Concept
Analytic third
Thomas Ogden's term, from 1994, for a third subjectivity that the analyst and analysand create together in the analytic setting. It is unconscious, co-created, and experienced differently by each participant. Ogden held that the analyst gains access to it chiefly through reverie: their own apparently idle thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations during the session, which he treated as clinical facts about the analytic relationship rather than as private distraction. He called the form it takes in projective identification the subjugating third, in which both participants are partly subsumed and then, if analysis succeeds, recover their separate subjectivities in altered form.
- Broader concept
- Countertransference
- Introduced by
- Thomas H. Ogden
- Key works
- 4
introduced by
- Thomas H. Ogden 1994 Ogden set out the concept in his 1994 paper and in the same year's book Subjects of Analysis, where a further chapter describes the subjugating third of projective identification.
derives from
- Potential space 1994 Ogden modelled the analytic third on Winnicott's idea that there is no infant apart from the mother-infant unit, and on the intermediate area that unit creates.
- Projective identification 1994 Ogden recast projective identification as a form of the analytic third, the subjugating third, in which the separate subjectivities of analyst and patient are partly subsumed and then reclaimed.
diverged into
- Thirdness 2004 Benjamin's thirdness builds on Ogden's analytic third but sets itself apart from it. She treats the third not as a thing co-created between analyst and patient, still less a subjugating one, but as a principle or function of surrender to a shared reality that both can recognise.