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[…] the relationship between the two people is a two-way affair and in so far as one is concerned with demonstrating that relationship it is not a matter of talking about analyst and analysand; it is talking about something between the two of them.
According to Pontalis (2007, p. 316), Freud is “a thinker of conflict rather than of the intermediate.” Two kinds of thought coexist in him: binary thought, made up of dichotomies such as conscious/unconscious, primary process/secondary process, pleasure principle/reality principle, or narcissistic libido/object libido; and ternary thought, as with the threefold division of the first topography into Ucs.-Pcs.-Cs. or the ego-id-superego structure of the second topography. However, even if what predominates in Freud is dualism and the idea of psychic life as essentially based on the conflict of agencies, forces, quantities, and wishes, he was keenly aware of the need to conceive of the intermediate, or, to use a more abstract term, intermediacy. This is suggested by his evocative neologism1 of the Zwischenreich, the “in-between realm” or “half-way region.” The term already appears in a letter dated 16 April 1896 to Fliess, his Berlin friend and correspondent (Freud, 1985, p. 181), in which, though, it is not quite clear what Freud is referring to. Jeffrey Masson, the editor of this edition of the correspondence, notes that, according to Schur, he is alluding to the unconscious and the body-mind relationship, and that Fliess was subsequently to make use of it in connection with the subject of bisexuality.
In “Remembering, Repeating and Working-through” (1914), Freud uses