I’m finding Jessica Benjamin’s work extremely interesting as someone trained in Margaret Archer and Pierpaolo Donati’s relational sociology. For Archer and Donati thirdness is about the outgrowths of our relationship: together we produce effects which are shared to which we orientate ourselves evaluatively. This is what Donati calls the relational reflexivity in which the relational goods (trust, mutuality, recognition etc) or their absence figure into how we relate to each other, in the process shaping the reproduction or transformation of those goods. For Benjamin there’s a more basic category of thirdness described on loc 703 of Beyond Doer and Done To:
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.
Her interest is in how anything comes to figure as a shared point of reference outside the dyad. What makes this particularly interesting I think is her sense of the psychodynamics involved in the emergence of this shared reference. It involves as, she puts it, a form of surrender. There needs to be a weakening of the hold of the self in order to enable a shared reference to emerge because sharing entails recognising the separateness of the other. It’s only in their otherness that the point of reference can come to be shared by us. From 717:
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.
The argument I would like to develop is that LLM facilitate a form of proto-sharing but without the need for surrender. A sense in which some experience of mutuality can emerge (predicated on what Milan Sturmer and I call attunement) but without the psychological risk involved in the encounter with the other. This raises the question of whether there is a real shared reference point with the LLM. Can there be thirdness with a model? I’m not sure but the strange psychic ambivalence of models can be understood at root in these terms I think, in the sense they are available without risk. They can produce at least an experience of thirdness but without the need for surrender
Mark Carrigan 