Letters to The Editors: Response to Ruth Stein

Dear Sirs,

I'd like to express my appreciation to Ruth Stein for making the rich connection between my article and Bion's theory of ‘binocular vision’ as yet another model for the third. In several of the papers that led up to Aron (2006), I drew on Bion's theory of thinking explicitly, suggesting, for example (see Aron, 2000), that the reverberations of Bion's (1967) theory of thinking, his ‘alphabetizing function,’ that occurs between mother and infant, analyst and analysand, is in the background of all attempts to develop an intersubjective theory of thinking. Furthermore, and most relevant to Stein's letter, in my paper on a relational view of the primal scene (Aron, 1995), I drew on Meltzer's (1973) extension of Bion in describing creativity as a function of the mating between previously formed conceptions. The primal scene, and the maturation of the combined parent figure described by Meltzer, are further models that utilize thirdness in the development of thought.

I believe that these conceptualizations are not only useful as models of symbolization, but perhaps just as importantly they serve as links or bridges between more classical and more relational psychoanalytic perspectives and thus may themselves be viewed as utilizing ‘binocular vision.’