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.
Development
1994
introduced by Thomas H. Ogden
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.
In Subjects of Analysis (1994);The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts (1994)
Relations
- 1994 introduced by Thomas H. Ogden
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.
- 1994 derives from Potential space
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.
- 1994 derives from Projective identification
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.
- 2004 diverged into Thirdness
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.
Works
- 1994
- 1994
The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts
Through two clinical sequences, Ogden illustrates the analyst's effort to recognise, understand and put into words, for himself and for the patient, the moment-to-moment interplay of three subjectivities: the analyst's, the analysand's, and the experience the two create together, which he calls the analytic third. In the first sequence the analyst reaches this jointly created experience partly through what seem to be his own private reveries, states that can look like narcissistic self-absorption, distraction, compulsive rumination or daydreaming. In the second, the analyst's somatic delusion, together with the patient's sensory experiences and bodily fantasies, becomes the principal route by which he comes to understand the leading anxieties being generated between analyst and patient.
- 2004
Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness
In this paper, published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2004, Jessica Benjamin argues that analytic work which takes both participants, analyst and patient, as subjects needs a discipline rooted in the structural conditions of thirdness. She distinguishes two forms of the third. An early form rests on experiences of union and mutual accommodation, which she calls the one in the third. Later moral and symbolic forms introduce difference, which she calls the third in the one. In clinical work, she uses the idea of a third co-created by analyst and patient to explain two things. Impasses and enactments collapse the relationship into the twoness of complementarity, a relation of doer and done to. Recognition is then restored through surrender.
- 2017
Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third
Beyond Doer and Done To is Jessica Benjamin's book-length statement of the theory of mutual recognition she first set out in The Bonds of Love. It gathers and reworks papers written after her 2004 essay of the same name, which opens the book. Its central argument is that recognition between two subjects tends to break down into a complementary relation of "doer and done to", and that thirdness is what restores it. Benjamin traces how the Third develops in early life as experience alternates between recognition and its breakdown: first a rhythmic third of attunement between infant and caregiver, then a moral third of shared values and acknowledgment. She shows the same movement inside the psychoanalytic relationship, where impasse and enactment are its forms. The book stresses the power of acknowledgment, including the analyst's acknowledgment of error, to repair a relationship and to heal both individual and social trauma. It carries the theory from the consulting room to social conflict and the witnessing of collective trauma. After an introduction on recognition, intersubjectivity and the Third, the chapters take up acknowledgment, the failed witness and the fear of harming; mutual recognition, vulnerability and asymmetry; excess, affect and gender complementarity in sexuality; the uses of enactment and play; negation and the lawful world; and the moral Third, with witnessing that goes beyond the logic of "only one can live". The publisher addresses it to psychoanalytic therapists and to theorists in the humanities and social sciences.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Subjects of Analysis1994Evidence for a relation
- The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts1994Evidence for a relation
- Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness2004Evidence for a relation
- Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third2017Evidence for a relation