The Presence of the Third: Intrusive Factors in Analysis

The time-honoured quiet and agreeably tempered setting of our consulting rooms, with their seclusive ambience, indicates our intention to facilitate the unfolding of the analytic process. In our attempt to guard the dyad against intrusions from the world outside we carve an artificial setting out of more or less familiar surroundings, though the attempt so to do can never be 100 per cent successful. The analyst as guardian of this seclusiveness is usually more aware than the patient of intrusive ‘noises off’ and their origins. Such disturbances can often be turned to analytical advantage; the patient's reaction may lend itself to interpretation. Most intrusions are manageable. Easily noticed, they can be amended. Peace restored, attention can again be focused on the work in hand.

This focus implies a certain obliviousness of other realities surrounding the analytic setting, ensconced as it is into our socio-economic and political environment. Not being professionally involved in the latter, we take this part of our daily environment for granted, paying it scant attention, the better to get on with the analysis.

What I said about our consulting rooms is outward and tangible evidence of a professional seclusiveness, which is more obvious when it is as clearly demarcated as in the case of a surgical operating theatre, which the patient does not usually see and where his active cooperation is not expected.

There are occasions when the usually protective envelope is opened and unsettling things may happen on a scale which affects everybody, not just an individual patient or analyst. Such was the case when Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated, as Hubback reported (HUBBACK 5).

Unless such events are in the nature of an acute emergency, expeditious judgment can be made and intrusions become ‘normal’— something one gets used to, like the climate one lives in. Although the capacity to adjust has advantages, it is a pity when analysts stop taking