The Third as Holding the Dyad: Commentary on Paper by Margaret Crastnopol

The Issues Raised By Dr. Crastnopol's Paper Provide An Oppor-tunity to reflect on relational theory. As I have tried to express in the book she cites (Muller, 1996), a relationship cannot stand on its own but must be anchored in a wider context of culture and semiotic code that can be called the Third. For the psychoanalytic dyad, the Third functions as the holding environment setting standards, defining tasks, and establishing roles for each participant in the dyad. From this point of view, the Third is other than the members of the dyad and is not reducible to simply another dyadic relation with one or each of the members of the dyad.

I believe this notion is already present in Freud's delineation of the oedipal resolution. The child has a relationship to the mother, the child has a relationship to the father, and the child may have a relationship to God; in none of these is the function of the Third explicitly acknowledged. In the oedipal triangulation, the child's relation to the mother is itself, as a relation, related to the child's relation to the father; further, the child's relation to each of the parents is in turn related to the parents' relation to each other. Even more complex, the child's relation to the parent of either sex is itself related to how each of the parents relates to the standard or ideal of sexual identity, as well as of parental identity, which stands apart from each of them. What I am getting at is that the oedipal resolution or triangularity as such does not involve a set of polar dyadic relations but in fact something quite more substantial if not more abstract—namely, a relation of relations.

A psychoanalytic theory of relations does not constitute a paradigm shift or an advance if it limits the conceptualization of the psychoanalytic work to a relation between two subjects and their