The Therapist’s Vulnerability and The Third
In my last post, I took up the idea of the vulnerability of the therapist which arises in the context of relational approaches to psychotherapy. The argument assumed that, of the many ways in which psychotherapy elicits or realizes potential vulnerabilities for the therapist, the participation in a style of therapy which involves genuine presence and the use of self-as-instrument in the process of change is one that carries with it an especially potent form of vulnerability for the therapist. I’d like to ground that concept further through the use of the concept of “the Third” in psychoanalysis and some of what Heidegger explores in the end of Division II Chapter 2 on the call to conscience and resoluteness.
The idea of the analytic third has been in use for several decades now. The earliest example would likely be Freud’s oedipal arrangement, in which the father comes in as a presence or force that disrupts the dyadic unity of mother and child. As this notion was taken up metaphorically by later theorists, they began to see not only the father as the third, but any object that came in and disrupted, mediated, or negotiated dyadic relationships as serving a similar type of function. In this rendering, the third can be not only another person, but also theory, language, culture. In the parlance of psychoanalysis, the third became anything that could be taken up by the subject to assist in the transition away from dyadic processes related to splitting, partializing, or any of the defensive processes which undermine one’s capacity for nuance and ambiguity, including the therapist, the therapist’s technique, and/or interpretation.
If you delve into the literature on this topic, it was Thomas Ogden who first seemed to identify ways of conceptualizing the relationship itself with a kind of Thirdness, or at least Ogden explored the concept in earnest. Coming out of a Kleinian tradition, Ogden has never been quite as purely relational or intersubjectivistic as many of his contemporaries. As such, their is an awareness of the relationship as something co-constructed, though his theorizing around the structure lends itself much more to a subject-object phenomena of representation. This third is a mental construct that impacts the theorizing and dyadic conceptualizations available to the analyst. It is a dialectical phenomena, but a dialecticism rooted in a kind of self-other reductivism. A thing emerging as a mental phenomena out of the I-and-you. There is a bothness to it, but it is primarily understood as something for the analyst to identify, analyze, and use from the perspective of formulation.
Where the idea of a more co-constructed and relational understanding of thirdness comes into play is via the work of Jessica Benjamin. More conventionally relational—and informed by critical understanding of relevant philosophy from Hegel and Kierkegaard—Benjamin was much more interested in thirdness as something that in a way transcends the analytic dyad, not merely something that exists between client and therapist to be observed as a representation by the therapist.
Benjamin is probably best known for the notion of the “doer-and-done-to” in psychoanalytic theorizing, which is largely informed by her theories of thirdness. An extension of the Hegelian “master-slave” dialectic, in Benjamin’s estimation dyadic relationships cannot help but fall into reductive binary relationships characterized by the feature where one or both participants in that dyad feel as though they are being victimized by the other. A quality of twoness, though necessary at times, oversimplifies relational dynamics in a way that reduces them to good-bad, seducer-seduced, or abuser-abused. Part of what Benjamin argues is that this also applies to therapies that are overly guided by theorizing or clinical interpretation. That oftentimes impasses in the process of doing therapy arise as a consequence of the therapist’s or analyst’s inability to bring themselves out of this mechanical way of working and into something that feels much more like the existential-analytic approach that psychoanalysis has been inching its way towards since the emergence of the relational and intersubjective traditions.
Benjamin talks at length about the idea of mutual recognition in the therapeutic encounter. She champions the idea that one of the most sophisticated and necessary things the analyst can do is bring the client into thirdness by creating space for the collaborative processing and exploration of what is taking place between client and therapist. As Benjamin sees it, this is oftentimes the only way out of an impasse, where what is inevitably arising in those moments is some impulse in both client and therapist not to be the “bad” one. That seemingly irreconcilable hurdles in therapy emerge in moments of mutual shame and blame. Moments that can only be sufficiently resolved paradoxically through the therapist’s admitting their culpability in structuring the emerging dynamic. In doing this, the analyst must—in using a turn of phrase that Benjamin borrows from her supervisor Emmanuel Ghent (someone I’ve cited here before)—surrender to the analytic situation. In other words, the analyst needs to recognize how their stuff is coming in to inform and influence the ways in which relational dynamics are playing out. Said another way, the analyst is surrendering themselves to their vulnerability, their vulnerability to their client and their vulnerability to losing themselves in the analytic situation in the same ways in which they likely lose themselves in many other types of relationships. It’s the argument for the therapist being in analysis or therapy with a skilled clinician themself and/or in good supervision, where the supervisor can then come in as yet another third to make sense of the internal dynamics hindering the treating therapist from making the correct relational maneuver.
I mentioned Heidegger at the beginning of this chapter and want to highlight a bit some of what we can come to understand in bringing his concept of resoluteness into the fold here. I have often stated a belief that I think a lot of the contemporary analysts in the relational tradition would have done well by themselves to have attempted some Heidegger. At least the Heidegger of Being and Time. Contemporary analysis is rich with amazing thinkers who offer quite a bit by way of present-at-hand ways of understanding and interpreting the complex interpersonal dynamics that express themselves in the therapeutic encounter. However, bringing in the phenomenal existential basis that Heidegger attempted to disclose in his magnus opus merely serves to highlight much of what psychoanalysis evolved into would have already been available to it in the 1930’s.
Heidegger presents the idea of resoluteness as a response to his highlighting the idea of Dasein as having a basis of Being-guilty, that is being constituted by a lack that gets covered over in Dasein’s everyday mode of being fallen. In large part, others only exist in Being and Time as something that gets in the way. Others are “the they” which interferes with one's ability to take on their existence as one’s own. However, as Heidegger starts to lay the groundwork for his idea of authenticity (and specifically for authenticity as one’s being able to tolerate the anxiety that one gets called into as the potential for taking over one’s own existence) he seems to hold space for the possibility that this is something to do, not just for one’s self, but because of what it entails as a possibility for relating to others.
Heidegger sees resoluteness as that which must come in the aftermath of being reticent before the overwhelming and tranquillizing chatter of “the they”. It is our willingness to confront and contain the anxiety that these days we refer to as existential anxiety, the anxiety that is concerned with bearing both our existential loneliness and our finitude. Doing this, as Heidegger puts it, “calls us back” into Dasein as a way of “taking over” our thrownness—our being that which we already are—in order to authentically encounter the possibility of what we might anxiously allow ourselves to become, as indefinite and uncertain as that might be in the moment. What that means about human relationships only gets delivered in one brief line, but in the context of everything else Heidegger raises here (and coupled with what we've already been talking about) it seems essential:
”Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another—not by ambiguous and jealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the “they” and in what “they” want to undertake.”
In other words, to bring it back to Benjamin, in order to dissolve the necessary impasses of therapy, those moments in which we bring ourselves into being that which the client is summoning forth in the enactment, we must find ways of doing that which we likely otherwise would not do. So long as we allow the everyday defenses to contaminate the relationship (defenses against shame, guilt, and fear which are given to rise in any interpersonal encounter, therapeutic or not) we will miss the opportunity for authentic being and allowing the client to answer their own appeal into finding a new way of being, which is of course the very appeal to which they have asked us to be responsible for on their behalf. By showing the clients what it means to be authentically oriented towards anxiety, we give them the opportunity to identify and do the same in their own life. That oftentimes, for our most “stuck” clients, the only way to prove to them that change is possible is to first demonstrate its very possibility.
All that having been said, I recommend all of Benjamin’s paper “Beyond Doer and Done to” (2017) to fully grasp some of the ways in which this phenomenon can present itself in the therapeutic encounter. In addition to some rich theoretical thinking, she draws on a handful of clinical vignettes that I think really show off her thoughtfulness and precision (and at times humility) as an analyst and supervising analyst. She is obviously someone with a great deal of respect for the need for vulnerability in the ways in which we understand our roles as helpers and healers, and articulates some of its intricacies far better than anything I can offer here.
