A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship (the shared third)

Abstract

Relational psychoanalysis has emphasized that the analyst’s awareness of her failures in recognition and hurtful re-opening of old wounds requires of her an internal struggle with self-regulation, with her own shame and guilt. This struggle takes place in the watchful presence of someone who is (sometimes hypervigilantly) listening to and monitoring the signs of the analyst’s internal state. If, in response to the patient’s hyper-arousal, the analyst retreats from the ‘music’ of mutual regulation (Knoblauch, 2000) into a dissociative use of observation in order to calm down, the patient can feel it. If, however, we are mindful of our failures, gradually we will learn together to recover from ruptures in attunement, and thus become sensitive to and use more effectively the inexplicable gaps created by the patient’s unintegrated or warring self-parts and the analyst’s failure to contain them. Thus moments of excess that fail to evoke a mirroring knowledge can serve instead to signal the unformulated, undifferentiated malaise, despair or fear. This perspective on ruptures represents an amplification of my original articulation of the process of mutual recognition as one of breakdown and restoration of intersubjective space (Benjamin, 1988). This expanded relational perspective includes the awareness of multiple self-parts that create different dyadic pairings within the same relationship and a view of intersubjectivity that emphasizes not just the fact of mutual influence (Stolorow and Atwood) but the consciousness that that there is a bi-directional dance between patient and analyst that each person registers differently – a cocreated dance governed by what we call the third (Ogden, 1994). In previous discussions of the intersubjective third I have distinguished between ‘a primordial third’, which refers to the musical or rhythmic exchange of gestures between caretaker and child as well as the procedural principles of lawful relating that underlie it, and a ‘symbolic third’, which makes use of more developed narrative elements and involves procedural rules based on consensus, negotiation, and recognition, especially recognition of the other’s separate subjectivity (Benjamin, 2004). Because of the inevitability that things will sometimes go wrong, that we will enact frightening and shameful aspects of our internal world that both Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90:441–450 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00163.x