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.