Psychodynamic Practice

Individuals, Groups and Organisations

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‘I am watching you. Are you watching yourself in

1
me? ’: reflection as an act of triangulation

Joanna Laurens

To cite this article: Joanna Laurens (2023) ‘I am watching you. Are you watching yourself
1
in me? ’: reflection as an act of triangulation, Psychodynamic Practice, 29:4, 343-361, DOI:
10.1080/14753634.2023.2234913

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14753634.2023.2234913

Published online: 25 Jul 2023.

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Psychodynamic Practice, 2023
Vol. 29, No. 4, 343–361, https://doi.org/10.1080/14753634.2023.2234913

‘I am watching you. Are you watching yourself in me?1’:

reflection as an act of triangulation
Joanna Laurens

(Received 2 May 2023; Accepted 6 July 2023)

This paper approaches the process of ‘reflection’ as an interpersonal and

intra-personal creative act. As commonly used, the word ‘reflection’ appears
to reference two seemingly different processes; the returning of a mirror
image and the process of reflective thought. Examining the intersection of
these two definitions – from infant development, through attachment theory
to post-Kleinian thinking and Lacan – this paper finds that the act of
‘reflection’ can be conceived of as an act of triangulation, in
a mathematical sense, whereby a pre-existing but unknown point is found/
made using two known points as the vertices.
Keywords: Reflection; triangulation; creativity; infant development; mir­
roring; Oedipal situation

Introduction
Even in everyday usage, the word ‘reflection’ seems to reference two very
different processes – as Pines notes: ‘“Reflection” is used for the mirror image
and [also] the process of reflective thought’ (Pines, 1982, p. 17). The concept of
‘reflection’ as ‘mirror image’ is most often employed, psychoanalytically, in
relation to infant development – specifically, the mother’s ‘reflection’ of the
child (i.e.: Kohut & Goldberg, 1984; Mahler, 1968; Winnicott, 1956, 1962).
Alternatively, an understanding of ‘reflection’ as ‘reflective thought’ would take
us in the direction of literature on self-awareness; the capacity to observe oneself
in interaction with the world (i.e.: Barwick, 2004; Sterba, 1934; Zetzel, 1956).
‘Reflection’ means literally ‘a bending back’2, but exactly what is being
‘bent back’, and from where, varies: ‘Reflection’ as ‘reflective thought’ involves
consciously directing our minds back against their own thoughts as objects –
entertaining complexity and diverse viewpoints; dealing with ‘differences’.
Conversely, ‘reflection’ as a ‘mirror image’ connotes the returning of
a ‘sameness’ - and not conscious thought, either: The baby sees ‘himself or
herself . . . in the mother’s face’ (Winnicott, 1956, p. 151), but this is not the
result of conscious thought on the mother’s part: Mothering is not an intellectual
function (Winnicott, 1964).
These dichotomies reverberate in the etymology of the word itself: Reflexion
referred both to ‘considered thought’ and also to ‘the action of a reflex’; a knee-

Corresponding author. Joanna Laurens Email: joannalaurens@mac.com

© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

344 J. Laurens
jerk reaction – that is, an involuntary action operating without conscious
thought, wherein the response unthinkingly ‘reflects’ the intensity of the
stimulus3. Beginning with infant development literature and attachment theory,
before moving on to post-Kleinian thinking and Lacan, this paper seeks to
explore how we might understand the processes inherent in ‘reflection’, given
that ‘reflection’ denotes both the generation of mature thoughts and also the
elicitation of unthinking reactions, which bypass the conscious mind.

Trigonometry: location, location . . . creation?

If the infant could speak about the process of psychological ‘birth’, Winnicott
believes s/he would say: ‘I get back, (as a face seen in a mirror), the evidence
I need, that I have been recognised as a being’ (Winnicott, 1962, p. 61); ‘when
I look, I am seen, so I exist’ (Winnicott, 1956, p. 154, my italics). Here, parental
reflection brings the infant into existence as a psychological self. For Winnicott,
this process involves the returning of ‘sameness’, wherein infants are ‘getting
back what they are giving’ (Winnicott, 1956, p. 151); wherein ‘. . .the precursor
of the mirror is the mother’s face’ (Winnicott, 1956, p. 149). However, encom­
passing both understandings of the word, Winnicott also implies that reflection
contributes something ‘different’, something more than a mirror image, because
this is a ‘creative looking’ (Winnicott, 1956, p. 154, my italics), wherein ‘seeing
gives form’ (Wright, 2005, p. 525). In other words, the parents are ‘changing the
other by providing something the other did not have before’ (Stern, 1985,
p. 144).
Before this ‘creative looking’ of the parents, ‘if we look through the baby’s
eyes, we have not yet reached a stage at which there is a place to see from’
(Winnicott, 1988, p. 131, my italics). That is, ‘before integration . . . the indivi­
dual only exists for those who observe’ (Winnicott, 1955, p. 148) and does not
exist as a ‘place’ from which observations can be made. In this way, parental
‘reflection’ constitutes the child as this ‘place to see from’; as a ‘place’ which
can then undertake its own observations, in turn. So, a Winnicottian under­
standing of ‘reflection’ might be the ‘creative looking’ of two people, which
constitutes a third ‘place to see from’. We could relate this creative act to the
mathematical definition of ‘triangulation’, which is: The location of an unknown
point, using two known points as the vertices.
I have referred, here, to ‘two people’ and to the ‘parents’ in the plural.
Winnicott is clearly focussed on mother–baby interactions, but his reference
to ‘those who observe’ implies more than one observer. The obvious next-in-
line observer, is the father. Winnicott does concede that ‘fathers can be good
mothers for limited periods of time’ (Winnicott, 1964, p. 17), but recent
infant research suggests that fathers are not just mothers-with-limitations but,
from birth, something ‘different’: By 3 weeks, neonates indicate an aware­
ness of the father, distinct from the mother, by moving hands and feet in
different patterns for each parent (Lichtenberg, 1983). Attachment research is
 Psychodynamic Practice 345
finding evidence of an infant-father dyad, present from shortly after birth
(Steele et al., 1996), whilst observations of newborns and their fathers
suggest that fathers are just as attuned – just as capable of ‘reflecting’
their newborn – as are mothers (Chamberlain, 1987). Support is growing
for the belief that ‘the fate of the human psyche is to have always two
objects and never one alone, however far one goes back’ (Green, 1980,
p. 146). Whilst there is research to support the idea that dyadic and triadic
processes may be separate, but parallel, developments for neonates
(Burhouse, 2001; Klitzing et al., 1999), a neonatal awareness of the father
need not necessarily imply an awareness of a relationship between father and
mother – an Oedipal dynamic – it could well suggest two ‘dyadic pairs. . .
infant and mother, or infant and father’ (Mann, 1997, p. 91).
Winnicott is one of many writers for whom the developmental function of
‘reflection’ is significant, although some prefer the term ‘mirroring’ (i.e.: Kohut
& Goldberg, 1984; Lichtenstein, 1977; Mahler, 1968; Foulkes, 1964); or ‘attu­
nement’ (i.e.: Fonagy et al., 1993; Stern, 1985); or ‘affect synchrony’ (Schore,
2002). Winnicott is also one of many writers for whom ‘reflection’ involves
giving back to the child both ‘difference’ and ‘sameness’: For Kohut and
Goldberg (1984), the self-objects mirror the infant’s own state, whilst the
merged infant internalises their calmness and power; for Fonagy (2001), the
parents attune to the infant’s own feelings, regulating these by simultaneously
contributing an incompatible affect; for Schore (2002), the infant becomes aware
of a synchronous other, but also accommodates him/herself to that other; for
Stern (1985), the parents reflect the child’s affect, but ‘translate’ this affect,
‘cross-modally’, so it is returned via a new medium; and for Bion (1967a) the
mother receives the projections of the infant and returns them in a modified but
recognisable form.
The consistent emphasis, here, is an inseparable mix of mirroring (‘same­
ness’) with a creative contribution from others (‘difference’), suggesting that
parental ‘reflection’ functions on the cusp of subjectivity and objectivity –
between something generated by the self (an object which is created) and yet,
paradoxically, something pre-existing the self (an object which is found)
(Winnicott, 1955, 1962, 1988). This is all very reminiscent of Winnicott’s
‘spatula game’, but the curious twist is that we are not discussing the infant’s
own creativity (yet) – but the parents’ creative finding of their child: This is an
understanding of the child as both found and created through parental reflection.
In this way, ‘the infant’s experience is given shape by the mother, and yet (in the
normative case), the shape that the mother gives her infant has already been
determined by the infant’ (Ogden, 1994, p. 45).
In this way, the nascent third is both found and created: It cannot be
anywhere other than where it is calculated to be, because it is already determined
by the two known vertices. The third pre-exists any calculation and is waiting to
be found. Yet, paradoxically, it does not exist until it is generated through the act
of triangulation.
346 J. Laurens
The role of parental self-reflection: some contributions from attachment
theory
As a child, Natalie had suffered violent physical abuse from her father, who then
left the family. Natalie presented with depression, often experiencing herself as
‘the victim’, in relationships. She became pregnant at the start of our work
together. At 5 months pregnant, she described an antenatal scan, remarking: ‘The
baby was kicking me hard: I’m sure it doesn’t like me’.
One of the means by which parental ‘reflection’ attributes something ‘dif­
ferent’ to the child, is through parents perceiving agency in neonatal behaviour,
when this may not exist in the infant. Attributing meaning and intentionality to
the child (Shotter & Gregory, 1976), parents assume an ‘intentional stance’
(Fonagy, 2001, p. 27) towards their not-yet-intentional baby. Connecting dis­
parate behaviours, they assign the child a coherent narrative: Joining the dots,
they create a gestalt. Even in utero, parents ‘ascribe motives to the behaviour of
each foetus [as if] the behaviour has a consistency and a meaning which needs to
be understood’ (Piontelli, 1992, p. 10). Consequently, ‘the self as agent arises
out of the infant’s perception of his presumed intentionality, in the mind of the
caregiver’ (Fonagy et al., 2004, p. 11). This ‘self as agent’ is returned to the
infant, via reflection, and internalised: ‘At the core of the mature child’s self, is
the other at the moment of reflection’ (Fonagy, 2001, p. 173).
This ascription of ‘difference’ to the child is not maladaptive, but is instead
correlated with secure attachment (2001; 2004). However, when the attributed
meaning is derived from unprocessed parental trauma, Fonagy’s benevolent
‘intentional stance’ elides into the attribution of maternal phantasies (Freiberg
et al., 1975), as illustrated by Natalie’s remark: ‘I’m sure it doesn’t like me’.
Here, normal foetal motility gains the meaning of a violent rejection. Since an
infant is unable to reflect on this ascribed meaning – to gain any distance from
it – s/he is, instead, formed by it.
Near the time she was due to give birth, Natalie’s baby moved during
a counselling session. She told me: ‘This baby is always poking me . . . No!
That’s me . . . ’. Now aware that the violence which she attributed to her child
originated in her past, and not in her child, Natalie’s ‘no. . .’ indicated that,
having noticed this projection, she had retracted it. Parents with a capacity to
reflect on themselves and their pasts, are far more likely to have securely
attached infants (Fonagy, 2001; Fonagy et al., 1993) – even when parental
pasts have been traumatic and even when parental attachment patterns are
insecure (Eagle, 1997). It seems that parents who can ‘narrativise’ or attribute
meaning to their pasts are more likely to produce securely attached children
(Holmes, 1998), when they come to ‘narrativise’ or attribute meaning to them, in
turn.
Self-reflection thus functions almost as a scientific ‘control’, enabling
a parent to minimise the unintended influence of ‘variables’ from the past.
Natalie’s retraction illustrates this relationship between parental self-reflection,
and the meaning which is ascribed to a child in the reflection of that child;
 Psychodynamic Practice 347
arguably the underlying process behind the finding that reflective parents pro­
duce securely attached children.
In the ascription of a coherent narrative, we could say that parents are
‘writing’ their child4. They are certainly neurologically ‘wiring’ their child, as
their attributions shape the neuroanatomy of the infant brain (Hofer, 1996).
Implicit, here, is the relationship between 1) The parental reflection of the
child; the ‘creative looking’ or ‘intentional stance’ which results in the child
as a ‘place to see from’; and 2) The parental capacity for self-reflection.
The concept of reflection functioning almost as a scientific ‘control’ which
enables a parent to minimise the unintended influence of unprocessed ‘variables’
from the past, points us back again towards ‘triangulation’ because, after all,
a scientific ‘control’ group (A) provides a point of comparison in an experiment,
against which the experimenter (the ‘observer’) (B) can compare the treatment
group (C).

‘Reflection’ as the triangle in and by which the child is formed

The significance of self-reflection has a long history in psychoanalysis. The
distancing of the ‘observing ego’ from the ‘experiencing ego’ (Sterba, 1934) was
first identified as desirable by Freud, when he recommended that the analysand
‘observe himself’ as if he were another person (Freud, 1933). Numerous forms
of ‘alliance’ between client and therapist have since been proposed (i.e.:
Fenichel, 1941; Greenson, 1965; Kohut, 1971; Menninger, 1958; Zetzel,
1956) – all implying a part of the client which is capable of aligning with the
therapist to watch proceedings from a distance; of ‘observing’ him/herself, in
interaction with another (Barwick, 2004). Schafer (1968) terms this ‘reflective
self-representation’ - the representation of the self, to the self – and claims that
without it, there can be no self-reflection in response to others, only blind (non-
reflective) reaction.
Consistently present in these various accounts of self-reflection, is a form of
triangulation, whereby a subject (A) witnesses him/herself (B), in interaction
with another (C) (Barwick, 2004). With her realisation of ‘no, that’s me’, Natalie
demonstrated this capacity to reflect on herself, in interaction with her child. Her
‘that’s me. . .’ captured that moment of self-recognition, of having gained suffi­
cient distance from herself, to perceive that self. This was her creation of that
third perspective which is neither the other, nor the experiencing subject.
Triangulation is a creative process, wherein a third ‘place to see from’ comes
into being. It is not a static third point, which is simply occupied or stepped
into – it is not a game of musical chairs: ‘Triangulation’ is not the same as ‘a
triangle’ - because the former is a creative act and the latter is a shape.
For Britton (1989), the capacity for reflection is derived from an internalisa­
tion of the ‘prototypical’ external triangular situation – the Oedipal triangle.
Again, the significant moment is an act, wherein ‘[a] third position then comes
into existence’:
348 J. Laurens
If the link between the parents . . . can be tolerated in the child’s mind, it provides
him with a prototype for an object relationship . . . in which he is a witness and
not a participant. A third position then comes into existence, from which object
relationships can be observed. Given this, we can also envisage being observed.
This provides us with a capacity for seeing ourselves in interaction with others . .
. for reflecting on ourselves whilst being ourselves (87).

In other words, ‘the healthy negotiation of the early Oedipal situation is an

inductive training in the capacity to evaluate objectively’ (Barwick, 2004,
p. 125). The internalisation of this external triangular situation, results in an
internal ‘triangular space’ (Britton, 1989, p. 86) which in turn ‘provides us
with a capacity. . .for reflecting on ourselves’ (Britton, 1989, p. 87); for
generating further ‘third positions’ or new ‘places to see from’
(perspectives).
There is something very uterine about an internal, triangular space wherein
new ‘places to see from’ come into being: Just as babies are physically con­
stituted within the triangular space of the uterus, these are psychological crea­
tions emerging from a triangular space of the mind. Segal remarks: ‘When
I think of Dr Britton’s triangle as defining [a] space. . .I think that space
implicitly contains the room for a new baby’ (Segal, 1989, p. 8) – and the uterus
is the first ‘room’ or triangular space a new baby both experiences – and is
formed by. This ‘new baby’ third, created by/in an internal reflective space, is
suggestive of a psychological ‘conception’, after Bion’s theory of thinking
(Bion, 1967a): Bion’s new perspective, whilst still undiscovered and not-yet-
conceived, is a ‘pre-conception’. As a result of a fertile ‘mating’ with
a ‘realisation’, ‘conception’ results (113) – and so two become three. This new
‘conception’ (‘new baby’; new ‘place to see from’; new perspective) is the result
of ‘thinking’ - arguably a Bion-ian version of reflection. Reflective thought – as
a generative act of triangulation – can consistently be perceived as the psycho­
logical birth of a new perspective.
The concept of an internal act of triangulation which is generative of
reflective functioning might best be clinically illustrated by its absence.
Leaving the waiting room for our first session, Sarah brushed past me as
I held the door open. She shouted: ‘Can I not even walk out of the room,
without getting touched up?’. Sarah felt assaulted; therefore, I must have
assaulted her. (Fonagy would term this ‘psychic equivalence’ (Fonagy et al.,
2004): She ‘equated’ my intentions with her experience and was unable to
‘conceive’ of a new perspective which was not ‘equated’ with herself as
experiencing subject.)
When we sat down together, Sarah spoke about going camping, to ‘do some
photography’: She could not put her tent up, as she had ‘lost a pole’ and only
had two. After giving up on creating the protective three-dimensional space of
a tent, she next worried about finding the right distance to position her camera
away from her, when taking a ‘selfie’ - neither too close, nor too far. She told
me: ‘I only had a selfie-stick. I needed a tripod. Otherwise, it’ll fall’.
 Psychodynamic Practice 349
Sarah seemed to be telling me about the stabilising quality of the triangular:
Just as triangulation enables us to locate ourselves, geographically, when navi­
gating or map-reading (in order to avoid getting lost), so the capacity to ‘see
ourselves in interaction with others’ enables us to use those other points to
position ourselves at a psychological distance from them – to locate ourselves in
relation to them, without collapsing (falling) into or away from them, like
Sarah’s two-poled tent. The result is psychological stability and robustness;
a supportive psychological ‘tripod’; an inner ‘triangular space’ (Britton,
1989, p. 86).
Sarah’s worried talk about setting up the ‘gaze’ of the camera not too near,
nor too far from herself, echoed these difficulties around determining her dis­
tance in relation to others, psychologically – and also, by extension, her concerns
around how to negotiate an appropriate distance from me, in counselling (espe­
cially given our near collision): Could I maintain the ‘right’ distance from her
(not too close, nor too far)? But she also showed an awareness of another way to
relate – which she needed but found currently unavailable to her (the absent
tripod). In presenting this narrative to me at our first meeting, there was an
implicit hope that a creative contribution from another perspective – within the
three-dimensional ‘space’ which is counselling – might serve her better than her
collapsed two-poled tent. After all, I thought, the ultimate solution to her ‘selfie’
problem – even more effective than a tripod – would have been the presence of
another person, to take her photo: ‘It is the spatial relationship. . .that promises
the potential for perspective by proffering room for reflection’ (Barwick, 2004,
p. 122).
Sarah’s ‘selfie’ suggested that she currently occupied, like Narcissus, the
position of both subject and object: Perceiving differentiation between the two
would require that ‘third position’ which she was currently unable to triangulate.
She could not tolerate ‘difference’ within what was ‘bent back’ or reflected to
her, for many months to come, but she readily accepted ‘sameness’ from me, by
way of empathic and supportive responses – which closely mirrored her own
position. Significant differentiation between her perspective and my own was
threatening and currently ‘inconceivable’: She felt assaulted by me; therefore,
I had assaulted her. These misattributions of meaning arose because Sarah (A)
could not see herself (B), in interaction with me (C). Instead of this reflective
triangle, there was only a single reactive ‘line’: Herself (B), in interaction with
me (C). Such are ‘primitive linear’ relations (125).
I told Sarah that I didn’t know much about putting up tents, but perhaps we
could make a space together which she found comfortable, right here. New
perspectives cannot be conceived when relations are linear; the most basic tent
needs three poles – Sarah’s two poles resulted in a mess of collapsed fabric and
misattributed meaning. But she seemed to be telling me what she needed, to be
able to make the transition to ‘mature spatial relations’ (2004).
Ovid’s tale of Narcissus has much to say about the sterility of ‘linear
relations’, as well as being a significant narrative on the subject of reflection
350 J. Laurens
itself. But the story of Narcissus is not simply a tale about a boy who intention­
ally ‘treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is
ordinarily treated’ (Freud, 1914, p. 65) – because Narcissus is not initially aware
that his reflection is himself. Separated from his beloved by a sheet of water, he
describes his sadness using a first-person verb (doleam); then, just a couple of
lines later, he describes the movements of the boy in the water with a third-
person verb (cupit) (Ovid: 448, 450). In other words, at the moment Narcissus
falls in love, he believes his reflection is an other; that something ‘different’ is
being ‘bent back’ towards him, from the water. But, rather than taking in this
anticipated creative contribution from an other, what is reflected back to him, is
only sterile ‘sameness’. Fertile couplings require the contribution of something
‘different’, though – as Ovid reminds us, when he has the frustrated Narcissus
call out, pleadingly, to the woods – a locus amoenus - a landscape which is used
elsewhere in the Metamorphoses for many secret liaisons and (essentially)
successful sex. But the woods have already offered him the nymph, Echo –
potentially a very ‘different’ partner for Narcissus – only for him to reject her
advances, seemingly threatened by her very difference.
The (blind) seer, Tiresias, had prophesied that Narcissus would live a long
life ‘if he does not come to know himself’ (si se non noverit (353)). This
prophecy is an ironic reversal of the classic Greek admonition to ‘know thyself’
(γνῶθι σεαυτόν) which was inscribed on the temple in Delphi. To ‘know thyself’,
in this sense, is to be ‘self-reflective’; insightful; to possess the kind of inner-
sight which the blind seer himself embodies. Inner-sight involves the kind of
‘knowing oneself’ which can be done blind because it requires not eyes, but the
internalised vantage points of others – making possible the conception of new
perspectives. For Tiresias, these new perspectives manifest themselves in the
guise of his perceptive prophecies.
Curiously, Tiresias spent 7 years transformed into a woman. As a woman,
she worked as a sacred prostitute in the temple of Hera and, through coupling
with considerable ‘difference’ by way of innumerable sexual partners, she gave
birth to seven children across as many years – reporting back that sex is
precisely nine times more enjoyable for women than for men. It seems, then,
that Tiresias’ couplings were consistently productive – whether the fertile
triangular spaces involved were psychological or physical; whether the new
vantage points conceived were thoughts (prophecies) or children. Such psycho­
logical fertility – associated here with the internalisation of considerable ‘dif­
ference’ - is the epitome of ‘know thyself’, as advised by the temple in Delphi.
Transformed into a woman, Tiresias occupied a radically different perspective to
his own – a positioning in direct proportion to his extreme capacity for insight
and reflective thought.
Without this capacity for ‘spatial relations’, Narcissus is unable to know
(reflect on) himself, and so to recognise himself, as the boy in the water. But
there is a way in which Narcissus ‘knows’ himself only too well – to the
exclusion of all others. This is the kind of unproductive ‘self-knowledge’
 Psychodynamic Practice 351
Tiresias’ prophecy cautioned against: Reaching out to fondle his own face; his
reflection perfectly mirroring his own gestures; trying to kiss his own lips . . . He
is just a boy, playing with himself, in the water. This kind of ‘knowing himself’ -
having relations only with himself – is the reason for his death.
It is the impossibility of engaging in a generative way with complete
‘sameness’ that ultimately kills Narcissus. Believing that he is nourishing him­
self through his eyes by taking in the richness of difference from his beloved, he
refuses all physical food – and starves on the sterility of the same. Anorexic;
self-depleted; he is literally ‘perishing out, through his eyes’ (per oculos perit
ipse suos (440)). Narcissus’ tragic outcome illustrates not just the barrenness of
‘primitive linear’ relations and the impoverishment of the self that results – but
the fear which can be experienced at the prospect of allowing psychological
difference in, to make possible the conception of a third.

Triangulation as the act of the ‘name-givers’

When we conceive a new perspective, language itself plays an important role – if
not in its conception in the first place, in its retention and ongoing viability.
Unless we define a new thought using words, it might yet slip away from us
again, back to whence it came; back into undifferentiated formlessness. Having
‘lost our train of thought’ - having lost the interconnecting links which were
formed when we conceived the new perspective – we might not be able to re-
find/re-conceive it. Without language, we will also struggle to introduce our new
perspective to others and to the wider (social and interpersonal) world. As
Nietzsche writes: ‘The way people usually are, it takes a name to make some­
thing visible at all. Those with originality have usually been the name-givers’
(1882: 218).
For Lacan, it does indeed take ‘a name’ to make a new perspective ‘visible’ -
and to introduce it to the wider social world. Specifically, it takes the Nom/non
or name/noun/no of the father, to bring a third into existence by interrupting and
differentiating the child from a formless merger with the mother, simultaneously
introducing the child to the wider social order of the symbolic (Lacan, 1964).
Prohibiting this merger with his ‘non’, the authority of the father’s word is
creative (as much as castrative) because it functions to separate and thus define
the (pre-existing) child as a subject; as a new place to see (and speak) from; and
so ‘the subject exists, in so far as the word has wrought him or her from
nothingness’ (Fink, 1996, p. 79).
Since adolescence often echoes the earlier struggles of infancy – and fre­
quently provides a ‘second chance’ for the resolution of difficulties (Blos,
1998) – some clinical material from adolescence might help to illustrate these
concepts.
Wearing a bobble-hat with fluffy pompoms hanging down on either side of
his plump face, there was something both comic and softly feminine about
Simon’s appearance. A 19-year-old first-year music student, he approached the
352 J. Laurens
university counselling service because he was experiencing ‘panic attacks’,
daily. The ‘attacks’ had begun 3 months earlier, but Simon could identify no
cause. He worried that he was ‘losing [his] mind’.
Simon described himself as ‘laid back. . .not clever; the one who makes
everyone laugh; the clown’. Referring to a poster on the wall, he said: ‘Your
poster looks like the Joker, from Batman’. The ‘Joker’, it seemed to me, was
also a ‘clown’ - although this particular clown seemed to be mine and appeared
to possess all the aggression and intelligence lacking in Simon’s own ‘laid back’
and ‘not clever’ clown. I recalled his panic ‘attacks’ and his fear of a heart
‘attack’ - also suggestive of aggression projected and experienced as
persecutory.
Simon had a troubled relationship with a feared father in the Navy, whose
acceptance and approval he felt desperate to gain. His father had left home when
Simon was 2 years old and had resumed irregular contact when Simon was
seven. Simon had remained an only-child. Fighting in the Navy, Simon’s father
seemed as expert at aggressive penetration as any ‘phantastic’ superhuman
figure – and not only in combat: Sailing ‘up a river, into the motherland’, inside
vessels referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her’ - Simon described a father in perpetual
occupation of internal, female, territories (Klein, 1932).
Whenever a silence fell between us, Simon seemed anxious. After this had
happened a few times, I commented on it. Surprisingly, he defended the silence:
‘Yes. But we need silence because, without silence, there would be no words’.
This sounded like possible intellectualisation, but he went on to explain that,
without silence, there would be only continuous, meaningless, noise – since
words and meaning were only created by silences intervening. Yet these neces­
sary meaning-bestowing silences caused him anxiety – especially if they went on
for longer than usual or seemed excessive.
The concept of something apparently uninterrupted; continuous; predating
symbolisation (‘meaning’); is suggestive of the undifferentiated mother-child
dyad. It is the role of the father to function as Simon’s feared-but-needed
‘silences’ - by breaking into this illusory continuousness, instigating ‘meaning’
through division by situating the subject within the symbolic – with his Nom/non
(Lacan, 1964). Simon’s ‘without silence, there would be no words’ could be
understood as ‘without le Nom/non du Père, there would be no symbolic’. At
this point, I recalled other ‘breaks’ Simon had told me about: After a ‘break’
during sex with a new girlfriend, he had lost his erection, ‘given up’, and
returned home. After the Easter ‘break’, he had lost enthusiasm or ‘desire’ for
counselling, causing him to miss our first session back together. Consistently, it
seemed that breaks seemed to represent harsh castrative paternal interruptions5.
Simon had scarcely mentioned his mother, other than to say that she was
‘great’ - but she now seemed very significant. I said: ‘In telling me about breaks
and gaps that make you worried, it’s making me think about another kind of
separation; one you’ve experienced recently – that of coming to university; of
leaving your mum’. Simon replied: ‘We’re really close. Dad was never around.
 Psychodynamic Practice 353
I have a woman’s mind’. He paused, then continued: ‘I had this dream, around
the time the panic attacks started: The phone rang. I answered it. A woman’s
voice said: “We’re coming to get you”. I screamed, threw the phone across the
room and broke down. When I woke up, I was covered with sweat’.
A single mother, living with her only child; Simon’s mother was so ‘close’
that Simon felt he had ‘a woman’s mind’, rather than one entirely his own. Even
the plural pronoun (‘we’re coming to get you’) seemed to suggest this all-
encompassing, incorporating, nature – there was a great power in that majestic
plural. Having worried about ‘losing [his] mind’, it seemed clear to whom he
feared having lost it. Perhaps his defence of silence (the paternal metaphor) was
understandable: Interrupting the mother-child dyad, le Nom/non du Père pro­
vides a much-needed escape from le désir de la mère - (the desire ‘of’ the
mother, as well as ‘for’ her) (Fink, 1997); for Lacan, the mother is a ‘huge
crocodile, in whose jaws you are . . . One never knows what might suddenly
come over her and make her shut her trap’ (Lacan, 1968, p. 112). The role of the
father in protecting the child from maternal engulfment and in aiding separation
has been discussed across much psychoanalytic literature (i.e. Abelin, 1975;
Benjamin, 1988; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1981; Greenson, 1968; Loewald, 1951) –
but Lacan emphasises the creative within the castrative, since this prohibitive
separation is simultaneously the definition – or ‘making visible’ - of a third, and
that subject’s initiation into the symbolic.
Words can never grant possession of the lost object, ‘the thing’, itself (das
Ding), though – because language can only represent and can never embody.
But, for Lacan, there remains a partial pleasure (jouissance) in the resulting
slippery system of substitution and frustration; in the friction of signifiers
playing against each other to produce meaning; in the constant going-around-
the-outside of ‘the thing’, with relentless suspension and incomplete satisfac­
tion – locating a perpetual torrent of loss and lack (manque-à-être) at the heart of
symbolic relations (Lacan, 1986). (Lacan shows us this process, through his own
use of language – as much as telling us about it.) The never-ending dis/inter-
course of the symbolic, with its messy cumulative and substitutive action, is
a result of the paternal metaphor itself – and is so very necessary for the
retention, ongoing viability, and public/social sharing of any newly conceived
perspective.

These individual beginnings are reminiscent of another ‘genesis’:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the
deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the
darkness.
354 J. Laurens
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening
and the morning were the first day.

(Genesis 1:1–5)

And so God (ur-father) continues, until he has created the entire world –
including his ‘children’. This creation is effected through acts of definition,
exacted upon Mother Earth’s all-encompassing formlessness. This is a physical
definition, since it is the literal sculpting of oceans and land from amorphous
infinity; a cleaving which is so creative, it generates geography itself. We can
think of this ‘definition’ as separating; limiting; proscribing; dividing; ‘not this,
not this, but that’; as the creative ‘finding’ which every sculptor knows, when
discovering form within raw materials – as ‘non’. But we can also think of this
‘definition’ as a symbolic definition, a definition within language, since it is an
attribution of the signifiers ‘Day’ and ‘Night’ and, after all, ‘it takes a name to
make something visible at all’. Situating whatever has been separated-off, within
the system which is language, this is ‘definition’ as noun, as ‘Nom’. This newly
conceived baby world, with all its new interdependent lifeforms, will not be at
risk of disappearing back into incoherent formlessness (like a ‘lost train of
thoughts’) because it has been defined (physically and symbolically) by the
original father, the original ‘name-giver’, himself. These named perspectives
have a viability of their own, now. After all, ‘when you manage to put something
into words, you transform it’ (Soler, 1996, p. 44).
When le Nom/non intervenes to find/form a third by cleaving the subject
from an all-encompassing merger, this is a creative act which is inseparable from
the initiation of the symbolic. As a result, there is (quite literally) an ‘author’ in
any paternal ‘author-ity’ - from Latin auctor; ‘one who causes to grow’6: The
God of the Old Testament is known to be prohibitive; retributive; proscriptive –
ultimately, it has often been said, castrative . . . but, as part and parcel of all that,
he is so very, very, creative7.
Towards the end of our work together, I became less of a potent ‘expert’ and
more someone with whom Simon wanted to identify: Spotting a book called
High Octane Motorbikes on the bookshelf, Simon wondered if – like himself –
I ‘like bikes’. Unlike his previous use of the bookshelf – when I was credited
with having read everything, whilst he ‘didn’t read much’ - this time the book­
shelf was used in an attempt to find a shared phallic – and also symbolic –
interest. Simon’s curiosity was further frustrated, when he ‘couldn’t place’ my
accent: ‘Sometimes it’s English, sometimes American, sometimes Scandinavian’
- I suggested that, like his roaming father in the Navy, I, too, seemed frustrat­
ingly difficult to pin down; to know; to identify (with). His father was now
someone he would ‘probably be like’, someone who was ‘a gentle giant’;
‘sensitive, like me’ - so sensitive, that Simon was ‘afraid of hurting him’ through
confrontation. Such depressive anxieties (Klein, 1935, 1937, 1940) were in
marked contrast to his earlier paranoid-schizoid fears.
 Psychodynamic Practice 355
In our penultimate session, Simon said he was experiencing only ‘a
couple of panic attacks each week’, now. Furthermore, they were milder: ‘I
tell myself it’s just the anxiety, not a heart attack or losing my mind. Then
I wait till it passes’. His new-found ability to locate himself outside his
panic – to reflect on his own panic from without – was associated with an
internalisation of my own normalising ‘vantage point’ and with an increasing
identification with his father, suggesting an internalisation of that ‘third
position’ which ‘provides us with a capacity for seeing ourselves. . .for
reflecting on ourselves whilst being ourselves’ (Britton, 1989, p. 87). In his
exclusion from the nursing couple, the father is, after all, the prototypical
excluded witness (Barwick, 2004): Simon seemed to have discovered
a (paternal) third position from which to distance himself from ‘a woman’s
mind’.

Conclusion
In the mathematical definition of triangulation, the third vertex is predetermined
by the other two vertices and cannot be anywhere other than where it is found to
be. Yet, paradoxically, it also does not exist until it is calculated through
a creative coupling of the other two known vertices. ‘Triangulation’ differs
from the frequently presented static-seeming Oedipal triangle – wherein differ­
ent perspectives can be occupied or switched between, but the triangle itself
remains a constant: Triangulation is a creative act. A triangle is a shape.
Triangles have become almost synonymous with the Oedipus complex.
However, Oedipal triangles take up the situation from the position of the child
and his/her ability to tolerate (and make use of) the position of the excluded
third – and the child’s perspective is not even ‘a place to see from’, to start with.
There are three perspectives available in any triangle, though – and, from
a Winnicottian perspective, we might consider that triangulation occurs from
the beginning via generative parental positions, and their own role in finding and
forming their child. From a post-Kleinian approach, the Oedipal element is the
prior internalised Oedipal triangle of the parents (Britton, 1989) and its ‘train­
ing. . .to evaluate objectively’ (Barwick, 2004, p. 125): The resulting fertile
‘triangular space’ provides the necessary environment for two locations to
create/locate their own third – and so ‘a third position comes into existence’,
whether a thought or a baby. From a Lacanian perspective, a third is both found
and made when the Nom/non of the father intervenes with creative author-ity to
define a new symbolic subject out of a pre-existing baby – initiating the
symbolic as a system for that new subject to use which, in turn, offers partial
satisfaction through a continual re-iteration of loss.
Just as triangles can come into being – resulting in creative thinking, self-
awareness and psychological stability – so they can be lost, resulting in some­
thing of the opposite: For Bion (1967b) the type of relating which occurs in
psychosis is ‘something which has got no breadth at all, or alternatively,
356 J. Laurens
something which has got no depth’ (21). A form of relating which is ‘either
linear or planar’ (21) but not both, describes a flat two-dimensional shape rather
than a fertile three-dimensional space. Consequently, reflective thought is not
possible in psychosis because, whilst the psychotic is ‘flooded with perception’
across one dimension, across the other there is an inability to ‘understand the
experiences which are so acutely observed’ (Bion, 1967c, p. 105, my italics).
(Containers are, after all, necessarily three-dimensional.)
For Lacan (1966) ‘three’ again becomes ‘two’ in psychosis, when the
paternal point of the triangle is ‘foreclosed’. This results in a loss of spatial
relations, since the Imaginary is not ‘represented at a distance as a function
of the triadic Oedipal structure’ (Ragland, 1996, p. 205, my italics). The
term ‘foreclosure’ is significant, here: Lacan uses the German term
Verwerfung, which translates as ‘rejection’. However, we cannot speak of
a ‘rejection’ or ‘foreclosure’ of a third, without also implying some prior
awareness of – and existence of – that rejected or foreclosed third.
(Otherwise, we would simply describe this third as ‘absent’.) Just as the
third pre-exists its own discovery/creation, ‘rejection’ or ‘foreclosure’ sug­
gest a return to a liminal existence for this third. This is a third which
perhaps must wait to be re-found and re-created anew.
One of the first developments of the infant brain is rudimentary con­
sciousness; ‘the sense of a corporeal and emotional self’ (Schore, 2002),
which is in relation to the world. We could describe this as a subject [A]
with a ‘sense of self [B] in the act of knowing a particular thing [C]’
(Damasio, 2000, p. 272, my italics). This is not a static triangle. It is an act;
the prototypical generative process of triangulation, in which that third
perspective is conceived for the first time. This is an understanding of
consciousness itself as a very rudimentary form of reflection: It seems
that the psychological birth of self-awareness and of a child are inseparable,
at the inception of the human mind.
All-things triangular have long been associated with the conception of new
perspectives. In Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, the third eye (also called the
mind’s eye or inner eye) represents extraordinary internal perception, surpassing
physical sight. In Ancient Greece, the Pythian priestess sat on the ceremonial
Delphic Tripod in order to be able to conceive the in-sights that were her own
new perspectives – her oracles. Diogenes Laertius (3rd century BCE/1925)
describes a golden tripod found by some fishermen, a tripod which Apollo’s
oracle in Delphi pronounced should be owned by ‘whosoever is most wise’
(1.1.28). The tripod was passed through a succession of the ‘most wise’ (all
seemingly wise enough to know that another was more wise) before it eventually
found its way back to the temple in Delphi, since it was agreed that Apollo was
the wisest of all. Temples – the physical spaces wherein insights were conceived
by oracles – were built, hundreds of miles apart, to create complex geodetic
triangulation on maps, long puzzling archaeologists. And, whilst the inscription
on the temple in Delphi advised all to reflect on themselves; to ‘know thyself’,
 Psychodynamic Practice 357
the word ‘Delphi’ itself shares the same linguistic root as another three-cornered
space wherein new perspectives are conceived, since δελφύς (delphys) is the
Greek word for womb.
When a baby is psychologically born; when a ‘third position’ renders ‘linear’
relations, ‘spatial’ - when a new ‘place to see from’ presents itself – new vantage
points are found/created. The creation of new perspectives is a transformative
component of therapy or counselling, too, of course: When performed by the
analyst, Symington refers to this ‘inner act’ of conceiving a new perspective on
patient material as ‘the analyst’s act of freedom’ (Symington, 2007, p. 58). For
Ogden, the analyst and analysand together create ‘the analytic third’; ‘a third
subjectivity unconsciously generated by the analytic pair’ (Ogden, 1999, p. 9).
And, for Bion, analytic ‘conceptions’ are the result of a ‘mating’ between a ‘pre-
conception’ (waiting to be found and not yet existing) and a ‘realisation’
(1967: 110).
Such insights can seem to arrive from outside us, in an ‘experience where
some idea or pictorial impression floats into the mind unbidden and as
a whole’ (Bion, 1967d, p. 147): Seemingly not-us (‘different’), it can feel
as if, ‘out of the darkness and formlessness, something evolves’ (136). But
this third is also produced within us and is clearly ‘of’ us and so, when it
comes to any kind of creativity, we can ‘never ask the question “Did you
conceive of this, or was it presented to you from without?”’ (Winnicott,
1953, p. 12) because the answer is both/and. What is conceived is an
inseparable mixture of self (sameness) and a seminal contribution from an
other (difference). Pre-existing our discovery of it – and yet still made by
us – this is the making/finding of something which we can only recognise,
when it comes to mind.
As quintessential ‘name-givers’, writers - auctors; those who ‘cause to
grow’ - have much to tell us about the creative process of triangulation and
how internal ‘spatial relations’ conceive new perspectives – as well as the
process of ensuring their ongoing viability through language. For the poet,
Seamus Heaney, the emphasis is on receptivity, since ‘[t]he crucial action is
pre-verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in
a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought’ (Heaney,
1974, p. 21). Nietzsche would agree that the process has nothing to do with
words, at this stage, but with the capacity to ‘see something that still has no
name; that still cannot be named even though it is lying right before
everyone’s eyes’ (Nietzsche 1882: 218). Having allowed a new perspective
to come together sufficiently to be recognised, language is needed to
separate it from us – to define it and to share it with others. At this
point, Kafka advises us: ‘[I]f you summon it by the right word, by its
right name, it will come’ (18 October Kafka, 1921).

Notes
1. From Spirit of Place by Lawrence Durrell (1969): p 156.
358 J. Laurens
2. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology: s.v. ‘reflection’.
3. Ibid.
4. This is echoed in the analytic process, since ‘analysis has to invent the patient, not
only investigate him’ (Malcolm, 1980, p. 71). This attributed meaning can become
potentially malevolent for patients when the analyst’s history functions as an unac­
knowledged variable. Hence the importance of the training analysis.
5. For Lacan (1954), castration is not anatomical but signifies lack; the impossibility of
reaching total satisfaction: To achieve some satisfaction, it is necessary to renounce
total satisfaction and the possession of the lost object. However, the prohibitive
function of the paternal metaphor – the ‘non’, which prevents the child from
possessing the mother – has considerable affinity with Freud’s castration complex
(Fink, 1997).
6. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology: s.v. ‘author’.
7. The New Testament also portrays God as productive, ex nihilo: ‘In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1). But, in
the New Testament, God is, within himself, a generative Holy Trinity – God the
Father; God the Son; and God the Holy Spirit.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Joanna Laurens is a psychodynamic counsellor and group-work practitioner in private
practice. She is also a published and produced playwright.

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