Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

and analyst’ (Ogden 2005: 6). However the idea of ‘thirdness’ has become used more
widely in a metaphorical capacity indicating something other that arises in psychoanalytic
settings, as it is a language that speaks of transition. Green charts how the concept of
thirdness, even if not named as such, is present within psychoanalytic theory ranging from
the Oedipal triangle (Freud), the psychoanalytic setting (Winnicott), Bion’s alpha function,
and in the language of ‘the unconscious as a discourse of the Other (Lacan)’ (Green 2004:
110). Benjamin places thirdness as an essential part of intersubjectivity and correlates it to a
form of internal mental space. For Benjamin the process of creating thirdness is the most
significant aspect of psychoanalytic encounter (Benjamin 2004, 2009), 537 but sees dangers
in it being reified. She also finds parallels between the historical understandings of love
expressed in religious traditions, with the concept of a relation to an intersubjective Third.
Grotstein adds to this by adapting thirdness to an immanent and numinous encounter present
in the psychoanalytic relationship (Grotstein 2002).
Ogden, Green, Benjamin and Grotstein see thirdness as an internal, conscious and
unconscious construct which points to something else, something other and potentially
Other. If intersubjectivity involves the unconscious of the analyst, the presence within that
analyst of ontological, religious or spiritual beliefs and practices will be ever present. 538 If
that analyst or patient believes that Other/O/God/Thou has existence beyond the psyche,
then ‘thirdness’ offers the possibility of an experience or a transition that is both internal and
537 Benjamin has developed three aspects of the third: the primordial, the symbolic and the moral. ‘I think in
terms of thirdness as a quality or experience of intersubjective relatedness that has as its correlate a certain
kind of internal mental space; it is closely related to Winnicott’s idea of potential or transitional space … For
in the space of the thirdness, we are not holding onto a third; we are, in Ghent’s (1990) felicitous usage,
surrendering to it … an orientation to a third that mediates “I and Thou”’ (Benjamin 2004: 6f.).
538 Sorenson helpfully examines the patient’s experience of the analyst’s spirituality and the analyst’s
experience of the patient’s spirituality (Sorenson 2004).
333