Beyond Doer and Done to

Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third

Jessica Benjamin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315437675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In Beyond Doer and Done To, Jessica Benjamin, author of the path-breaking Bonds of Love, expands her theory of mutual recognition and its breakdown into the complementarity of "doer and done to." Her innovative theory charts the growth of the Third in early development through the movement between recognition and breakdown, and shows how it parallels the enactments in the psychoanalytic relationship. Benjamin's recognition theory illuminates the radical potential of acknowledgment in healing both individual and social trauma, in creating relational repair in the transformational space of thirdness. Benjamin's unique formulations of intersubjectivity make essential reading for both psychoanalytic therapists and theorists in the humanities and social sciences.

Chapter 1

Beyond doer and done to

An intersubjective view of thirdness

This chapter is the second version of a paper originally written for a volume on the concept of the Third for Psychoanalytic Quarterly, then rewritten for Relational Psychoanalysis Volume IV (Aron & Harris, 2011). It emerged from developing an idea I had initially when thinking about Ghent’s (1990) concept of surrender, written for a conference honoring his work in 2000. Initially I began to think of the Third as related to an original sense of harmony that exists both in the world and self, an idea one might find in neo-Platonic mysticism (see Benjamin, 2005). But I had already begun to consider with Aron (Aron & Benjamin, 1999) how the shared, intersubjective Third could be differentiated from that of more classical theories in which the Third appears as something in the mind of the analyst alone. It represented an effort to think through the idea of recognition from the ground up in terms of an orientation to a principle, a relationship, or even love, which we refer to in order to step out of the doer done to complementarity. I realized, as I wrote in a separate Afterword to the reprinted version, that my thinking about the Third in this way replicated an idea of Kierkegaard, (brought to my attention by Hoffman in her 2010 book): surrender to the Third, which “is love itself” can be maintained even when the other fails, as the one who remains committed can hold onto the Third “and then the break has no power over him” (Kierkgaard cited in Hoffman, 2010, p. 204). The essence of the third position is that we use it to step out of complementary power relations in which we might feel done to by keeping faith with the intention of our connection. In this paper I tried to ground analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities by understanding the developmental conditions of thirdness, both the early form of thirdness at the implicit level involving union experiences and accommodation, here called the rhythmic Third, as well as later explicit, symbolic forms of thirdness that recognize one’s own and others’ distinct perceptions, intentions or feelings, the differentiating Third.¹ Here, in this first foray, I tried to show how clinically, the concept of a co-created or shared intersubjective thirdness helps to elucidate the breakdown into the twoness of complementarity in impasses and enactments and suggest how recognition is restored through surrender. This includes accepting moments of disruption and the need to acknowledge them to the patient as a surrender to “what is.”

1 Because readers found my terminology in previous works confusing, I have adapted this terminology with the help of Aron’s elaboration of my work. Previously I referred to the One in the Third and the Third in the One. Aron suggested, based on my discussion (Benjamin, 1998) of Sander, using the term rhythmic Third for the former, and I have introduced the term the differentiating Third to rename the latter.

The introduction of the idea of intersubjectivity into psychoanalysis has many important consequences and has been understood in a variety of ways. The position I will develop in this paper defines intersubjectivity in terms of a relationship of mutual recognition—a relation in which each person experiences the other as a “like subject,” another mind who can be “felt with” yet has a distinct, separate center of feeling and perception. The antecedents of my perspective on intersubjectivity lie on the one hand with Hegel (Hegel, 1807; Kojève, 1969), and on the other with the developmentally oriented thinkers Winnicott (1971) and Stern (1985)—quite different in their own ways—who try to specify the process by which we become able to grasp the other as having a separate yet similar mind.

In contrast to the notion of the intersubjective as a “system of reciprocal mutual influence”—referring to “any psychological field formed by interacting worlds of experience” (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 3)—adumbrated by intersubjective systems theorists Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange (Orange, Atwood & Stolorow, 1997),² I emphasize, both developmentally and clinically, how we actually come to the felt experience of the other as a separate yet connected being with whom we are acting reciprocally. How do we get a sense that “there are other minds out there” (see Stern, 1985)?

In highlighting this phenomenological experience of other minds, I—like other intersubjective critics of Freud’s Cartesianism—emphasize the reciprocal, mutually influencing quality of interaction between subjects, the confusing traffic of two-way streets (Benjamin, 1977, 1988). But this theoretical recognition of intersubjective influence should not blind us to the power of actual psychic experience, which all too often is that of the one-way street—in which we feel as if one person is the doer, the other done to. One person is subject, the other object— as our theory of object relations all too readily portrays. To recognize that the object of our feelings, needs, actions and thoughts is actually another subject, an equivalent center of being (Benjamin, 1988; 1995b), is the real difficulty.

2 Stolorow and Atwood (1992) point out that they coined the term intersubjective independently and do not think of it as presupposing a developmental attainment, as Stern (1985) does. I (Benjamin, 1977; 1978) have made use of the term as introduced into philosophy by Habermas (1968), and then carried forward into psychology by Trevarthen (1977; 1980), in order to focus on the exchange between different minds. Like Stern, I consider the recognition of other minds (the other’s subjectivity) to be a crucial developmental attainment. Unlike Stern, however, I (Benjamin, 1988) have considered all aspects of co-creating interaction with the other, from early mutual gazing to conflicts around recognition, as part of the trajectory of intersubjective development. The major difference between the theorizing of Orange, Atwood and Stolorow (1997) and my own is not, as they believe (see Stolorow, Atwood & Orange, 2002; Orange, 2010), that I think the analyst should focus clinically on helping the patient to recognize the analyst’s (or other’s) subjectivity at the expense of the patient’s own. It is rather that I see such engagement in reciprocal recognition of the other as growing naturally out of the experience of being recognized by the other, as a crucial component of attachment responses that require mutual regulation and attunement, and, therefore, as ultimately a pleasure and not merely a chore (Benjamin, 2010).

The place of the Third

To the degree that we ever manage to grasp two-way directionality, we do so only from the place of the Third, a vantage point outside the two.³ However, the intersubjective position that I refer to as thirdness consists of more than this vantage point of observation. The concept of the Third means a wide variety of things to different thinkers, and has been used to refer to the profession, the community, the theory one works with—anything one holds in mind that creates another point of reference outside the dyad (Britton, 1988; Aron, 1999; Crastnopol, 1999). My interest is not in which “thing” we use, but in the process of creating thirdness— that is, in how we build relational systems and how we develop the intersubjective capacities for such co-creation. I think in terms of thirdness as a quality or experience of intersubjective relatedness that has as its correlate a certain kind of internal mental space; it is closely related to Winnicott’s idea of potential or transitional space. One of the first relational formulations of thirdness was Pizer’s (1998) idea of negotiation, originally formulated in 1990, in which analyst and patient each build, as in a squiggle drawing, a construction of their separate experiences together. Pizer analyzed transference not in terms of static, projective contents, but as an intersubjective process: “No, you can’t make this of me, but you can make that of me.”

Thus, I consider it crucial not to reify the Third, but to consider it primarily as a principle, function, or relationship (as in Ogden’s (1994) view), rather than as a “thing” in the way that theory or rules of technique are things. My aim is to distinguish it from superego maxims or ideals that the analyst holds onto with her ego, often clutching them as a drowning person clutches a straw. For in the space of thirdness, we are not holding onto a Third; we are, in Ghent’s (1990) felicitous usage, surrendering to it.⁴

Elaborating this idea, we might say that the Third is that to which we surrender, and thirdness is the intersubjective mental space that facilitates or results from surrender. In my thinking, the term surrender refers to a certain letting go of the self, and thus also implies the ability to take in the other’s point of view or reality. Thus, surrender refers us to recognition—being able to sustain connectedness to the other’s mind while accepting his separateness and difference. Surrender implies freedom from any intent to control or coerce.

3 I am greatly indebted to Aron with whom I formulated important portions of this paper and descriptions of the Third in a jointly authored paper (Aron & Benjamin, 1999); Aron emphasizes the observing function, but modified by identification, which he has formulated more recently in Aron (2006).

4 Ghent’s work on surrender was the inspiration for my first formulations of some of these thoughts, which were presented at a conference in his honor sponsored by New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program, May 2000.

Ghent’s essay articulated a distinction between surrender and its ever-ready look-alike, submission. The crucial point was that surrender is not to someone. From this point follows a distinction between giving in or over to someone, an idealized person or thing, and letting go into being with them. I take this to mean that surrender requires a Third, that we follow some principle or process that mediates between self and other.

Whereas in Ghent’s seminal essay, surrender was considered primarily as something the patient needs to do, my aim is to consider, above all, the analyst’s surrender. I wish to see how we facilitate our own and the patient’s surrender by consciously working to build a shared Third—or, to put it differently, how our recognition of mutual influence allows us to create thirdness together. Thus, I expand Ghent’s contrast between submission and surrender to formulate a distinction between complementarity and thirdness, an orientation to a Third that mediates “I and Thou.”

Complementarity: doer and done to

Considering the causes and remedies for the breakdown of recognition (Benjamin, 1988), and the way in which breakdown and renewal alternate in the psychoanalytic process (Benjamin, 1988), led me to formulate the contrast between the twoness of complementarity and the potential space of thirdness. In the complementary structure, dependency becomes coercive; and indeed, coercive dependence that draws each into the orbit of the other’s escalating reactivity is a salient characteristic of the impasse (Mendelsohn, 2003). Conflict cannot be processed, observed, held, mediated, or played with. Instead, it emerges at the procedural level as an unresolved opposition between us, even tit for tat, based on each partner’s use of splitting.

In my view, theories of splitting—for instance, the idea of the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1946; 1952)—though essential, do not address this intersubjective dynamic of the two-person relationship and its crucial manifestations at the level of procedural interaction. The idea of complementary relations (Benjamin, 1988; 1998) aims to describe those push-me/pull-you, doer/done-to dynamics that we find in most impasses, which generally appear to be one-way—that is, each person feels done to, and not like an agent helping to shape a co-created reality. The question of how to get out of complementary twoness, which is the formal or structural pattern of all impasses between two partners, is where intersubjective theory finds its real challenge. Racker (1968) was, I believe, the first to identify this phenomenon as complementarity, formulating it in contrast to concordance in the countertransference. Symington (1983) first described this as an interlocking, dyadic pattern, a corporate entity based on the meeting of analyst’s and patient’s superegos.

Ogden (1994) developed his own perspective on this structural pattern in the notion of the subjugating Third. He used the term analytic Third differently than I do, to denote the relationship as that of an other to both selves, an entity created by the two participants in the dyad, a kind of co-created subject-object. This pattern or relational dynamic, which appears to form outside our conscious will, can be experienced either as a vehicle of recognition or something from which we cannot extricate ourselves. Taking on a life of its own, this negative of the Third may be carefully attuned, like the chase-and-dodge pattern between mother and infant. From my point of view, it is somewhat confusing to call this a Third because, rather than creating space, it sucks it up. With this negative of the Third (perhaps it could be called “the negative Third”), there is an erasure of the in-between—an inverse mirror relation, a complementary dyad concealing an unconscious symmetry.

Symmetry is a crucial part of what unites the pair in complementarity, generating the takes-one-to-know-one recognition feature of the doer/done-to relation (Benjamin, 1998). In effect, it builds on the deep structure of mirroring and affective matching that operate—largely procedurally and out of awareness—in any dyad, as when both partners glare at each other or interrupt in unison. As we pay more attention to this procedural level of interaction we come to discern the underlying symmetry that characterizes the apparent opposition of power relations: each feels unable to gain the other’s recognition, and each feels in the other’s power. Or, as Davies (2004; see also Davies & Frawley, 1994) has powerfully illustrated, each feels the other to be the abuser-seducer; each perceives the other as “doing to me.”

It is as if the essence of complementary relations—the relation of twoness—is that there appear to be only two choices: either submission or resistance to the other’s demand, as Ogden put it (1994). Characteristically, in complementary relations, each partner feels that her perspective on how this is happening is the only right one (Hoffman, 2002)—or at least that the two are irreconcilable, as in “Either I’m crazy or you are.” “If what you say is true, I must be very wrong— perhaps shamefully wrong, in the sense that everyone can see what is wrong with me, and I don’t know what it is and can’t stop it” (see Russell, 1998).

As clinicians, when we are caught in such interactions, we may tell ourselves that some reciprocal dynamic is at work, although we may actually be full of self-blame. In such cases, our apparent acceptance of responsibility fails to truly help in extricating us from the feeling that the other person is controlling us, or leaving us no option except to be either reactive or impoten...