The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts*

Abstract

This chapter considers the dialectical movement of subjectivity and intersubjectivity to be a central clinical fact of psychoanalysis that ail clinical analytic thinking attempts to describe in ever more precise and generative terms. The conception of the analytic subject as it has been elaborated in the work of Klein and Winnicott has led to an increasingly strong emphasis on the interdependence of subject and object in psychoanalysis. The idea of analyst as neutral blank screen for the patient's projections is occupying a position of steadily diminishing importance in the conceptions of the analytic process. Portions of two analyses will be presented that highlight different aspects of the dynamic interplay of subjectivities constituting the analytic third. The foregoing account was offered not as an example of a watershed in an analysis; rather, it was presented in an effort to convey a sense of the dialectical movement of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the analytic setting.

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