More Than One Can Live: Reconceiving Harm and Reparation in the Intersubjective World Scientific Program by Jessica Benjamin, PhD

In the therapeutic process, we encounter impasses where one must seemingly harm or be harmed by the other, and it feels as though there is only room for one psyche to live. This constellation was already implied by Klein’s writings, but this presentation will juxtapose her views to an intersubjective perspective: contrasting the intrapsychic idea of reparation, based on understanding unconscious anxieties of harming the love object, with the intersubjective ideas of repairing rupture and restoring recognition. The theory of mutual regulation and recognition allows a reformulation of both harm and repair.

The position from which we communicate about or step out of the deep complementary structure underlying impasse is elaborated in the idea of the moral Third – a developmental and clinical concept. The moral Third can be defined as a representation of a world in which repair is possible – a lawful world of self and other in which attachment is preserved by acknowledging the inevitable violations of expected patterns.

However, when there is a history of failed repair, even expressing a need for acknowledgment may be fearfully equated with being destructive to the needed other—the other who cannot tolerate the failure to be good. Thus, both need for responsiveness and need for acknowledgment of failure have the imagined or real potential to so destabilize the other that being injured and harming the other become conflated. How does our clinical work enable us to create/recreate with our patients the sense of a lawful, meaningful world (representation) in which both can live?

Learning Objectives:
• To make clinical use of the idea of intersubjective rupture and repair and its developmental origins
• The meaning and application of the concept of the idea of the Moral Third and how it guides the therapist in clinical impasses that involve “doer-done to” complementarity
• Will be able to evaluate and discern when acknowledgment and disclosure by the analyst are helpful, especially when there are problems of dissociation and shame.

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Admission is Free. Fee for 2 CME credits: $30 for NOBPC members; $50 non-members

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Jessica Benjamin PhD is currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. Dr. Benjamin is one of the original contributors to the fields of relational psychoanalysis, theories of intersubjectivity, and gender studies and feminism as it relates to psychoanalysis and society.

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and NOBPC. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of 2 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s);. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE INFOR-MATION FOR ALL LEARNERS: None of the planners and presenters of this CME program have any relevant financial relationships to disclose. PSYCHOLOGISTS AND SOCIAL WORKERS MAY RECEIVE CREDIT FOR THIS ACTIVITY WITH A CME CERTIFICATE.