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.