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The idea of renewing an ethics of speech in psychoanalysis warrants consideration now because of the great range of views in our field regarding what analysts can or should say to patients. In this controversy, which is part of the contemporary reformation of theory and which contributes to the vitality of psychoanalysis, much of the conceptualizing is based on a relational, two-body model. What concerns me and others, however, is the notion that a two-body psychology is an advance over Freud and that within the intersubjective field an analyst and patient co-create the treatment without relying on any Third. As an old mentor, Ess White at the Austen Riggs Center, once said, “Two people cannot share an ethics unless it is based on some third thing.”
I will argue for a general principle that speech in analysis becomes unethical whenever the triadic structure of speech collapses into a dyadic relation. I agree with Jay Greenberg (1998), who stated recently that “a proper analytic stance should always be case specific and not dictated by a priori notions of a standard technique” (p. 224). Or, as John Gedo (1996) in The Languages of Psychoanalysis demonstrates and succinctly states, we must learn to speak to the patient in his mother-tongue, in his earliest semiotic indicators. What I am arguing, however, is that a “proper analytic stance” is one that promotes the associative process that Charles Sanders Peirce called semiosis, and that semiosis, while always particular, has triadic structural features that should guide our work.
Peirce (1998) the leading nineteenth-century philosopher in America, defined semiosis, the action of signs, in triadic terms as an “action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation