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Jessica Benjamin is a well-known American academic and psychoanalyst specialising in the field of relationship development theory. Her important new theory is groundbreaking in the world of psychology. The book is aimed at therapists and theorists. Benjamin's unique formulations of intersubjectivity make essential reading for both psychoanalytic therapists and theorists in the humanities and social sciences.
This body of work is made up of articles and lectures over a twenty-year period, as well as specifically written pieces for publication in this book. This book continues her work on the theory of mutual recognition and the development and growth of the Third. The book sets out the premise that all relationships (whatever type) can create a Third relationship which is healthy and reciprocal.
Benjamin describes the Third as:
To the degree that we ever manage to grasp two-way directionality, we do so only from the place of the Third, a vantage point outside the two. However, the intersubjective position that I refer to as thirdness consists of more than this vantage point of observation. The concept of the Third means a wide variety of things to different thinkers, and has been used to refer to the profession, the community, the theory one works with—anything one holds in mind that creates another point of reference outside the dyad (; ; ). My interest is not in which “thing” we use, but in the process of creating thirdness—that is, in how we build relational systems and how we develop the intersubjective capacities for such cocreation. 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. One of the first relational formulations of thirdness was Pizer's idea of negotiation, originally formulated in 1990, in which analyst and patient each build, as in a squiggle drawing, a construction of t