we are saying the same thing!

we need to be aware of how conditional and fragile are our efforts to counter destructiveness, and this fragility makes for a tension that is extraordinarily difficult to maintain, in theory and in practice. But there is no other point to clinical work than to aim for a mutual understanding that ameliorates destructiveness—not in a one-time overcoming but an incremental, imperfect process that requires continual self-correction and modulation of our course. (299)Intersubjective relations cannot, of course, be free of destruction. But intersubjective space does not refer to all intersubjective relations; it refers to something more specific, derivative of Winnicott’s term, potential space. It can also be understood in contrast to breakdown, which takes the form of the split complementarity: the relationship of doer–done to, in which it appears possible only to submit to or resist the demand of the other. Complementary power relations collapse the space of communication and internal mental reflection that make it possible to identify with the other’s position without losing one’s own and so eventually to analyze the interaction. Intersubjective space might work to contain destruction, but frequently—and this is what makes destruction destructive—it collapses in the face of destruction, leaving us in the complementary world of internal objects (if you are strong, I must be weak). Surviving destruction means, in effect, restoring or creating such space.The idea is not to posit an ideal space that is free of something bad (destruction), a kind of idealized “authenticity,” but rather to conceptualize a movement between expansion and collapse of mental space, as part of the movement between recognition and breakdown. Intersubjective space may be thought of practically as mental activity occurring in or between persons that, like our well-loved metaphor, the container, expands and collapses, depending on the quality of the destruction and of our practice in sustaining our capacities in the face of it. What this idea invokes is the very thing Butler finds lacking in my formulations, a “temporal dynamism . . . of a struggle that repeats itself, a laboring with destructiveness that must continually be restaged.”Thus I believe there is between Butler and me an agreement, obscured perhaps by language, context, and disciplines. (300)It is not the Other that is owned; one’s self is owned and that places the Other outside (dispossesses him). In my understanding, it is not the Other that the self must include but the projected part of self. When the self reowns the disowned part of self—for instance, the self’s repudiated passivity projected by the homophobic man onto the homosexual Other—the Other no longer has to be a receptacle for it. The Other can be something else, an external being neither owned nor disowned by the self.1 Paradoxically, the logic of owning and disowning can be transcended only by owning our unwanted parts. (301)I suggested that, rather than seeing a figure as the third, we should look for the origins of the mental function of thirdness in the dyadic development of dialogue. (304)The third is thus not simply constituted through harmony, nor is it “an ideal of transcendence . . . a reference point for reciprocal desire that exceeds representation.” Rather, it is a foundation for symbolic representation, and so its meaning, in Butler’s phrase, both exceeds and constitutes the relation of desire. Ultimately, for this thirdness to develop, it must sustain the challenge of difference and opposition, so that one can decenter from the identification with only one position (only I am right; or, if you are right, I must be wrong). Aron and I (Aron and Benjamin, 1999) have suggested that this decentering action is crucial to recognition of other subjects. We see thirdness as a mutually achieved state that affords a position from which it is possible to recognize the position of the other. It is a position from which to step outside or think beyond the complementary dyadic relation in which the other is simply a projection or the self feels coerced by the projections of the other.In the collapsed dyadic space of the complementary relation, the person who interrupts is not necessarily perceived as an other at all, nor does she necessarily provide a point of thirdness. It is, rather, the space of thirdness that allows us to perceive an other. The question, from an intersubjective viewpoint, is whether the oservation [sic] or participation by a third becomes a base for recognition or self-deflation, as in the persecutory third who sees or causes my humiliation by my lover. (305)