THE ANALYTIC THIRD: AN OVERVIEW
THOMAS H. OGDEN, 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" (Freud,
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.
The recognition and subsequent naming of one's experience in and of the analytic
third involves psychological work on the part of the analyst in which he comes
to sense that something is going on which is both created by analyst and
analysand and, simultaneously, in an important sense, is creating the analyst
and analysand at that juncture in the analysis. The work of analyzing the
experience of the analytic third involves gaining a sense of the nature and
history of the unconscious fantasies, anxieties, defenses, and object relations
comprising the third co-created "subject of analysis." While the use of my own
reverie experience is an indispensable aspect of my analytic technique, when I
eventually speak to the patient about what I sense is happening between us, I
speak to the patient from, but infrequently about my reverie experience (or
about other forms of countertransference experience).
In analytic work conducted with a conception of the analytic third as part of
one's theoretical framework, one makes one's way from experiential shapes (such
as a patient's dream, the analyst's reveries, an enactment in which both patient
and analyst have participated) toward an expanded sense of the fundamental
nature of the third, i.e., that which renders "humanly understandable or humanly
ununderstandable" (Jarrell, 1955, p.62) the psychological purposes served by the
experiential shapes that are generated and how (that is, according to what sense
of self and the world) those shapes are linked with one another. Often, in my
experience, the "third subject" is of a subjugating sort which creates the
effect of tyrannically limiting the range of thoughts, feelings, and bodily
sensations "permissible" to both analyst and analysand. Under such
circumstances, neither analyst nor analysand is able to experience himself or
the other in terms outside of a very narrow band of (predominantly irrational)
thoughts and feelings. At other times, the analytic third is of a perverse sort
that has the effect of locking the analyst and patient into a specific,
compulsively repeated perverse scenario. (See Ogden, 1997, for a discussion and
clinical illustration of an analysis dominated by a perverse form of the
analytic third.)
At still other times, the analytic third may be of a powerfully creative and
enriching sort. Such forms of the analytic third are enlivening in the sense
that "shapes" are generated in the analytic relationship (for instance,
interesting, sometimes novel, forms of considering, dreaming, and fantasizing as
well as richer and more fully human qualities of object relatedness marked, for
example, by humor, compassion, playfulness, flirtatiousness, camaraderie, charm,
love, and anger which have "all the sense of real" [Winnicott, 1963, p. 184]).
Some forms of playing in the analytic setting involve an experience of the
analytic third that might be thought of as an experience of the patient and
analyst engaged in playing in the presence of the unconscious (jointly, but
asymmetrically constructed) mother who facilitates the capacity of the child to
be alone in her ("invisible," unobtrusive) presence (Winnicott, 1958). 1 place
emphasis on the words "to be" because it is the experience of coming into being
as an individual with one's own distinct and unique qualities that is of central
importance in the experience of this form of the analytic third. One can see and
feel and hear and smell and touch something like oneself in the activity of
playing. This experience of playful symbol- and metaphormaking allows one to
create symbols which give shapes and emotional substance (sensate "embodiments")
to the self-as-object ("me") which serve as mirrors in which the self-as-subject
("I") recognizes/creates itself. Other forms of playing in the analytic
relationship involve an unconscious experience of the father or the
"father-in-the-mother" (Ogden, 1987) whose protectively watchful eye is felt to
make safe, for example, Oedipal flirtation between analyst and analysand. The
creation of various forms of the analytic third which create and preserve
conditions in which playing might safely occur evolves throughout the course of
every analysis that is "a going concern" (to borrow Winnicott's apt phrase).
Many forms of the analytic third coexist at any moment of an analysis, some of
which are pathological in the sense of limiting the range of human emotion and
depth of object relatedness into which patient and analyst are able to enter. As
analysis progresses, none of these pathological forms of the analytic third is
"conquered" or eliminated any more than transferences are eliminated in the
course of analysis (Loewald, 1960). Rather, as is the case with transferences,
in the course of the analysis of a given form of pathological analytic third,
the capacity of the third to timelessly hold the analytic pair hostage in a
given, unchanging, unconscious form of relatedness (or unrelatedness) is
gradually transmuted into forms of experience of self and other that can be
preconsciously and consciously experienced, verbally symbolized, reflected upon,
spoken about and incorporated into one's larger sense of self (including one's
experience of and understanding of how one has come to be who one is and who one
is becoming).
As I often find true, a poet, in this case A.R. Ammons, is able to convey/create
in words what I can only talk about—"that stolid word about" (James, 1890, p.
246).The experience of engaging in the analysis of the analytic third is
not so much looking for the shape
As being available
To any shape that may be
Summoning itself
Through me
From the self not mine but ours.
(Ammons, "Poetics," 1986, p. 61)
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James, W. (1950). Principles of psychology: Vol. I (P. Smith, Ed.). New York:
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Jarrell, R. (1955). Poetry and the age. New York: Vintage.
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published 1960)
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1951)
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