Reply to Commentary

DR. MULLER'S ELABORATION ON HIS USAGE OF THE “THIRD” HELPS TO clarify where I may have misread him, which aspects of his formulation I find problematic, and where our underlying beliefs fundamentally diverge. I found edifying Muller's further explanation of how the Third might be said to provide a “structuring context,” one that is “antecedent to” the analytic dyad. In his view, the Third is a “relation of relations” and is manifest in “an observable structure (e.g., the semiotics of turn taking; the deictic use of pronouns; the delineation of roles, tasks, and boundaries) defining a position from which to participate in and observe the dialogue.” This description of the Third is similar to the last facet of my own tripartite version of the Third, to which Muller refers in his response—a facet that he (sometimes) seems to say is the only legitimate usage of the term.

Although I mentioned this in my paper, it may bear reiterating that Muller's own view is neither unified nor altogether clear. Both as articulated in his book and in his commentary here, his Third seems (confusingly) to take on different qualities depending on the particular passage in which it is invoked. In some places, Muller presents the Third as an overarching, preexisting position, formal rather than content-specific, and independent of the particularities of a given analytic pair. Yet elsewhere, Muller embraces conceptualizations like those of Ogden and Brickman, who present the Third as something neither universal nor free of the participants' subjective perspectives. Ogden's “analytic third” describes “the intersubjectively-generated experience of the analytic pair.” Similarly, Brickman invokes the Third to encompass “the analyst's deployment of a working model of a dynamic unconscious.” These conceptualizations are like mine in addressing the highly subjective aspect of the Third, which is uniquely and freshly created within and between the members of each analytic dyad. Muller nonetheless obje