The Idea of the Third
Initially, the idea of the third passed in to psychoanalysis through Lacan (1975), whose view of intersubjectivity derived from Hegel's theory of recognition and its popularization by the French Hegelian writer Kojève (1969). Lacan, as can best be seen in Book I of his seminars, saw the third as that which keeps the relationship between two persons from collapsing. This collapse can take the form of merger (oneness), eliminating difference, or of a twoness that splits the differences—the polarized opposition of the power struggle. Lacan thought that the intersubjective third was constituted by recognition through speech, which allows a difference of viewpoints and of interests, saving us from the kill-orbe-killed power struggle in which there is only one right way.
In many analytic writings, theory or interpretation is seen as the symbolic father with whom the mother analyst has intercourse (Britton 1988; Feldman 1997). Not only in Lacanian theory, but also in Kleinian, this may lead to a privileging of the analyst's relation to the third as theory and of the analyst's authority as knower (despite Lacan's warning against seeing the analyst as the one supposed to know), as well as to an overemphasis on the oedipal content of the third. Unfortunately, Lacan's oedipal view equated the third with the father (Benjamin 1995b), contending that the father's "no," his prohibition or "castration," constitutes the symbolic third (Lacan 1977). Lacan equated the distinction between thirdness and twoness with the division between a paternal symbolic, or law, and a maternal imaginary. The paternal third in the mother's mind opens up the sane world of symbolic thirdness (Lacan 1977).
I agree that, in some cases, we might speak of someone's letting go and accepting the full blow of the reality that mother has her own desire and has chosen father, and this might indeed constitute one kind of surrender to the third (Kristeva 1987). I respect Britton's (1988, 1998) idea, and its adaptation by Aron (1995), that the triangular relation of a child and two others (not necessarily father and mother) organizes the intersubjective position of one subject who observes the other two in interaction. But unless there is already space in the dyad, unless the third person is also dyadically connected to the child, he cannot function as a true third. He becomes a persecutory invader, rather than a representative of symbolic functioning, as well as a figure of identification and an other whom mother and child both love and share.
The only usable third, by definition, is one that is shared. Thus, I contend that thirdness is not literally instituted by a father (or other) as the third person; it cannot originate in the Freudian oedipal relation in which the father appears as prohibitor and castrator. And, most crucially, the mother or primary parent must create that space by being able to hold in tension her subjectivity/desire/awareness and the needs of the child.
The Problem of Oneness
The issue of maternal subjectivity, as we have known for some time, is relevant to critiquing developmental theories that postulate an initial state of oneness between mother and baby (Benjamin 1995b). A fascinating point can be found in Lacan's (1975) critique of object relations theory. Regarding Balint's idea of primary love, Lacan objected that, if the intersubjective third were not there from the beginning, if the mother–baby couple were simply a relation of oneness, then mother could nurse unstintingly in total identification with baby, but there would then be nothing to stop her, when she was starving, from turning the tables and eating the baby.4 Thus, the child is actually safeguarded by the parental ability to maintain aspects of subjectivity that are crucial to suspending the child's immediate need without obliterating the difference between I and thou. In a related vein, Slochower (1996) argues that we must consciously bear the knowledge of pain in giving over to the patient, who cannot bear our subjectivity.
empathy, by holding the tension between identificatory oneness and the observing function. This mental space of thirdness in the caretaker must be, I believe, in some way palpable to the child. As a function, in both its symbolic and soothing aspects, it can be recognized and identified with, then made use of by the child or patient.
This ability to maintain internal awareness, to sustain the tension of difference between my needs and yours while still being attuned to you, forms the basis of what I call the moral third or the third in the one. It is analogous to the ability to project the child's future development (in other words, her independence), which Loewald (1951) considers a parental function in his famous paper 4 Shockingly for us today, Lacan (1975) alleged that Alice Balint portrayed certain aborigines as doing just that. on therapeutic action. The sustained tension of difference helps create the symbolic space of thirdness. This third in the one is exemplified by the mother's ability to maintain awareness that the child's distress will pass, alongside herI propose that the analyst can only soothe—that is, help regulate—the patient by maintaining this position of thirdness. And if the analyst does not eventually convey the third in the one to the patient, if she gives from a position of pure complementarity (the one who knows, heals, remains in charge), the patient will feel that because of what the analyst has given him, the analyst owns him; in other words, the analyst can eat him in return. Further, the patient has nothing to give back, no impact or insight that will change the analyst. The patient will feel he must suppress his differences, spare the analyst, participate in pseudomutuality or react with envious defiance of the analyst's power.
The flip side of this absence of thirdness is that the analyst, like a mother, may feel that her separate aims, her being a person with her own needs, will kill the patient. She then cannot distinguish between when she is holding the frame in a way that is conducive to the patient's growth and when she is being hurtful to the patient. How can she then bear in mind the patient's need to safely depend on her, and yet extricate herself from feeling that she must choose between the patient's needs and her own? Such a conflict may occur when an anxious patient repeatedly calls on weekends, or when the analyst goes away.
Let me illustrate the dynamic that is instituted when the patient's world is organized by the choice between submitting to being eaten or murdering the other. Rob, a patient in his forties, grew up as his mother's favorite, the one who existed to fulfill her expectations, her perfectionist demands, her unfulfilled ambition—in short, to live for her desire. Rob married a woman who is committed to being a perfect, self-sacrificing mother, but who refuses sex; thus, Rob can never fulfill his own desire as a separate person, nor can the couple come together as two bodies in the oneness of attunement.
Rob forms a deeply passionate attachment to a woman at his work, and while considering leaving his wife, takes his own apartment. But his wife demands that he swear on the Bible that he will not contact this woman for six weeks while he is considering the situation; otherwise, she will never take him back. Rob has submitted to this demand, but is confused. In effect, he does not know a real third and cannot distinguish a moral principle from a power move. He feels bound to his promise, but also coerced and frightened of losing his wife or his lover. He tells his analyst he feels suicidal.
At this juncture, Rob's analyst, a candidate in supervision, is gripped with terrible urgency as well, feeling that she must protect and save her patient. But she is about to leave for a longplanned week's vacation and finds herself fearing that her leaving might kill the patient. Separation means murder. She feels divided: coerced, but bound to her patient, deeply concerned and afraid to leave, but aware she is caught in an enactment. She cannot get to that feeling of the mother who knows her baby's distress will pass. She wants to be the good mother, available and healing, but can find no way to do this without complying in some way with Rob's notion that he can only stand alone by abjuring all dependency. She will be coerced by Rob as he is by his wife.
Patient and analyst are thus replaying the relationship in which the child must submit to the mother who devours; the mother who leaves destroys the child. The third here is perverted, turned from a commitment to truth or freely agreed-upon principle— e.g., "We need to give our marriage a chance"—to a promise extracted, "Give in to me or else." The wife threatens the patient that he will go to hell for leaving her, thus giving expression to a moral world in which goodness/God is opposed to freedom, where freedom is only possible in a world of moral chaos ruled by the devil. The perversion of the moral third accompanies the kill-or-be-killed complementarity and marks the absence of recognition of the other's separateness, the space that permits desire, the acceptance of loss.
In consultation, the analyst realizes she must bear her guilt for wanting to be separate and to have her own life, just as the patient must bear his. She has to find a way to distinguish between her deep empathy with the patient's fear of abandonment, on the one hand, and submission to him in his urgent, extracting behavior, his demand that she give her life, on the other. In the observational position provided by supervision, it becomes clearer how the interaction is informed by the belief that separating and having one's own independent subjectivity and desire are tantamount to killing, while staying means letting oneself be killed.
The analyst is inspired in the following hour to find a way to talk to Rob about how she has to bear the guilt of leaving him, as he must bear his own guilt. This dispels the sense of do-or-die urgency in the session, the intense twoness in which someone must do wrong, or hurt or destroy the other.
The One in the Third
One of the important questions I want to address here is how we think about the way human beings actually develop this symbolic third. Here I part company with Lacan (1975). The deeper problem with the oedipal view of the father as representative of the third (a concept both Lacanian and Kleinian) is that it misses the early origins of the third in the maternal dyad. Lacan tells us that the thirdness of speech is an antidote to murder, to "your reality" versus "my reality," but his idea of speech misses the first part of the conversation. This is the part that baby watchers have made an indelible part of our thinking. In my view of thirdness, recognition is not first constituted by verbal speech; rather, it begins with the early nonverbal experience of sharing a pattern, a dance, with another person. I (Benjamin 2002) have therefore proposed a nascent or energetic third—as distinct from the one in the mother's mind—present in the earliest exchange of gestures between mother and child, in the relationship that has been called oneness. I consider this early exchange to be a form of thirdness, and suggest that we call the principle of affective resonance or union that underlies it the one in the third—literally, the part of the third that is constituted by oneness.