Contribution to Correspondence on ‘Analytic Impasse and the Third’

Dear Editors,

I would like to make a small ‘ecumenical’ contribution to the correspondence following ‘Analytic impasse and the third’ (Aron, 2006, 2007; Stein, 2007). ‘Thirdness’ is an important (perhaps a central) notion in analytical psychology. ‘Thirdness’ appears in Psychological types (Jung, 1971) (originally published in German in 1921) which was itself something of a product of Jung's experience of the ‘impasse’ between Freud and himself. In this, Jung articulates how the ‘mediatory product’ of psychologically opposing perspectives (conscious and unconscious in that text) ‘becomes a new content … putting an end to the division and forcing the energy of the opposites into a common channel’ (p. 480). A preoccupation with transcending thirdness persists in analytical psychology, especially in the notion