Concept
Thirdness
Jessica Benjamin's concept, set out in 2004, of a position or function two people share that lets each hold their own perspective and the other's at once, beyond the either-or of complementarity. It is not a thing or a third person but a principle the partners surrender to together. She traces two forms: an early, rhythmic third, the one in the third, built in the attuned exchanges of infant and caregiver and later in the shared rhythms of a session; and a later, differentiating third, the third in the one, including the moral third of shared values and acknowledgment, which makes room for difference within union. She set it apart from Thomas Ogden's analytic third, and especially from his subjugating third, as a position held by keeping the tension between sameness and difference.
Development
2004
introduced by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin set out her theory of thirdness in the 2004 paper, distinguishing the early one in the third from the later third in the one. The 2017 book develops the rhythmic and moral thirds.
In Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness (2004);Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2017)
Relations
- 2004 introduced by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin set out her theory of thirdness in the 2004 paper, distinguishing the early one in the third from the later third in the one. The 2017 book develops the rhythmic and moral thirds.
- 2004 diverges from Analytic third
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.
- 2004 opposed by Doer and done to
In Benjamin's account the complementary twoness of doer and done to is what thirdness is lost to: when the shared third collapses, each partner feels done to by the other, and surrender to the third restores recognition.
- derives from Mutual recognition
Benjamin's thirdness grew out of her earlier theory of mutual recognition: the third is the shared space or principle that makes recognition between two subjects possible, as the subtitle of her 2017 book on recognition theory and the third reflects.
Works
- 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
People
References
- 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