, leading to compliance, hopeless dejection, or hurt anger. As Schore (2003) has proposed, we might think of this in terms of brain hemispheres: the analyst's shutting down the right-brain contact with her own pain also cuts off affective communication with the patient's pain. Moving dissociatively into a left-brain modality of observation and judgment, the analyst "switches off" and is reduced to interpreting "resistance" (Spezzano 1993).
Typically, observing thirds that lack the music of the one in the third, of reciprocal identification, cannot create enough symmetry or equality to prevent idealization from deteriorating into submission to a person or ideal (Benjamin 1995c). Such submission may be countered by defiance and self-destructive acts. Analysts in the past were particularly prone to conflating compliant submission on the patient's part with self-observation or achievement of insight and defiance with resistance. One of the most common difficulties in all psychotherapeutic encounters is that the patient can feel "done to" by the therapist's observation or interpretation; such interventions trigger self-blame and shame, which used to be called by the misnomer "resistance" (although they may indeed reflect intersubjective resistance to the analyst's projection of her shame or guilt at hurting the patient). In other words, without compassionate acceptance, which the patient may have seldom experienced and never have internalized (as opposed to what ought to be), observation becomes judgment.
Analysts, of course, turn this same beam of critical scrutiny on themselves, and what should be a self-reflexive function turns into the self-flagellating, "bad-analyst" feeling. They fantasize, in effect, being shamed and blamed in front of their colleagues; the community and its ideals become persecutory rather than supportive.www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
