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Recognition of close connection between the Drive and the Object, whereby the Object is understood to be the revealer of the Drive (Green 2002). Within the intertwining of Object and Drive connection, analysis includes recovery of Eros (life, love) and Sexuality as its function.
III. Cb. Intersubjectively Relevant ‘Third Topography’/’Third Model’ The French (Brusset, 2005, 2006) have adopted the term ‘La Troisième Topique’/ ‘Third Topography’, also known as ‘The Third Model” (see the separate entry OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY) to retrospectively assemble under one metapsychological rubric the work of a number of post-Freudian authors who added the relationship to early caretakers as prerequisite to the attainment of a psychic apparatus capable of operating according to one or the other of the two Freudian models of the psychic apparatus. [The first (Freud, 1900) being the topographical one of a division into consciousness, unconsciousness, and preconsciousness, each with their separate rules of operation and the second (Freud, 1923, 1926) being the structural model, which divides the psychic apparatus into id, ego, and superego.] North American French analysts include in this group also two English speaking authors - Winnicott and Loewald. The ‘Third Topography’/’Third model’ posits that in human development, the two- person mind precedes that of the one-person psychic autonomy of drive, defense, and intrapsychic fantasy, described by Freud. While the first and second models have been used to depict neurotic illness as a mind at war with itself, the “third model” describes a state in the pre-history of the individual, when the mind is not always capable of functioning within its own circle of representations and able to judge them as such. To begin with, it is dependent upon the nebenmensch (Freud, 1895), the other-near-by, to ensure that the psyche is not overwhelmed by internal and external excitations. The caretaker’s modulation of stimulation, taking on the function of stimulus barrier, allows the baby to eventually recognize libidinal and aggressive impulses as non-traumatic parts of himself. Thus the third model describes a time in the life of each individual before the development of the other two. The third model was discovered last theoretically but describes a situation, which is first in the life of the individual. From the point of view of the unconscious subject , persons in the neurotic-normal range can be said to have an “internal” life while borderlines and psychotics do not experience either their drives or their fantasies as “internal”. In order to move from primary process thinking where wishes are perceived as fulfilled to where wishes can be experienced in a transitional space of truth and untruth, one needs the intervention of a good-enough parent as temporary prosthesis and container. In this model, each human being begins life in a situation of two- person psychic processing where together the baby and the environment are an operative unit and it is only over time with considerable (usually unconscious) psychic work on the part of both parties that a relative one-person intra-psychic autonomy is established. The latter is viewed as an ideal universal development not accomplished by all persons, usually because of deficiencies in the primal two-person encounter. For these retrospectively dubbed ‘third model’
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