THE THIRD: AN OVERVIEW
THOMAS H. , M.D.
I have made some progress in becoming clearer with myself about what I mean when
I use the term "the intersubjective analytic third" in the five years since
writing "The Analytic Third-Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts" (Ogden,
1994); in large part through making clinical use of the concept. I shall very
briefly attempt to convey here a part of this enhanced understanding. It seems
to me that I use the term analytic third to refer to a third subject,
unconsciously co-created by analyst and analysand, which seems to take on a life
of its own in the interpersonal field between analyst and patient. This third
subject stands in dialectical tension with the separate, individual
subjectivities of analyst and analysand in such a way that the individual
subjectivities and the third create, negate, and preserve one another. In an
analytic relationship, the notion of individual subjectivity and the idea of a
co-created third subject are devoid of meaning except in relation to one
another, just as the idea of the conscious mind is meaningless except in
relation to the unconscious.
While both analyst and analysand participate in the creation and elaboration of
the unconscious analytic third, they do so asymmetrically. The relationship of
roles of analyst and analysand in an analysis strongly privileges the
exploration of the analysand's unconscious internal object world and forms of
relatedness to external objects. This is a consequence of the fact that the
analytic enterprise is most fundamentally a therapeutic relationship designed to
facilitate the patient's efforts to make psychological changes that will enable
him to live his life in a more fully human way. It is, therefore, the conscious
and unconscious experience of the analysand that is the primary (but not
exclusive) focus of analysis. The analytic third is not only asymmetrical in
terms of the contributions of analyst and analysand to its creation, it is also
asymmetrical in the way it is experienced by analyst and analysand: each
experiences the analytic third in the context of his own separate personality
system, his own particular ways of layering and linking conscious and
unconscious aspects of experience, his own ways of experiencing and integrating
bodily sensations, the unique history and development of his external and
internal object relations, and so on. In short, the analytic third is not a
single event experienced identically by two people; it is an unconscious,
asymmetrical co-creation of analyst and analysand which has a powerful
structuring influence on the analytic relationship.
The term analytic third, as I am using it, should not be equated with Lacan's
(1977) "le nom de pere " (the name of the father) which, as the representative
of law, culture, and language creates a space between mother and infant. For
Lacan, with the introduction of language there is always a third: the chain of
signifiers constituting the language with which we speak that mediates and gives
order to the relationship of the subject to his lived sensory experience and to
his relations with others. (There are, however, a great many ways in which the
unconscious internal object father may play a critical role in the formation and
function of the analytic third as I understand it.)
Neither am I using the term analytic third to denote a normal maturational
progression in which mother and infant, analyst and patient, together create a
third area of experiencing between reality and fantasy. As will be discussed,
the experience of the analytic third at times may overlap with, but is by no
means synonymous with, Winnicott's (1951) notion of a generative potential space
that is created between analyst and analysand when an analysis is going well.
Rather, I view the intersubjective analytic third as an ever-changing
unconscious third subject (more verb than noun) which powerfully contributes to
the structure of the analytic relationship. The analyst's and patient's
experience in and of the analytic third spans the full range of human emotion
and its attendant thoughts, fantasies, bodily sensations, and so on. The task of
the analyst is to create conditions in which the unconscious intersubjective
analytic third (which is always multi-layered and multi-faceted and continually
on the move) might be experienced, attached to words, and eventually spoken
about with the analysand. However, this highly schematic description of the
analysis of the analytic third obscures the enormous difficulty of the task. In
my experience, the analyst's capacity to name and talk to himself about his
experience of the analytic third almost always takes place after-the-fact, that
is, after the analyst unwittingly (and often for a considerable period of time)
has played a role in the specific experiential "shapes" reflecting the nature of
the unconscious analytic third.
The possible experiential shapes (thoughts, feelings, sensations, fantasies,
behaviors, and so on) generated by the influence of the analytic third on the
analytic relationship are endless. For example, the influence of the analytic
third might come to life in the form of an acting-in or an acting-out on the
part of the analyst or the analysand or both; at other times, in the form of a
somatic delusion on the part of the analyst (as in the second clinical example
presented in my 1994 paper); or on still other occasions, almost entirely in the
form of the analyst's reverie experiences (as in the first of the two clinical
illustrations presented in the same 1994 paper).
To make matters even more complex, the analytic third is at first almost
entirely an unconscious phenomenon. Since the unconscious, by definition, cannot
be invaded on the wings of the brute force of will, the analyst and analysand
must use indirect (associational) methods to "catch the drift" (,
1923/1955, p.115) of the unconscious co-creation. For the analyst, this means
relying to a very large degree on "the foul rag-and-bone shop" (Yeats,
1936/1966, p. 336) of his reverie experience (his mundane, everyday thoughts,
feelings, ruminations, preoccupations, daydreams, bodily sensations, and so
forth). The analyst's use of his reverie experience requires tolerance of the
experience of not knowing, of finding himself (or, perhaps more accurately,
losing himself) adrift and apparently directionless. The emotional residue of a
reverie experience is usually, at first, unobtrusive and inarticulate, an
experience that is more a sense of dysphoric emotional disequilibrium than a
sense of having arrived at an understanding. And yet, in my own clinical work,
the use of my reverie experience is the emotional compass upon which I most
heavily rely (but cannot clearly read) in my efforts to orient myself to what is
happening in the analytic relationship in general, and in the workings of the
analytic third in particular.
