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In a work of rare originality of psychoanalytic theory, John P. Muller delights us with his new book Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Developmental Semiotics in Freud, Peirce, and Lacan. In it, Muller addresses how signs powerfully form and impact the mind and the body and give grounds for the creation of intersubjectivity. Drawing heavily on the work of the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and keeping Freud as a fundamental and founding reference, Muller retrieves the triadic and structuring role of the Oedipus complex in a very astute manner, examining it in a theoretical and technical setting that has regressed, so to speak, to a two-body psychology.
That Muller chose these three authors as a common point of reference and dialogue stresses one of the main theses of his book, namely, that there is no dyadic link, either between infant and mother or analyst and analysand, outside the triadic structure that makes the dyad possible. Certainly the dyad exists and manifests itself constantly, whether in the manner of the analytic relationship or within the child-parent relationship, as Muller repeatedly points out throughout the book. The question, however, is whether this relationship is purely a dual one or one that can sustain itself only in its relationship to a third term. Muller's thesis throughout the book—and in this he identifies with a myriad of previous authors—is that triadic structures are present and operative from before