ABSTRACT

Psychoanalysis has always recognized that past events, especially early developmental experiences, repeat themselves in the present. The analyst's current view is that working in the here and now not only offers insight to there and then, but is also an opportunity for a new relational experience. Jessica Benjamin addresses the issue "psychoanalysis" by differentiating between what she calls the one-in-the-third and the third-in-the-one. Contemporary Kleinian's view the third as an Oedipal construct, conceiving the third as an aspect of the analyst's mind rather than a shared co-created experience. The conceptualization of thirdness clearly rests upon the assumption that transference and countertransference constitute an intersubjective dyadic system continually influencing each other, and must be resolved in relation to each other. Psychoanalysis has been plagued by its preoccupation with binaries, polarized between theorists and schools that emphasize drive or culture, self or object, attachment or separation, autonomy or relations, the individual or the social, the intrapsychic or the interpersonal.