Conflicting Interests and the Creation of a “Third Space”: Reply to Commentary

On reading her stimulating discussion of our paper, we suspect that Benjamin hears ominous philosophical connotations in the notion of “conflicts of interest” as it has been used historically in discourses in which singular, “true” individual (or class) interests can be objectively known and rationally pursued. Space does not permit a fuller, theoretical clarification. Suffice it to say that, for us, the reason that self-interest is a vital, useful category of human interaction lies in the monumental, adaptive challenge posed by the paradoxical fact that we must all struggle (consciously and unconsciously) to look out for ourselves, yet must do so precisely: 1) without having any objective way of knowing what our true interests are; and, 2) without having any way of neatly separating our interests from the interests of others (some of whom we must “use” to construct our basic sense of self).

Clinically, Benjamin seems concerned that, in viewing the tensions in the therapeutic relationship as entailing a dimension of “conflicts of interest,” we run the danger of becoming overly literal—of concretely interpreting the patient's wishes and demands as valid needs, losing our sense of symbolic meanings, and abandoning our own vital commitment to the analytic space as a framework that ultimately transcends both our own interests and the patient's current subjective sense of her or his own interests. Benjamin implies that in so doing we risk getting lost in what is presumably “real” and thus sacrifice the potential to transform the collision of subjectivities, in patient and analyst, into a “thirdness”—an intersubjectivity that does not negate vital, individual, subjective differences.