The origins and destinies of the idea of thirdness in contemporary psychoanalysis

Abstract

The central aim that animates this paper is to present and discuss the idea of thirdness or analytic third in psychoanalysis, from its origins to the concepts formulated by André Green and Thomas Ogden. The contributions of Winnicott, Reik and the Baranger couple are discussed, as are their influences to contemporary psychoanalysis. In order to promote the clarification and to distinguish different psychoanalytic conceptions of the third, ten figures referring to the meaning of thirdness that appear in different theories are presented, without necessarily their being mutually exclusive. As a final consideration, the article seeks to reorder in four dimensions the ten figures originally presented, emphasizing the central elements in Ogden and Green's constructions. These dimensions are at the same time conceptual and clinical, insofar as they create possibilities of operating the idea of thirdness in the transference/ countertransference dynamics.

Key words:

• thirdness
• absence, intersubjectivity, contemporary psychoanalysis, Ogden and Green
• intersubjectivity
• contemporary psychoanalysis
• Ogden and Green
• Education Section, Intersubjectivity & The Other

Notes

1. Publication date of the book, Subjects of analysis, in which the notion of the ‘analytic third’ is explicitly stated, although it had been built on since 1990, at least (cf. Ogden, 1990).

2. Cf. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, ‘The third in psychoanalysis’, LXXIII (1), January 2004; and Revue Française de Psychanalyse, ‘Le Tiers Analytique’, LXIX (3), June 2005. However, although the work by Ogden and Green stand out in the general context on the subject, we must, now, also point out another contemporary author, the heir of Kleinian tradition in the British school, Ronald Britton (1989, 1998, 2003), and his instigating notions of the third position and triangular psychic space.

3. Since 1994, I have been conceiving psychoanalytic notions that involve the figure of the third in my own theoretical efforts. I initially proposed, in my study on the notion of reality in psychoanalysis, the triad: “material reality / psychic reality / clinical reality”, in which clinical reality is, at the same time, constituted by and a constituent part of the other two realities in the analytic field (cf. Coelho Junior, 1995). More recently, in 2010, I proposed the notion of “co‐corporeality” to refer to the co‐presence of two corporealities that already bring, within themselves, the I and the other in the analytic situation (cf. Coelho Junior, 2010).

4. Cf. Rickman (1951). Rickman proposed a sequence that leads from One‐Body Psychology (the classic model of general psychology, with an emphasis on the study of memory, perception and learning processes) up to Multi‐Body Psychology (group relationships), through Two‐Body Psychology (the mother–infant relationship), Three‐Body (the Oedipus complex model) and Four‐Body (the rivalry among siblings in the context of the Oedipus complex).

5. North American relational psychoanalysis from the 1990s (cf. Aron, 1996) used this opposition extensively, defending the relational dimension of a two body psychology against what would be, in their view, classic Freudian psychoanalysis; that is, a solipsist psychoanalysis centred on the patient's intrapsychic dimension and in opposition to the intersubjective dimension.

6. Here, I will take up some ideas that were presented in the preface I wrote for Karina Barone's book, Realidade e Luto: um estudo da transicionalidade (2004).

7. Here, we should also remember the letter from Freud to Groddeck, dated 5 June 1917: “It is known that the Unconscious (Ubw) is the authentic link/mediation (richtige Vermittlung) between the corporeal (Körperlichen) and the psychic (Seelischen), perhaps even the much sought after missing link.” (pp. 317–18). In other words, the structure of metapsychology, in this case, takes into account three elements, with the unconscious being the third, which is the link and mediation.

8. An overcoming that he also identifies in Winnicott – cf. Reis (1999, pp. 379–84).

9. Some of these ideas have already been presented in a more developed form, in Coelho Junior (2002), a text I refer to interested readers.

10. Cf. Macdonald (2014), especially Chapter 3, ‘Negation, binding and thirdness: The André Green–Hegel couple’.

11. In one of the resumptions of his journey, which were recurrent during the final decade of his life, Green (2002, p. 265) suggests he became aware of the notion of thirdness relatively late in his psychoanalytic trajectory (1989, “De la tercéité”, published in Les Monographies de la Revue française de psychanalyse).