Ntile, Close But No Cigar The Perversion of Agency and The Absence of Thirdness

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Gentile, J. (2001). Close but No Cigar: The Perversion of Agency

and the Absence of Thirdness. Contemp. Psychoanal., 37:623-6..
(2001). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 37:623-654
Close but No Cigar: The Perversion of Agency and the Absence of Thirdness*
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.
My Patient was a fifteen-year-old, pretty, coy, often sullen girl. I also consulted with her parents: her mother
sexy, brash, fun; her father earnest and humorless. One day, I said to my young patient, “You and your
mother are so close. But you also seem like strangers.” “Yes,” she replied matter-of-factly and with an
unusual directness, “Close but no cigar.”
I had the sense that my patient had communicated in a pithy, brilliant way (the significance of which eluded
her) the essence of the problem with which so many patients wrestle and with which contemporary
psychoanalytic theory also wrestles: the problem of a closed dyadic process that precludes an entry into the
terrain of intersubjectivity (Benjamin, 1995, 1998; Ogden, 1994) and dialectical experience (Bromberg, 1996;
Ghent, 1989; Hoffman, 1998; Pizer, 1998). There is increasing consensus that to be known as a subject and to
experience oneself as an agent requires a space beyond a dyadic “twoness” (see Benjamin, 2001; Ogden,
1994; Muller, 1996). This space is often conceived as intersubjective space or the space of thirdness.
Agency, conceived herein as a wellspring of spontaneous gesture and personal impact, guides therapeutic
action toward—and simultaneously requires—the space of thirdness for its developmental realization. Yet,
when a closed dyadic process prevails, instead of impelling therapeutic action toward thirdness and
intcrsubjectivity, agency gets mired in
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* Excerpted versions of this article were presented at Multiple Perspectives on Subjectivity, Rome, Italy,
March 1999, and the Spring Meeting, APA Division of Psychoanalysis (39), New York, April 1999. I thank
Drs. George Atwood, Kerry Gordon, Emmanuel Ghent, Stephen Mitchell, and Seth Warren for their
thoughtful, helpful comments and editorial suggestions on earlier drafts; and Drs. Jeffrey Memelstcin,
Romolo Petrini, and Malcolm Slavin for their insightful discussions of conference drafts. David Klugman and
Dr. Jeffrey Pusar shared valuable, influential perspectives about agency. I am particularly and very deeply
grateful to Drs. Jonathan Slavin and Malcolm Slavin who each gave generously of time and provided
multiple careful readings, invaluable editorial help, substantive contributions, and even acts of heroism
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a trapped, perverse state of “twoness”—a state of phenomenological confinement that elides the space of
intersubjectivity and symbolic communication. In the collapsed state of twoness, fusion-based dynamics,
power relations, and brute force yield a relatedness that looks like, but actually precludes, psychological
intimacy.
This article discusses psychoanalytic conceptions of a closed dyadic space or a state of twoness versus an
open, if bounded, space of thirdness. Central to these conceptions and to the main thesis of this article is that
agency seeks and requires the space of thirdness and intersubjectivity for its developmental realization. By
contrast, in the absence of thirdness a perversion of agency results. Here, the patient's agency remains in a
“potential” state, finding expression only in a closed, circular path. I suggest that, ironically, psychoanalytic
models of therapeutic action themselves have perpetuated such closed dyadic states, contributing to a
perversion of agency for both the individual patient and psychoanalysis, with the attendant costs of keeping
both the patient and psychoanalysis in a state of relative disenfranchisement from (and limited impact upon)
the larger world.
The second major focus of this article is to describe the organization of meaning and experience embedded in
states of perverse agency. The chief characteristic of this proposed phenomenology is that it is organized
around a split between loyalty and vengeance toward an original attachment figure, a split that precludes a
third space in which new meaning is created and wherein mutual psychological transformation occurs. In
addition, the article sketches phenomenological markers that characterize the gradual transformation toward
thirdness from this state of subjective (and intersubjective) impasse. These may be seen as precursors of a
more fluid interplay of agency and intersubjectivity in which desire, mourning, intimate exploration, personal
recognition, play, and new meaning-creation all become possible.
The organization and content of experience in states of twoness may be seen as archetypal of, or common to,
all trapped dyadic states. The idea that a given mode of organizing experience exists in tandem with a given
organization of meaning and phenomenology is found in Ogden's formulations of a container-content
relationship between the depressive mode of experience and the oedipal situation, that is, that the structure
and content of experience emerge in tandem, “each shaping and influencing the other” (Ogden, 1986, p. 92).
Likewise, Ogden refers to a container-content relationship between the splitting or twoness of the paranoid-
schizoid
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position and the phenomenology associated with keeping endangered and endangering aspects of self and
other apart. Here Ogden characterizes experience of oneself as “presubjective,” that is, not “as an active
personal agent but, rather, as an object to whom life events occurred” (p. 49).
The idea of an archetypal container-content relationship also reflects the idea of a foundational or deep
structure (Gentile, 1998; Ogden, 1986; Slavin & Kriegman, 1992) that mediates the organization of human
experience. From that perspective, it may be said that my patient is guided, in part, by a deep structural
intuition or knowing when she says to me, “Close but no cigar.” Packaged in these four words, she
communicates to me something of both the container and the content of her phenome-nological predicament.
She may be seen as close to her mother, but only in a confined dyadic sense (twoness) as she is
simultaneously deprived of an intersubjective basis for knowing and being known. In that sense, strangely
perhaps, it is not a personal psychological relationship. She may be seen as at the cusp (“close”) of a
transformation to thirdness, but that realm is yet foreclosed to her (“no cigar”). Assuming the content of that
space includes sexual desire, agency, and their imaginative, symbolic possibilities, her sullenness is not
surprising. In her close but paradoxically estranged relationship with her mother (insofar as she cannot be
known as a subject in this closed dyadic state), she remains confined in a role-based relationship—unable to
venture into the phenomenological location in which a cigar is not just a cigar.1
Twoness: Implications for Agency

Only as psychoanalysis has shifted away from a preoccupation with specific character types in favor of a
broader concern with different forms of “relationality” (Mitchell, 2000) has the distinction between
relatedness that precludes intersubjectivity (characterized by twoness) versus relatedness characterized by
intersubjectivity (and thirdness) come into focus. Along with these trends, psychoanalysis increasingly is
establishing itself, in part, as a semiotic enterprise in which access to a third space between symbol and
symbolized creates the possibility for an intersubjective agent and subject to come into being. Muller (1996,
p. 35) has described
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1 Elsewhere (Gentile, 1998), I articulated the possibility of a phenomenological trajectory that emerges
between a deeper structure and an intersubjective context, and that can be characterized by a series of
phenomenological markers, signposts, locations, and so forth. by a form of subjectivity in which the self is
experienced predominantly as “the self as object.” In this experiential state there is very little sense of oneself
as the author of one's thoughts and feelings. Instead, thoughts and feelings are experienced as forces and
physical objects that occupy and bombard oneself. [Ogden, 1994, p. 142]
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such a semiotic perspective as essential to an understanding of the process whereby the patient becomes an
active participant in her experience and whereby the “talking cure” achieves its impact.
Central to the perspective of this article is that such transformations in semiotic capacity (which may be seen
as “container” features) emerge in tandem with transformations of phenomenology, meaning-creation, and
relatedness (or “content”). From a semiotic standpoint, twoness is characterized by a form of symbolization
(introduced by Segal, 1957) in which, as Ogden (1994) puts it, “there is little capacity to differentiate
between symbol and symbolized. In other words, there is almost no interpreting ‘I’ interposed between
oneself and one's lived experience” (p. 142).
Without such a mediating. I relatedness in states of twoness precludes an intersubjective basis for knowing
and being known. Instead, as Ogden (p. 231) describes, a paranoid-schizoid mode of organizing experience
predominates, in which the direct linkages associated with projective identification provide the basis for
“knowing.” Similarly, Benjamin (1995, 1998, 2001) calls attention to relationships in which
complementarities and polarities reign and in which dialectical thinking, intersubjective relating, and
processes of mutual recognition are eclipsed. Although Benjamin refers to such relatedness as characterized
by a “subject-object” paradigm, it may be more apt to refer to them as organized by an “object-object”
paradigm, given that neither member of the dyad can achieve subject status here.
Muller (1996), writing from a standpoint informed by semiotics theory, also describes a relatedness that
precludes a mediating “I.” He refers to this as a state of coerced mirroring (or what is formally referred to in
semiotics as “enacted iconicity”) in which “affective resonance is coercive, fixed solely by the affective state
of the other, and eclipses any Third' (p. 25; italics added).
Thus, when twoness prevails—as in the state of coerced subjectivity, in Benjamin's complementary relation,
and in Ogden's paranoid-schizoid mode of experience—there is no interpreting “I,” no space for the
emergence of personal agency. Instead, experience here is characterized
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And without agency, there is no personal, particular subject. As Pollock and Slavin (1998) describe, “without
agency, connection is illusory, based either on a fantasy of merging or on the omnipotent imposition of one's
will onto another” (p. 864).
Thirdness: Creating a Space for Agency

The birth of the human subject requires a space between two subjects, a space between symbol and
symbolized—a space of thirdness or “mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation”
(Peirce, 1891, p. 296; quoted in Muller, 1996, p. 32). This conception is central to the thinking of a wide
range of theorists concerned with intersubjectivity (Benjamin, 1995; Habermas, 1968; Hegel, 1807; Lacan,
1977; Ogden, 1994) and, again, underscores that transformations in scmiotic capacity and phenomenology
emerge in tandem. For example, Ogden (1986) refers to an “oedipal/symbolic third” in which “there exists a
‘middle term’ that stands between symbol and symbolized, between oneself and one's immediate lived
sensory experience, thereby creating a space in which the interpreting, self-reflective, symbolizing subject is
generated (p. 72).
This “oedipal/symbolic third,” in Ogden's conception, provides the container for the Oedipus complex, which
“facilitates the triangularization of experience … the emotional presence of the father [introduces] thirdness,
a vantage point outside of the mother-infant dyad.… In this sense, the Oedipus complex is the exit from the
nonreflective, twoness of the paranoid-schizoid position” (pp. 124-126). Put differently, the emergence of the
human subject not only emerges in the (third) space between two subjects and between symbol and
symbolized,2 but also amidst the triangular space of mother, father, and child. Thus, while typically
psychoanalysis has placed the accent on the father's role at this developmental juncture, from a perspective
guided by the child's (or patient's) emergent agency, the most remarkable feature of the Oedipus is that a third
person comes into being as a sexual subject.
In that sense, the Oedipus complex may be regarded as psychoanalysis' archetypal third, both formed by and
forming the space of thirdness. The idea of an archetypal third also implies the possibility of a foundational
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2 As Muller (1996) notes, “Peirce emphasized the triadic character of the process of semiosis, the process
whereby signs have such pervasive influence” (p. 43). Thus, the relationship between symbol and symbolized
is not one between pairs, but instead involves a relationship of mediation.
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structure to the organization of human experience. That is, while thirdness comes into existence in the space
between symbol and symbolized, it is simultaneously organized by a foundational Third that influences the
content of experience, including the emergence of the Oedipus complex as a central organizer of sexual
meaning.
Muller (1996) previously attached the status of a foundational Third to the presence of a semiotic code that
grounds and transcends the dyad, even if the dyad may function in denial, eliding it. The idea of a
biologically based adaptive design (Slavin & Kriegman, 1992) or of a “deep structural” trajectory (Gentile,
1998) also may be seen as a foundational Third, that is, one that organizes human experience in mediation
with, and over and above, the relational organization of experience.
Other psychoanalytic conceptions of a foundational Third lie in Benjamin's (2001) recent suggestion of a
primordial or transcendent third; in Beebe, Jaffe, and Lachmann's (1992) view of a dyadic systems
organization of experience (in which relatedness becomes organized within the dyad but, implicitly, also
within the biological framework holding the dyadic communication); in the advocacy of a dynamic systems
perspective, which may be seen as framing and transcending the dichotomies of strictly dyadic relations
(Ghent, 2000; Thelen & Smith, 1994); and of course, in Freud's conceptions of a foundational unconscious
fantasy process, anchored around “a phylogenctically determined nucleus for the creation and organization of
sexual and aggressive meanings” (Ogden, 1986, p. 92).
Without a conception of a foundational Third, dialectical constructivism (Hoffman, 1998) risks collapsing
into a dichotomous vision (see M. Slavin, 2001) in which relational constructivism and the idea of a
foundational basis to the organization of experience are seen as mutually negating polarities. This
dichotomizing tendency is evident in the trapped dyad's eschewing of triangular space (thirdness) as well as
its refusal to surrender to unconstructed or foundational aspects to the organization of experience (the
Third).3
Indeed, as this article explores, patients commonly display persistent and agonizing struggles that sustain
psychic life in the confines of two-ness and stave off a surrender—desired but dreaded—to the Third (see
Benjamin, 2001; Ghent, 1990; Muller, 1996). In that “beyond omnipo-tence”
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3 It is noteworthy in this context that Hoffman has reframed his discussion of constructivism within this
larger frame of dialectic with the universal, or immutable, unconstructed aspects of experience (see Hoffman,
2001; Slavin, 2001; Stern, 2001).
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location, words create boundaries, consensual laws, and an irever-sibility associated with the naming of
experience (Muller, 1996). There, the possibility for genuine remembering and mourning, and for acts of
agency and acts of meaning (Bruner, 1990) become possible. By contrast, the elision of the Third perpetuates
acts of omnipotence, reactivity, coercion, as well as the annihilation of both sexual meaning and the
experience of desire.
Agency as Therapeutic Action

It may be argued that Freud's thinking included a conception of what now may be considered a foundational
Third in his convictions about unconscious fantasy, the Oedipus complex, and their universal moorings.
Further, in advocating free association in which “the patient takes the risk of not knowing what he is going to
say” (Phillips, 1993, p. 29) and a conception of transference as a “playground” in which there is “almost
complete freedom” (Freud, 1914, p. 374), he opened a space (of thirdness) for psychoanalytic action—which
included the communication of sexual meanings and desire—to take place at the locus of the patient's agency,
between a foundational unconscious and a relational context.
In the years that followed, in part because of the then dominant positivist epistemology that attached
authority to the analyst's detached “objective” perspective (e.g., Mitchell's 1993 discussion), Freud's potential
playground may be seen as having collapsed in the direction of authoritative-accommodative (or reactive)
role-based dichotomies. Oscillations between technical innovations (e.g., Ferenczi, 1924) and necessary
constraints, if not prescriptions for and impositions of psychoanalytic technique, followed (e.g., Glover,
1924). These now may be understood, in part, as efforts, alternately, to elide the Third and to impose a Third,
but never as a surrender to the Third.
Gradually, in place of the “authority” Freud ascribed to the patient's unconscious agency and its expression in
the transference, authoritarian dynamics contributed to analytic relationships characterized by double-binds,
coercion, and omnipotence. In this resultant twoness, roles of “patient” and analyst” became entrenched and
reified, leading to a disenfran-chisement of the patient's agency, as well as the analyst's (J. Slavin & Pollock,
1999). What resulted may be seen, at least in part, as a perversion of the patient's agency as well as that of
psychoanalysis itself.
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As a literature on therapeutic action evolved—whether concerned with interpretation, emotional provision, or

new relational experience—it came, in effect, to define and privilege the analyst's action,4 further
disenfranchising the patient (and her unconscious) as agent of her treatment. The patient's contribution to her
own change process increasingly became defined by default (e.g., as the recipient of the analyst's
interpretations, confrontations, self-disclosures, provisions of empathy). And what she does in treatment
came to be characterized more as happenstance (e.g., dreams are brought in, unmet longings emerge,
enactments take place) than as role-based (and contingent) reactions to the analyst's action, let alone as acts of
genuine agency. Further, insofar as the patient adopts an accommodative or reactive stance, she participates
in defining herself as object, not subject. In that sense, both members of the dyad construct this “vicious
complementarity” (Benjamin, 1998) from which they seek to extricate themselves through the course of their
analytic odyssey.
Although the patient's agency has long been implicated in theories of analytic action (Bion, 1967; Bollas,
1989; Ferenczi, 1932; Kohut, 1984; Winnicott, 1965, among many), relational and intersubjectivist theorists
have sought explicitly to move psychoanalysis beyond classical conceptions that bound both analyst and
patient to rules and roles and, thus, to what now may be seen as a restricted twoness. Enfranchising the
patient as a cocreator of therapeutic action, these theorists have enlisted not only the patient's subjectivity, but
the formerly virtually excluded analyst's agency and subjectivity as well (J. Slavin & Pollock, 1999; see also
Aron, 1996; Atwood & Stolorow, 1984; Davies, 1994; Greenberg, 1986; Hoffmann, 1983; Mitchell, 1993;
Orange, Atwood & Stolorow, 1997; Renik, 1993; J. Slavin, 1994), enabling both members of the dyad to
emerge as agents of therapeutic action.
Inadvertently, however, while more inclusive than the historically narrowed preoccupation with the analyst's
activity, this relational and constructivist lens, once again, obscures the patient's distinct contribution as agent
of her own treatment. That is, by sustaining the accent on the dyadic relational process, the patient's agency
(i.e., her unique and independent contributions to her own self-definition and self-determination)
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4 Even antidotes to the rather prescriptive tenets of classical psychoanalysis, inviting the analyst to avoid the
pitfalls of a “social inequality' in the analyst-analysand society” (Racker, 1968, p. 132n) or “the perils of
neutrality” (Renik, 1996) have placed the accent in analytic activity on the analyst's activity.
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once again may be eclipsed. In particular, the preoccupation with dyadic construction may have obscured the
patient's unconscious agency (organized in part by a deeper structure or Third) and kept it from gaining
articulate form.
It is paradoxical that the emergence of personal agency (including unconscious agency) both requires the
space of thirdness (with its moorings and boundaries) and is an expression of thirdness (and the Third;5 see
next section). Thus, it may be said that it is in the recent attention of psychoanalysis to the need for thirdness
and intersubjectivity as a pathway out of a limited, coercive dyadic relation that a more complete model of
therapeutic action resides. Indeed, many theorists (Aron, 1996; Beebe, Jaffe & Lachmann, 1992; Benjamin,
1995, 1998; Bromberg, 1996; Fosshage, 1992; Ghent, 1989; Hoffman, 1998; Ogden, 1986, 1989, 1994;
Slavin & Kriegman, 1992) anticipated the current preoccupation with thirdness in their assertion of a
dialectical tension between the individual and relational, between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In the
fertile realm of intersubjectivity and thirdness, the possibility now exists for the formerly disenfranchised
patient to achieve status, semiotically and phenomenologically, as a subject and agent in her own right (see
especially Benjamin, 1998; Ogden, 1994; Muller, 1996). At the same time, there is now a space in which
psychoanalysis itself can reclaim its power—a space in which unconscious (and perhaps foundational) sexual
meanings can achieve personal impact in a relational context that is not strictly relational (insofar as it is
simultaneously of the Third).
Agency and its Perversion

In this section, the perversion of agency is defined. To do so, however, it is necessary to contextualize the
discussion within a larger definition of agency. Nonetheless, the article concentrates mainly on perverse
agency and its phenomenological contents, while touching only marginally on agency and its
phenomenology.
Agency, in recent psychoanalytic writings, has been used to refer to what Sander (1991) described as “an
inner impetus that determines each living thing to be self-regulating, self-correcting, self-generating” (quoted
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5 Although intersubjectivity requires thirdness for its elaboration, it is both ironic and a testament to the idea
of a Third that twoness and perverse agency, which seek to elide the Third (thereby impeding therapeutic
action), are simultaneously and inescapably, in part, organized by it as well.
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in Rustin, 1997, p. 50). Klugman (1997) provides a compelling portrayal of agency as developmentally
rooted in infancy, as an amalgam of Winnicott's spontaneous gesture and the personal idea, as fundamentally
reserved for unconstructed (and not relationally constructed) aspects of experience, and as dedicated to “the
preservation of the rudimentary distinct sense.” As Benjamin (1995) has described and as Pollock and Slavin
(1998) have elaborated, agency emerges from within, but requires “the other's confirming response, which
tells us that we have created meaning, had an impact, revealed an intention” (Benjamin, 1995, p. 33) in order
to be transformed into an experienced sense of agency. Sander (1983) explicitly locates the origins of
personal agency in the “open-space” periods of the infant-caretaker system that are characterized by relative
disengagement and provide the infant with an opportunity for the “initiation of experience” (p. 323). Such
open-space periods provide a break from the state of dyadic confinement and coerced subjectivity in which
there is no space for the emergence of agency.
Following these theorists, I use agency to refer to a self-generated and self-determined personal expression
that originates within such an open-space relational context (rather than from within the relationship per se).
Simultaneously and paradoxically, this emergent agency is a distinctly personal but not strictly personal
expression (again, insofar as it is also of a transcendent or foundational Third). It is dependent on recognition
by the other (to use Benjamin's language) or “moments of meeting” (to use Sander's language) to become
experienced as “a sense of agency.” In that sense, agency requires a dialectical relationship between
subjectivity and intersubjectivity for its realization. With this realization, the patient's self-experience,
formerly dominated by a sense of exclusion, alienation, and sense of self as an “object” or thing, begins to
assume subject status. Significantly (and, in my view, underestimated in psychoanalytic discourse), the
legacy of this transformation may be seen as the entering into existence of a personal, symbolic, “me—not-
me” imprint in the relational, material world (i.e., the world of public discourse, beyond omnipotence and
closed dyadic processes).
In the patient's quest for an experience of personal agency, she must dare to “break free”6 from a prevailing
twoness by risking a self-initiated claiming of her experience. In that moment of naked assertion and faith,
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6 Both Mitchell (1997) and Symington (1983), importantly, recognize the analyst's need to break free of the
confines of the patient's closed system in order to have an impact. The accent, however, is placed on the
analyst's rather than the patient's activity.
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the patient as agent becomes dependent on the recognition of the other (as opposed to a familiar contingent
response) to achieve a sense of agency (Benjamin, 1995). She “breaks free” from a closed dyadic but not
personal space (i.e., given its omnipotent and iconic features) and creates herself as a particular subject in
relation to an Other for the first time. At the same time, the patient as subject is now dependent on a requited
intersubjectivity, itself structured in part by the Third, in order to elaborate her own personal trajectory of
meaning-creation.
In the absence of thirdness, however, a perversion of agency ensues, and agency remains confined to a state
of twoness. I use the term perversion here, following Ghent (1990, p. 108), in its commonplace usage to
“mean something akin to distortion, corruption, diversion, misconstruction.” Nonetheless, the term has its
own specific historic psychoanalytic usage that does bear relevance to this discussion, though a full
discussion is beyond the scope of this article.
Briefly, in his review of the literature on perversions, Parsons (2000) notes that, beginning with Freud (1919),
many theorists have made the point that perversions aim at “depersonalizing the object but also at merging
with it. What is unbearable is the relationship to a person who has his or her own otherness.… Perversion
could be more epigrammatically defined as the sexualizalion of the avoidance of mutuality” and its risks (p.
46; italics added). Further, McDougall (1986, p. 20; quoted in Parsons, 2000, p. 44) suggested that “perhaps
in the last resort only relationships may aptly be termed perverse.” Bringing together these perspectives with
that of this article, it may be said that the role-based relatedness of twoness is itself perverse, and perverse
agency inevitably ensues until developmental transformation makes possible a shift toward intersubjectivity.
Thus, in the perversion of agency, because transformation to intersubjectivity is elided, the patient's need to
create an impact in the material, relational world finds expression instead only within the confines of an
iconic twoness. In that solipsistic solution, a perversion of agency results, wreaking havoc (particularly over
time) for the patient in relationship to both mind and body (through symptoms). Even when enacted in the
relational world, in the absence of an intersubjective outlet, agency remains in a state of semiotic and
subjective confinement, “all dressed up but with nowhere to go” and relationships remain characterized by
control dynamics, not creative expression. The result is a relative sense of impotence (which can be
camouflaged by a subjective omnipotence),
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rather than an experienced sense of agency (or potency) with its concomitant symbolic expression in the me
—not-me world.
Nonetheless, it has been my impression that, even in patients whose experience is markedly locked in this
type of subversive struggle to create-destroy oneself, there is often (perhaps always) a “free” strand of agency
that survives this undertow, promoting, however unevenly, some type of forward motion in a manner
evocative of Winnicott's (1965) true self-experiencing, Bion's (1970) evolution toward O, and Eigen's (1993)
wholling tendency. This free strand of agency, perhaps an unconscious agency or what M. Slavin has referred
to as a “proto-agency” (personal communication), presses toward intersubjectivity and its creative
possibilities. Still, long periods in treatment are characterized by only subtle changes in the patient's readiness
to break free from her confinement, first evidenced by what we commonly call “resistance.”
Resistance as a Transitional Stage in the

Establishment of Agency
From the standpoint of a model of therapeutic action that includes the patient's agency, emergent signs of
resistance—however disturbing for analyst, patient, or both—must be welcomed. Something is happening in
the treatment and it is the patient who is the catalyst of therapeutic action, originally camouflaged as
therapeutic inaction or what Schafer (1976) described as “counteraction.” From the perspective taken here,
the patient is beginning to resist participating in a role-based relationship on terms defined by the analyst's
action, however sensitive, attuned, or “good-enough” his or her analytic activity may be. Resistance, then, is
a sign of the patient's emergent status as agent, albeit at this stage, as an inchoate or “undercover” agent. It
signals the patient's protest, an intermediary point in which the patient at once continues to collaborate in the
creation of self-experience as “object” (by defining herself in reaction to the analyst and complying with his
or her agenda or affective communication) while simultaneously actively repudiating her participation in this
complementary relationship. Schafer similarly discusses the patient's “disclaimed action” as efforts at once to
resist and to engage in analysis, and which ultimately remain protective of the status quo relationship.
Often, in the context of resistance, the patient and analyst experience a despairing sense of inertia, a lost
sense of working in tandem toward a common goal. Resistance thus allows for a transition from a shared (if
not entirely authentic) sense of working together, toward a gradual
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recognition of the inevitability that a former internal conflict (which resided as a collapsed dialectic in the
patient's internal, but still relational world) and which has been likely mirrored in the complementarity of the
analytic setup, now is coming into existence as a conflicting agenda in the emergent space between the
patient and the analyst (see Slavin & Kriegman, 1992, 1998), who presumably has his or her own sense of
agency.7
Such “resistances,” in giving rise to a shared sense of impasse, seem to subvert the analyst's activity
temporarily. Beyond the very useful step of diminishing the relative contribution of the analyst as agent of
change, however, they are not sufficient to impel therapeutic action itself. Historical resistance movements
can be taken as an analogy. For example, in his assessment of resistance in World War II, military historian
John Keegan (1989) concluded:
The principal achievement of resistance in western Europe during the years of Hitler's strength was
psychological rather than material. The most visible symbol of resistance was the underground newspaper …
and the most seditious activity the transmission of intelligence, of varied value, via clandestine networks …
[pp. 489-490] … The “indirect” offensive encouraged and sustained by the Allies against Hitler must be
judged to have coniributed materially little to his defeat. [p. 495; italics added]
Similarly, in psychoanalysis, however powerful “resistance” is in stymying the analyst's definition of the
patient and her treatment (and however much it may be a sign of the resuscitation of the patient's vitality as a
human being), resistance alone is insufficient to produce significant material change in the patient's battle to
recapture, or capture for the first time, a personal sense of agency and self-determination. Instead, the patient
often remains in the tailspin of twoness, forfeiting the entry to thirdness and, instead, often going to greater
and greater lengths to impel the analyst once again to act. Such endeavors to impel the analyst to act or to
change are perhaps best understood as a way-station along the
—————————————
7 This is an important presumption about which further (if brief) elaboration will follow. I assume the
hypothetical and preferable case in which the analyst's sense of agency is relatively secure in an effort to
bring into bold relief the palient's experiential dilemma (rooted itself in a relational history that both precedes
and includes the analytic relationship) in assuming agency and entering intersubjectivity. That experiential
dilemma, difficult enough, becomes far more complicated for both members when the analyst's sense of
agency is more precarious.
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path to personal agency and not as an end in themselves. Although they signify change, they simultaneously
signify the absence of decisive change, ultimately sustaining a familiar form of dyadic relatedness and
precluding the intersubjectivity associated with truly transformative therapeutic action. By tapping into the
analyst's personality or by exhorting the other to change, opportunities are bypassed, often again and again,
for claiming a sense of agency and increased semiotic status, begging the question: Why all of this effort and
activity in the service of sustaining a static phenomenological location? What does further active change
mean to such patients?
Clinical Illustration
I return for a moment to the patient I introduced in the beginning of this article, described there as
maintaining a coy, sullen stance. This presentation disavowed a frank expression of sexuality and aggression,
only conveying these aspects of self indirectly. She repeatedly voiced her sense that she was missing out on
her childhood and life but, in any moment requiring decision and direct expression, she demurred. For
example, her mother, who had tended toward a monopolistic claim on the domain of sexuality, increasingly
was able to generate a space for her daughter to express her own wishes and desires. Repeatedly, however,
her daughter refused all efforts to do so with an impotent “I don't know,” abetting what she perceived as her
mother's monopolistic ambitions while spiting her (and herself) at the same time. Not infrequently, the
emergent space would crumble as mother and daughter retreated to their well-rehearsed and now reified roles
(their twoness). At times, this pattern took on an exaggerated, urgent quality, compelling mother to display
frenzied, tantrumlike behavior while her daughter remained seemingly dead calm, revealing glimpses of
neither fury nor desire.
Meanwhile, my patient's father regarded himself as a rescue figure for his daughter, whom he felt was
victimized by his “selfish, irresponsible” wife. Unable himself to sustain the dialectics of thirdness, however,
he could not offer himself as the potent agent that his daughter required—not to be rescued but to rescue
herself. Instead, he offered her a picture of earnestness and moral righteousness.
My patient could use neither parent (as in Winnicott's object usage) for the expression of her own aggression
and desire, and thus, for her
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own self-transformation. In mother's monopolistic claims, she aspires to sole (and concretized) possession of
“the cigar”; in father's earnest seriousness, he does not own “the cigar” as his, let alone play with it. And their
daughter, trapped between them with “no inbetween,” cannot allow her own desires to gain a foothold nor
dare to own (let alone celebrate and play with) her own sexuality. Longing for someone to “do something” (I
believe this was a wish for reparation as much as a wish to clide her own fears, desires, and unfamiliar
identity), she repeatedly sealed off possibilities for new experience. For example, she would obsess about
decisions until they were made for her by others or rendered irrelevant by the passage of time or retreat to a
sulking posture instead of entering the relational (and triangular) fray. Despite her insistent demands for
change, she remained in the throes of twoness, not yet ready to face her fears nor to embrace her desires.
Splitting, Closed Dyadic Relations, and the

Collapse of Thirdness
Tragedy is embedded in this whirlwind of activity that creates motion and, at best, incremental change, but
precludes transformation. That is, despite gradual gains in agency and self-initiation of desire, the patient
continues to engage in repetition compulsions, preserving a relational status quo (of twoness), a perversion of
agency, and a “perseveration of experience” (Mitchell, 1997), keeping one foot on familiar land while testing
the waters of thirdness with the other. The patient delays—often for excruciating periods of time—claiming
ownership of her treatment and articulating her desires, needs, subjectivity, and self-definition, forestalling
the possibilities of new experience, entry to oedipal potentialities, and the mourning of a personal history
that, however defining, has become confining and deadening.
Here, the patient seeks change while refusing change, locked instead in a dyadic process that because of its
adhesive nature, cannot be made use of for purposes of intersubjective recognition. Ferenczi (1932) came to
acknowledge the limits of the analyst's activity in such cases, recognizing that “without [the patient's] self-
help, all our efforts may be quite useless” (p. 40). Patients, too, reach this conclusion, albeit for some only
very reluctantly and only after exhausting various rescue fantasies. For example, one patient, whose chronic
subjective experience vacillated between a deadening, entrenched sense of enslavement and enlivening but
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fleeting escape fantasy, sighed one day, revealing her dawning perception of her responsibility for her own
agency and destiny, “So therapy is not just going to make things better. I actually need to do something.”
In the absence of thirdness, splitting prevails. Splitting, emblematic of states of twoness, “generates a distinct
quality of experience … in which there is “no inbetween” (Ogden, 1986, pp. 61-62). Experience here is
dominated by a suspended animation-deadness, in which no choices are made, mind is disembodied, desire is
extinguished, and nothing ever “happens.” As Freud (1927) first recognized (see Grotstein, 1995), splitting is
characterized by the patient's effort to preserve incompatible agendas simultaneously. Since then, many have
made the same point. For example, Scarles (1986) described the patient's struggle in splitting as his effort “to
become a fully human individual without relinquishing his subjective omnipotence” (p. 30). Kernberg (1975)
and Ogden (1986) emphasized the need to keep loving and hating faccts of experience apart from one another
“because it is too dangerous for the primitively organized infant to love the object he hates, and hate the
object he loves” (Ogden, 1986, p. 51) Essentially deadlocked in a power struggle, “any independent activity
on the part of one party of the relationship is experienced as an impending dissolution of the relationship
which is based on mutual dependence (p. 162).8
Bion attributed splitting to “an infantile mental catastrophe due to the perception by the infant of a mother
whose ‘reverie’ was insufficient to contain his projections” (Grotstein, 1985, p. 53).9 In such a collapse of
potential space, mutually transforming psychic experience is not possible (Bromberg, 1991, 1996; Ogden,
1986, 1989, 1994; Winnicott, 1971), leaving no space for independent or agential surrender. Indeed, Ghent
(1990) described how “the longing for surrender … ‘to come clean’ … to become known, recognized” (p.
110) may remain buried or disguised
—————————————
8 Although I agree with Ogden's description of annihilation fears as “the leading anxiety” of the paranoid-
schizoid position, patients rarely seem to articulate their experience in these terms. It may be that while
annihilation fears organize the paranoid-schizoid position, they are more apt to be actively experienced and
articulated only at the brink of the transition to intersubjectivity.
9 In a similar vein, the patient's entry to intersubjectivity is predicated on the analyst's capacity to sustain this
dialectical mode of experiencing and be available to greet the patient's emergent projections, spontaneous
gestures, and agential foragings. Otherwise, the stage is set for a derailment within the treatment, echoing for
the patient a previously derailed developmental process (see also Slavin & Pollock, 1997). This may result in
the patient adapting to the analyst's needs, sustaining and reinforcing the coerced subjectivity of early
compliant, false self-adaptations, or remaining adrift in futile search of a requited intersub-jectivity.
- 638 -
(as masochism) due to “that most unwelcome price-tag: dread” (p. 114). The very “intensity of the
masochism” (and, perhaps, of splitting itself) may actually be understood as “a living testimonial of the
urgency with which some buried part of the personality is screaming to be exhumed” (p. 116).
It may be speculated that this buried part of the personality is the patient's agency (including sexual agency)
itself.
The Perversion of Agency: Splitting and its

Phenomenology
A vital, but to some extent overlooked, stepping-stone in the process of new meaning creation lies in the
elaboration of the old meaning that is embedded and imprisoned in this collapsed space, where new meaning
cannot be created. Translating Freud's original discussion of the repetition compulsion and symptom
formation into contemporary terms, it may be said that in the collapse of the dialectic that underlies splitting
and the perversion of agency (and its accompanying apparent state of mental paralysis), there is not an
absence of meaning. Rather, meaning itself has taken on a fixed, perseverative quality and may remain
“locked up” in a manner akin to the way energy may become locked up in the mass of an atom. In the
relational elaboration of this imprisoned and unsignified meaning, a long-standing phenomenological way
station yields to a more fluid, transformative, and ultimately agential process. Through this elaboration,
splitting, an “order-generating” process (Ogden, 1986, p. 48), evolves toward a personal meaning-generating
process, giving birth to the interpreting subject.
In what follows, I seek to elaborate aspects of this imprisoned meaning that I believe are archetypal of this
phenomenological location. Before I proceed, it should be noted that because I seek to spotlight the patient's
experience, the analyst's experience and participation in preserving or unlocking this phenomenological
impasse is not articulated (although I assume that access to such locked meaning emerges through a dialogic
process). Despite the potential risks of not explicating the analyst's responsibility and contribution, I believe
that too great a focus on interactive organization fails to acknowledge the degree—especially in cases of
severe splitting—to which the patient's subjectivity is not sufficiently present for interactive reorganization
and symbolization. For example, drawing on the work of Tustin (1986), Ogden (1986, 1994) elaborates the
idea of an “autistic-contiguous” mode of being in which subjectivity
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is confined within a tightly sealed solipsism and reliance on autistic objects as a result of earlier relational
problems. Similarly, Beebe and Lachmann (1998) describe the possibility that in the case of extreme self-
regulatory measures, the infant or adult patient may simply not be available (or only minimally available) for
interactive engagement and mutual regulation of internal states.
Perversion of Agency as Loyal Allegiance and

Spiteful Protest
For many patients, a powerful meaning embedded in the perversion of agency is that agency itself has come
to represent a violation of self-experience—a breach of one's allegiance to a trapped and victimized sense of
self. In cases of trauma, severe caretaking hypocrisy, and betrayal of trust, the sense of violation that
characterizes, or even organizes, this sense of identity may simply be beyond the pale. In that case, what
appears as inertia (and, in a material sense, is), is nevertheless psychologically quite active and goal-directed.
The patient, in delaying the assumption of personal agency or “I-ness” (Ogden, 1994; Fast, 1998), is busy.
She is maintaining a lonely vigil in commemoration of her victimized self. She is dedicated to remembering a
private holocaust that no one else may have witnessed, experienced, or validated.10 She is maintaining a
spiteful vengeance—a protest march that steps in time and never moves forward—against the powers that
were who dared to act at her expense or didn't dare to act to protect her. Instead of the creation of new
experience, the perversion of agency results in a dead-end inertia.
Fromm (1973), in his classic work, The Anatomy of Human Destruc-tiveness, questioned the intense
preoccupation that some people have with vengeance and made sense of it as a response to an intolerable
experience of fundamental injustice. For patients whose self-experience is organized around such a sense of
injustice (which I believe emerges secondary to the relational obliteration of agency), the idea of
relinquishing a psychological activity that is dedicated to self-history in favor of a
—————————————
10 Despite her allegiance to this past, she paradoxically cannot create a living memorial to it. At best, this
past is preserved in iconic form, or more likely in Lacan's register of the Real, in Bollas's unthought known.”
As Muller (1996) describes (pp. 91-104), when “catastrophe originally occurred in the presence of another
who simply registered it without responding, without naming it,” the experience remains unsymbolized and
cannot transform into something that can be either remembered or forgotten, without passing into language
and intersubjective mediation.
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new goal is apt to be experienced as self-burial: closing the lid on the coffin of oneself, granting clemency to
those guilty of unrepented moral transgressions, and joining with the enemy, with those who would prefer to
forget, to bury the past, to erase oneself.
“Recognition” is sought in this location, but as an object of victimization, not as a subject, thereby ironically
perpetuating psychic annihilation and the failure to create oneself as an agent whose signs and
communications have significance for the other. Splitting, thus, allows the experience of self-strangulation to
coexist paradoxically with the experience of self-preservation. In that sense, surrender (to use Ghent's term)
or recognition (to use Benjamin's)—an opportunity for joyfully coming alive—is simultaneously a death
experience (i.e., of one's victimized self).
Embedded in this allegiance to self-history lies the active holding on to an omnipotent moral protest, which
also characterizes the phenomenology of perverse agency. As Fromm (1973) noted, in the victim's passion
for vengeance (in response to such fundamental injustice), “he elevates himself to the role of God … [and
this] may be his greatest hour” (p. 306). The patient, in maintaining a dedication to his or her own
self-history, sustains a spiteful protest against an original, violating attachment figure and, in refusing to
concede, simultaneously maintains a loyal participation in that relationship. “Recognition” of the other here
fails as well, insofar as it is recognition of other as an icon (i.e., of “crimes against humanity”) and not as a
complicated human subject that is sought. In the perversion of agency, annihilation supplants recognition.
For example, one patient came to recognize that her own inner deadness reflected not only her loving
allegiance to her mother's sense of victimization, but also an indignant and hateful protest against her
mother's predatory tendency to live through her daughter rather than create a life of her own. Adding insult to
her own injury, this patient's deadness stood in steadfast opposition to (and hence, also loyal to her
victimization by) her father's drunken, imperious behavior, leaving her with no space in which to experience
her own agency and peremptory desires. In cases such as this, the patient's loyalty-vengeance not only
sustains a closed dyadic relationship, but imposes a viselike clamp on it that destroys linkages (Bion, 1962),
precludes the entrance of a third term (Lacan, 1977; Ogden, 1994), and forestalls surrender to the limiting
(beyond omnipotent creation) function of the Third (Muller, 1996), the articulation
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of desire (Lacan, 1977), the creation of new, oedipal experience (Davies & Frawley, 1994), and the
emergence of two mutually recognizing subjects (Benjamin, 1995).
Thus, in the ultimate perversion of agency, spite achieves the status of virtue and splitting becomes a matter
of moral integrity. As one patient said, partly to me, partly to herself, shaking her head in a way that
simultaneously suggested misery and victory, “I'm sorry … I promised myself long ago I'd never trust anyone
… I'd always stay here.” Another person referred to his allegiance to the underdog, telling me with a similar
admixture of pride, conviction, and resignation, “I'll always root for the losing team, but at least no one can
say I'm not consistent and loyal.” Yet another patient said, “I'm forever spiting myself but, to me, it's being
true to myself.”
Put differently, the profoundly human desire to have a creative, potent impact in the material, relational world
has been exchanged for an all-too-human but far less humane goal: The exclusive right to authoring one's
own demise. Again, Fromm's analysis of human destructiveness sheds light on the tragic intransigence of this
perversion of personal agency: “If man cannot create anything or move anybody, if he cannot break out of the
prison of his total narcissism and isolation, he can escape the unbearable sense of vital impotence and
nothingness only by affirming himself in the act of destruction of the life that he is unable to create” (p. 497).
In this exchange, which psychically robs the original aggressor of his or her power, the patient experiences, at
best, a bittersweet triumph. After all, spite, by definition, cannot achieve status as a moral virtue. Subjective
omnipotence is subjective; it does not allow for an authentic experience of personal agency and signifying
status in the material, relational world. For example, one man, triumphantly but masochistically controlling
the outcome of his treatment, announced to me that he was terminating that very session, revealing that “no
one” would come between him and his heroin—his secret trump card. Another man, in the face of any
apparent positive change in his life, never failed to remind me that he still held his ace-in-the-hole, repeating
his long-standing mantra, “I still sleep alone at night.” Another patient, secretive and proud and ashamed of
her masochistic rituals, expressed her indignance on discovering that a friend shared the very same
symptoms. “They're mine!” she protested. In their insistence on an adhesive form of connection, these
patients—at least at this developmental moment—simultaneously
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sustain an experience of exclusion from, rather than inclusion within, a potential space of thirdness in which
new identity can be created. Oedipal strivings (which require triangular space for their negotiation) become
compressed into the prison of twoness, such that, perversely, self-defeat is experienced, in part, as victory.
In my experience, there is often a transformative moment—characterized by a momentary sense of delighted

discovery—in which the patient may recognize himself or herself as an agent (however perversely) for the
first time as having actively collaborated in building a relationship based on polarization and opposition. For
example, one patient experienced a budding sense of self-respect in recognizing that her periodic mute
behavior as a child (previously experienced by her as a sign of her “pathetic” nature) had the impact, at least
in fantasy, of caricaturing her mother's loud and brutish behavior by polarizing the discrepancy between
them. Another patient, who had previously condemned himself for engaging in submissive, compulsive
sexual activity, now experienced an exuberant moment of pride in recognizing that although his behavior was
humiliating to himself, it simultaneously mocked his father by setting into bold relief the latter's
preoccupation with his own phallus.
Although such a moment of emergent recognition of oneself as an agent can powerfully fuel the process
whereby recognition and agency develop, it is in itself a very small consolation prize. The patient, in pirating
this omnipotence, remains the master of his or her own losses and defeat, a living testimonial to a time when
self-capture and the seizure of self-control was the only adaptive solution to capture and annihilation by an
original “enemy.” In refusing the possibilities of a new relational paradigm, the patient perpetuates a fixity to
lived experience in which “interpretation and perception are treated as identical processes” (Ogden, 1986, p.
61). In savoring her protest as the cornerstone of identity, she sustains an experience of alienation from the
relational and cultural world, rather than achieving a sense of belonging and inclusive fitness (see Slavin &
Kriegman, 1992). As Warren (1997) has written, in masochistic activity, the person does not give up power
for love, as is commonly conceived, but, rather, gives up “the possibility of truly loving by holding fast to a
kind a cynical knowingness, a power-play which forecloses the possibility of self-to-self contact” (p. 112).
In this perverse fame of one-down, but one-up-manship, becoming visible as a desiring, ambitious subject
represents a painful loss of omnipotent control, as well as an embarrassing concession to conventional limits
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and consensual laws associated with thirdness. The birth of agency and desire inevitably threatens to betray
and to annihilate what has become a lifelong identity and, along with it, the only purpose in one's life, risking
a devastating loss of identity, an overwhelming experience of emptiness, and a bewildering crisis of personal
meaning.
For many patients, as previously suggested, another facet that perpetuates the perversion of agency is that the
claiming of agency and desire has become entangled with a willingness to become someone who, long ago,
betrayed the self in a never-to-be-forgotten (though often consciously forgotten) way—someone with whom
the patient is also identified in the other part of the split. For example, as Ferenczi (1933) noted, “the fear of
the uninhibited, almost mad adult changes the child, so to speak, into a psychiatrist and, in order to become
one and to defend himself against dangers coming from people without self-control, he must know how to
identify himself completely with them” (p. 205). The much-desired goal of personal agency competes with
the dreaded loss of control over previously hidden or only dissociatively exposed impulses and desires. Such
a loss of control over what inevitably are, to at least some degree, raw, unbounded, and unknown aspects of
self, therefore, brings moral risks and responsibility associated with “real” (i.e., at once subjective and
material) as opposed to strictly subjective power. The irony in this can be devastating to the patient who now,
at least implicitly, recognizes the possibility that in taking a chance on new experience, he or she will
appropriate the analytic space and “set up a system that is just as cruel as that of the defeated enemy”
(Fromm, 1973, p. 513).
So, in the splitting that underlies perverse agency, the patient may achieve a sense of loyalty to an organizing
sense of self, but the cost is high—a loyalty or submission to the other's subjectivity. At the same time,
splitting preserves the patient's spiteful protest against this attachment figure; but again the cost is high,
simultaneously spiting oneself by failing to produce one's own personal-meaning legacy. Instead, the patient
maintains a rigid but organizing morality, as well as a stifling omnipotence that precludes the expression of
desires (sexual and aggressive) that may closely resemble those who had betrayed the patient in some form or
another and that would render her vulnerable to dependence. In short, splitting accomplishes, on a psychic
level, a simultaneity of contradictory agendas; in doing so, splitting preserves one's psychic foundation and
wreaks havoc on it at the same time. It simultaneously and paradoxically keeps one's sense of self both alive
and dead.
- 644 -
It is my impression that there is an additional cost of splitting: here, the patient only partly reveals herself.
Loyalty and spite, hallmarks of perverse agency, may be understood as muted, indirect, and even
manipulative expressions of a more frank love and hate. The alive and direct expression of love and hate, fear
and desire, vulnerability and pride, may more properly belong to the realm of agency and intersubjectivity.
By contrast, here such uninhibited self-exposure remains at bay, and the patient sustains a poised existence
between loyalty-vengeance and lived, in-the-moment experience, in which she simply cannot cut her losses,
which continue to mount in real time.
From Splitting to Intersubjectivity:

Phenomenological Precursors
Here I provide some brief sketches of shifts in subjectivity that may mark a transition out of twoness and
splitting. These incremental shifts prepare the patient for the morally confusing and more radical quest of
assuming agency and create the possibility of resurrecting a formerly stifled semiotic and phenomenological
trajectory.11
Foreshadowing recent discourse on thirdness, the construct of “multiplicity” entered the psychoanalytic
idiom (Bromberg, 1996; Davies, 1996; Harris, 1996; Lachmann, 1996; Mitchell, 1993; M. Slavin, 1996),
accentuating the personal flexibility “to represent oneself as fluid, complex, and subtly textured” (Lachmann,
1996, p. 595). This construct offers a transitional and intersubjective bridge between splitting and integration,
simultaneously depathologizing the problem of splitting and deidealizing the goal of integration.12 It is this
“multiplicitous” subjectivity (perhaps more usefully thought of as a capacity for transitional and dialectical
experience), to which the analyst offers access and which the patient (often
—————————————
11 It should be noted that heretofore I have sought to obscure the analyst's subjectivity in order to claborate
the imprisoned meaning embedded in the patient's perversion of agency. At this phenomenological juncture,
however, the analyst's agency and subjectivity become more centrally implicated—as both a catalyst and
participant—in the patient's evolution of her own subjectivity beyond its stifling, if familiar, confines.
Nonetheless, the tilt of this discussion remains on the patient's subjective evolution.
12 The term “multiplicity” provides a useful correction against an idealized construct of integration,
reminding us of what M. Slavin (1996) has argued may be an adaptive limit on self-integration in which, at
best, we organize ourselves into “a not overly integrated, never fully reconcilable constellation of versions of
ourselves” (p. 624). Nonetheless, my preference remains to place the accent on the “striving for integration,”
as in the singular process model favored by Lachmann (1996), which I believe captures the spiritual
dimension inherent in the personal quest for agency and meaning-creation. Put differently, agency uses,
organizes, and (to some degree) unites, but also exists over and above, our multiplicity.
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inadvertently) discovers, that provides a space for mutual discovery, intersubjective knowing, negotiation,
and an end to the war of twoness.
In this intersubjective space, both parties may experience relative personal freedom as well as relative
constraints—a democratic space of checks and balances that no longer is limited to the tyrannies of splitting.
Yet entering this space may initially represent an impossible or, minimally, a double-edged choice for the
patient, experienced not as a pathway toward greater personal freedom, but as a potential road to entrapment
and annihilation. For example, when one's sense of morality and identity is based on splitting, by definition,
subjective experience is internally inconsistent. When self-experience is limited to only one side of the split,
however, the patient is free (and forced) to experience self as internally consistent and either morally
righteous or pure (based on an identification as victim) or as the embodiment of pure immorality (based on an
identification as aggressor). Love and hate may be kept in pure, uncontaminated form, diminishing anxieties
associated with annihilation of oneself and one's valued relationships (Ogden, 1986).
Consequently, for a patient whose identity is based on severe splitting, early encounters with the analyst's
subjectivity—critical encounters insofar as they lead to a discovery of a previously unknown terrain of
inter-subjectivity—may lead to a preoccupation with, and moral condemnation of, the analyst's apparent (and
sometimes, quite real) hypocrisy and lack of internal consistency. This analyst, with her multiplicitous
subjectivity, lives not with the purity of self-experience that splitting achieves, but with a much greater sense
of internal contradiction than the patient can stand, even as the patient desperately longs for a pathway toward
greater personal freedom. That is, early discoveries of the analyst's subjectivity creates a dilemma for the
patient who both desperately wants to preserve the analyst in her either-or split (as an attachment figure
simultaneously linked through loyalty and spite) and desperately does not want to discover that the analyst,
like her, is not capable of her own sense of agency and capacity to sustain the dialectics of thirdness. Put
differently, the patient desperately wants the analyst to conspire with an omnipotent eschewing of the Third
and remain loyal to the “suffocating dyad,” and yet desperately longs to discover that the analyst participates
in the Third and can provide the patient the possibility for meaningful enfranchisement. (See Muller, 1996,
pp. 189-190, for discussion of this dilemma in terms of the analyst's unique role as both a member of the
dyad and of the Third.)
When patients display less severe splits, these transformations of
- 646 -
meaning are apt to be less tortured and to require less articulation. In stead, what seems to dominate early
discoveries of the analyst's subjectivity is the patient's devaluation of, and experience of being burdened by,
the analyst's subjectivity. These same patients (less deeply fearful), however, may more readily experience
curiosity and desire in response to discoveries of the analyst's subjectivity. In turn, what has been
increasingly experienced as stale now becomes more interesting. In that sense, the emergence of boredom in
the treatment may serve as a tell-tale sign of the entrance of curiosity, desire, and ultimately intersubjectivity.
Gradually, through this exploration of the analyst's subjectivity, the patient “gains empathy towards his splits
… [which now] seek return and admittance to reachieve at one-ment” (Grotstein, 1995, pp. 170-171). The
initially unmediated reaction to discoveries of the analyst's subjectivity gives way to interpretation, providing
an entry into intersubjectivity. From a semiotic perspective, the analyst's sharing of personal subjectivity
provides signs eliciting interpretation. In that process, the space begins to be pried open between the symbol
and the symbolized (Ogden, 1986), creating an opening for desire. What formerly reflected self-preservation
increasingly is experienced as self-strangulation.
Further, in her discovery of the analyst's subjectivity and dialectic between personal freedom and constraint,
the patient gradually recognizes that the analyst will never fully know her personal experience. The analyst's
agency ensures that despite an empathic immersion in the patient's personal experience and availability for
influence and enactment, there will be limits. There will not be an often longed-for trading of places. As
Bromberg (1991) wrote:
In one way, it is as if the patient is communicating that the analyst must somehow “lose” his mind in order to
know the patient's. The analyst's ability to make creative use of this disorganized state of relatedness, while
keeping his own center of subjectivity without inflicting it on the patient, is the heart of this part of the work.
[p. 411; italics added]
That is, the analyst (because of his or her own center of subjectivity) will never fully experience the
emotional state of the patient (who had no such center of subjectivity in the context of earlier trauma)
characterized, as it has been, by perpetrator-victim or other dichotomized, polarized roles. The patient, thus,
must concede her lifelong quest to be known in this omnipotent, fusion-based way (that bypasses
intersubjectivity) and
- 647 -
along with it her quest to right original injustices—a concession experienced, in large part, as a loss of
identity.
Fortunately, there is real (if only partial and always bittersweet) compensation. Because of the analyst's
relationship with the Third (and limits), the patient's aggression too will bear limits, and she will not bear the
burden, in full, of her feared identification with the aggressor. Further, she will no longer bear to such a
degree the “suffocating” solitary weight of her own unsignified baggage (see Muller, 1996, p. 87), because
there is now opportunity to release experience through symbols, no longer circumscribed to the endless cycle
of the dyad where words don't “add up” to real impact and transformation.
But perhaps the most devastating blow to the patient's loyal-vengeful identity comes in the patient's dawning
realization that, in sustaining her long-enduring power struggle, she has actually enacted (at least in
relationship to herself) the very damage that she sought to condemn. This realization leaves the patient at
once guilty and ravaged, perpetrator and victim. Genuine anger, regret, and sadness mount as she
contemplates the futility of her life's misguided and perverse agenda. Her lifelong pursuit of reparation and
justice now yields to a greater involvement in the present, as she begins to imagine, through the analyst's
subjectivity, that she too can experience greater personal freedom and vitality.
Such phenomenological changes pavc the way for the shedding of a twoness in which morality and identity
are based on splitting, revealing in its place a “passionate longing for surrender” (Ghent, 1990). The outcome
of this surrender—ultimately an act of faith for the patient—depends on the analyst's personal agency (and
involvement in the Third) to keep the relationship safe for the democratic existence of not one, but of two
people. In relinquishing a life of omnipotent self-capture, the patient must rely on the analyst not to aggress
against or emotionally abandon the now vulnerable patient (that is, not to replicate past traumas). Further, the
patient needs the analyst not to forfeit her own sense of agency and rights to life beyond the dyad, reinforced
and made possible through her participation in the Third. To the degree to which the analyst can sustain her
involvement in the Third, she helps her patient avoid replicating an historical confusion between an
identification with the aggressor (who desires at the expense of another) and desire that is the basis for
personal agency.
In tandem with the patient's discovery of this particular, contradictory person who appears to have an identity
based, not on splitting, but on
- 648 -
something more choiceful (and whose life extends beyond the dyad), she begins to experience increased
desire toward this person who is both “like” and “different.” It is this emergence of desire that wreaks
ultimate havoc on the loyalty-spite split as a basis for identity, further advancing the transformation to
thirdness. That is, the patient's glimpse of her own desires impels her, de-spite herself, to now contemplate
her own use of the object (Winnicott, 1971) for her own gain. And in so doing, she must also surrender
(Ghent, 1990), not only to a new relationship, but to life beyond the dyad—to a life anchored in the Third
(with its consensual and even foundational mooring). No longer so trapped in power plays, the patient is
more ready to experience genuine play.
That is the dilemma that the patient arrives at in her quest for agency. It threatens to heal—by blowing apart
—the very splits that have become the basis for identity. It threatens to exchange a known subjective impasse
of the dyad for unknown (and repudiated) intersubjective terrain. In relinquishing the familiar but stifling
confines of splitting, she takes a chance on being both loyal to her own agenda and joined in a relationship. In
conceding a solitary vigil to the past, she creates a space for a shared process of remembering and mourning
history. Moreover, she creates a space for engaging in the present and elaborating a future.
One of my patients has repeatedly voiced that she is “tired of talk, talk, talk” and longs for action.
Appropriating the analytic space for her own exploration and creation of personal experience (which has
significance for the other), however, means becoming someone with her own sense of agency, potency, and
desire, with the attendant risks of not only taking an inch, but taking a mile, and resembling uncomfortably
closely, at least for a time, someone that she promised herself long ago never to be. It means surrendering to a
world where signs have consensual validation, where words have meaning, and language sets boundaries. It
means relinquishing a confining “principled” morality that denies any personal freedom, an omnipotent self-
capture that has become unbearably lonely, a psychic deadness that precludes sexual desire, and taking a
chance on the much-needed multiplicity, but much-dreaded duplicity, of a desperately needed, real, alive
other (who may exploit, usurp, and appropriate). It means making a choice to betray one's very identity in
pursuit, at last, of a requited intersubjectivity. It means surrendering to another (and to the Third) in an act of
faith that in the best of scenarios (at least for a time) will bring with it waves of terror and exhilaration, dread
and desire, psychic destruction and new creation.
- 649 -
Conclusion
An underlying assumption throughout this article has been that there is a sequential patterning to
transformations in subjectivity and associated incremental gains in agency. At the same time, it is assumed
that incremental gains in agency and the space of thirdness eventuate in not merely quantitative change, but
qualitative, “quantum” change that consists of the patient's “breaking free” from the confines of a closed
dyad, allowing herself to assume a previously disavowed or unconscious agency and a capacity to use the
space of thirdness, increasingly, as the “place where we live” (Winnicott, 1971). Along with these
incremental and more radical transformations in subjectivity, experience previously organized within a state
of twoness (and its simultaneity of omnipotent lawlessness and stifling confinement) yields to an organization
of thirdness, characterized by its dialectic between lawful constraint and creative liberation. The patient's
agency, in this view, is seen not only as a goal of psychoanalysis, but as its sine qua non mechanism of
therapeutic action. When agency is stifled, so too is therapeutic action.
A phenomenology of loyalty-spite associated with the perversion of agency and its emblematic states of
twoness or splitting is described. In addition, transformations of subjectivity are sketched that represent
incremental gains in agency and entry to a new terrain, characterized by thirdness and intersubjectively
created meaning. I suggest that this is an archetypal phenomenology, organized in tandem with the structure
of twoness, its gradual breakdown, and the emergence of thirdness. Such a phenomenology is seen as
simultaneously organized between the dyad and, in part, by a deeper foundational structure.
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Gentile, J. (2001). Close but No Cigar: The Perversion of Agency

(2001). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 37:623-654

Jill Gentile, Ph.D.

through this article's many incarnations.

Twoness: Implications for Agency

oneself and one's lived experience” (p. 142).

Thirdness: Creating a Space for Agency

Benjamin, 2001; Ghent, 1990; Muller, 1996). In that “beyond omnipo-tence”

Agency as Therapeutic Action

As a literature on therapeutic action evolved—whether concerned with interpretation, emotional provision, or

Agency and its Perversion

Resistance as a Transitional Stage in the

Splitting, Closed Dyadic Relations, and the

The Perversion of Agency: Splitting and its

Perversion of Agency as Loyal Allegiance and

In my experience, there is often a transformative moment—characterized by a momentary sense of delighted

From Splitting to Intersubjectivity:

When patients display less severe splits, these transformations of

Bion, W. (1967), Second Thoughts. New York: Jason Aronson, 1993.

Bollas, C. (1989), Forces of Destiny. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Bruner, J. (1990), Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Eigen, M. (1993), The Electrified Tightrope. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

University Press, 1988.

Freud, S. (1927), Fetishism. Standard Edition, 21:149-158. [→]

Lacan, J. (1977), Ecrits. New York: W.W. Norton.

Ogden, T. (1994), Subjects of Analysis. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Racker, H. (1968), Transference and Countertransference. London: Hogarth Press. [→]

Renik, O. (1996), The perils of neutrality. Psychoanal. Q., 65:495-571. [→]

Schafer, R. (1983), The Analytic Attitude. New York: Basic Books.

Segal, H. (1957), Notes on symbol formation. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 38:391-397. [→]

treatment. Psychoanal. Dial., 4:253-274. [→]

Warren, C. S. (1997), The disavowal of desire: A relational view of sadomasochism. Psychoanalytic

Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

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