Twos and Threes: Musical Chairs in Female Psychic and Social Life

Object Relations

Chodorow (1978, 1994a,b) advances a theory of early object relationships suggesting that girls value relationships more than boys do, while boys value autonomy more than do little girls. Like Stoller (1968) she argues that the typical parenting arrangement in which the primary caretaker is the mother means that little girls negotiate separation developmentally from the same sexed object (mother). Thus, in female development the need for closeness with mothers and related conflicts are important. Persephonal/oedipal phase issues are also typically colored by relational issues. In contrast, the little boy typically separates from the opposite sexed parent (the mother); in establishing his masculine identity as separate from the mother, therefore, he is frequently more preoccupied with issues of autonomy and independence than girls are. In later writings Chodorow (1994b) cautions against overgeneralizations about gender and stresses individual differences.

Inhibited Aggression

Many psychoanalysts have written about the general cultural prohibitions against the expression of anger and aggression in girls and women (see, e.g., Nadelson et al. 1982; Gabbard and Wilkinson 1996; Person 2000). Lerner (1980) suggests that this inhibition reflects girls’ fears of their own omnipotent destructiveness and preoedipal separation/individuation difficulties in the mother-daughter relationship. Tyson (1989) and Fenichel (1931) have explicated the preoedipal antecedents of girls’ problems with anger in their relationship with the mother. Offering data about middle school children very much concordant with our observations, Knight (2011) noted that that girls turned their aggression on themselves and were worried about their “meanness,” while boys were anxious about their overt and violent aggressiveness getting out of control. We argue that girls’ inhibition of aggression also reflects the dynamics and conflicts of the female triangular persephonal situation (Holtzman and Kulish 2003). Fears of loss of the mother and her love come to the fore for girls in the context of triangular erotic conflicts. It is highly dangerous for a little girl to express murderous aggression and jealousy toward her mother, which must be denied or repressed. Thus, inhibition of a subjective sense of themselves as aggressive agents becomes a pervasive defense for women and girls (Hoffman 1999). ⁴

Popular and Sociological Writings about Girls’ Social Life

Recent writings on patterns of aggression in preadolescent and adolescent girls have aroused considerable interest in the popular press and academic literature. Hadley (2003, 2004) reviews these writings and the more formal research that has come to characterize girls’ aggression as “indirect” or “relational,” as compared to boys’. These writers follow the ideas of Chodorow (1978) and Gilligan and her colleagues (Gilligan 1982; Brown and Gilligan 1992) about the importance of relationships for girls. Our concept of twos and threes is illustrated in these detailed observations, as the ways in which we have observed clinically that girls behave and express aggression in threesomes corresponds with the vignettes appearing in popular texts.

For example, in a bestselling book for popular audiences, the parental educator Rosalind Wiseman (2002) describes the group dynamics of girls in terms of “queen bees” and “wannabes”—the girls who are popular and lead the group and the girls who want to be them. There are some that are neither. Like many of these writers, Wiseman gathered her data from journalistic interviews she conducted with groups of adolescents across the country. Wiseman describes dynamics among school-age girls that closely resemble the phenomena of twos and threes, and calls them “typical” (pp. 239–247). Sometimes a girl will be the excluded one in the group, the “third wheel,” and sometimes the excluder. This kind of behavior leads to the “mean girls” term that has become so well known in the popular culture of movies and books, referring to girls on the inside of a group who are mean to girls on the outside. Wiseman offers advice to mothers: “If you have more than one girl over, you’re just paving the way for girl drama” (p. 64).

In contrast, Wiseman’s book on group dynamics among boys (2013) makes no mention of such dramas and triangularities. Rather, boys’ competition is played out more widely, and being on top is based not on being “nice” or popular but on athletic ability. Most boys have a best friend and socialize within a three-to-five boy inner circle, with a few more guys on the periphery (p. 45), not in groups of twos and threes. In these two books, Wiseman offers no explanations for these patterns or why the behaviors differ between the genders. We include her work, however, to document the widespread awareness of the phenomenon of twos and threes in girls.

Research studies by social scientists on gender differences in aggressive behaviors in children and adolescents across many countries confirm and extend reports like Wiseman’s. As summarized by Hadley (2004), they provide reliable evidence that girls in general express aggression differently from boys. Boys are more direct and often more physical, while girls tend to express aggression covertly and indirectly, and through relational maneuvers, including manipulative behavior like flattery or gossip. These relational behaviors increase markedly in the middle school years. The studies also show gender differences in patterns of social grouping, with girls typically forming tighter, smaller peer groups. Hadley (2004) discusses possible explanations for these general research findings in terms of societal expectations and values and evolutionary theories offered by Campbell (1995) and Brown (2003). In summary, there are many reasons for these differing expressions of aggression between boys and girls—social, psychological and biological. ⁵

Adolescence

Since triadic persephonal issues arise with a vengeance at adolescence, the phenomenon of twos and threes emerges with greater salience and clarity at this time. Competition with other girls and the mother is heightened, as is the need to manage accompanying fears of rejection. Such underlying feelings become particularly clear and poignant when one girl begins to date and spend time with a boyfriend, at the expense of her relationship with a female “best friend.” The girl left behind feels painfully alone and excluded, and the triadic situation and primal scene may be evoked. In such instances, it is the “negative” oedipal complex that may be activated—the girl’s erotic longings for the mother who prefers the father.

Alliances among teenage girlfriends reflect shifting unconscious identifications and positions the way a kaleidoscope reflects shifting images. Homoerotic and heterosexual desires oscillate between the “negative oedipal” and “positive oedipal” desires, reflecting old persephonal conflicts between desire for one parent and loyalty toward, and love of, the other. The painful alienation of the excluded party is characteristic of the primal scene. One patient as a young adolescent once saw her parents having sex. At that moment she thought, “I don’t recognize what they have turned into. They pay no attention to me. I don’t matter.” But it is equally a conflict for the girl if her father manifests a preference for her, which she fears might evoke her mother’s hostility, or vice versa.

Triadic conflicts like these may be played out in interpersonal relationships with peers. For example, a patient remembers the searing, painful feelings when two of her girlfriends went to a carnival without her. In telling the story, she equated those feelings with the time her boyfriend broke up with her and took up with another girl. These two memories—one of the twos and threes among peers, the other of a persephonal/oedipal triangle—were linked by the same painful affects of jealousy and exclusion and suggest similar underlying dynamics and sources.

The popular mystery novel A Secret Place, by Tana French (2015), vividly portrays the dynamics and emotions of twos and threes in adolescence. It is set in an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Ireland where one of the teenage students is murdered. The solution lies in the unraveling of complicated feelings among a set of girls, including feelings of loyalty, exclusion, and, in this case, literally murderous rage. Two girls share a secret place on the grounds where they sneak out to meet. These two tell a third about the place and take her there: “‘You never showed us this place before,’ Holly says. Selena and Becca glance at each other and shrug. For a second, Holly feels almost betrayed—Selena and Becca have been boarding for two years, but it never occurred to her that they would have separate stuff together—until she realizes that now she’s part of it too” (p. 22).

Moreover, the girls have vowed to do without boyfriends to keep their friendship circle unbroken, but when one of them breaks this vow, things get nasty and a series of events ensue that lead to murder: “sometimes she wants to punch Selena right in the soft pale daze of her face and keep punching. Not because she got off with Chris Harper and lied to them and broke the vow that was her idea to begin with; those aren’t even the problem. But because the whole point of the vow was for none of them to have to feel like this. The point was for one place in their lives to be impregnable. For just one kind of love to be stronger than any outside thing; to be safe” (p. 374). These are the painful feelings many girls try so hard to avoid.

In this book murderous rage, and the narcissistic wound of being excluded and betrayed, are enacted in behavior: As in real life, when an adolescent girl starts to date boys her close girlfriends can feel betrayed and abandoned. The core dynamics are twos versus threes. Holly’s realization that “it never occurred to her that they would have separate stuff together” serves equally as an iconic reaction of the third, intruding upon the primal scene. ⁶ A girl’s realization that parents (or classmates) have separate lives and experiences together that do not include her set off feelings of shock and betrayal. Perhaps these students are right to insist on their official rock-solid camaraderie to avoid dangerous competition. In this novel poisonous jealousy about being left out leads to murder.

Twos and Threes in Boys versus Girls

Clinically, although we have treated many men in analysis and psychotherapy, we have rarely encountered the twos and threes phenomenon, as described here, in their accounts and memories of their social life. On the surface, men do not seem to fret about being excluded from a lunch with two of their friends. Boys have rivalrous interactions, but typically they do not develop into endlessly revolving threesomes. We did, however, observe one clinical incident of a boy reporting a twos versus threes experience. Like many girls, he seemed especially interested in maintaining close relationships with others. It may be relevant, though, that this boy grew up with twin sisters who were close to his age. Surely other clinicians who work frequently with adolescent and preadolescent boys have observed more of these experiences in boys.

Of course, we are not saying that men and boys are not very much concerned with or do not have difficulties with triangular relationships. For example, men often come into treatment not able to resolve a triangular drama they have created with a wife and mistress. This may be a man’s way of dealing with the oedipal conflict by making sure that two women are fighting over him, thus ensuring that the person left out of the threesome is never oneself.

It may also be that the gendered differences suggested by Chodorow’s work may offer another vantage point on this issue: the suggestion that girls and women value close relationships, while boys and men value autonomy and independence, may mean that men need to take a “strong,” “who cares” attitude about hurt feelings in their social relationships. Describing the fate of a boy’s oedipal strivings in middle childhood, Ross (1977) writes that “a child of this age will err in the other direction from the self-reference of his earlier years, now removing himself from the problems with which he grapples, as if they had nothing personal to do with him. The primal scene, his own sexual feelings, for that matter his wishes to be nurturant or generative—these no longer interest him. He is concerned instead with ‘mates’ . . .” (p. 341). In a discussion of the social (and psychological) construction of femininity, Benjamin (2004) argues that an oedipal boy’s attitudes toward femininity may express his “need to locate an object that can contain excitement and can hold the place of passivity,” culturally the “daughter” position (p. 48). She goes on to suggest that in an oedipal boy’s mind, a sister may also play this role. Thus she offers a theoretical suggestion of how male oedipal conflicts are played out in the sphere of siblings or peers.

Just as the paradigms for the female and male oedipal complexes have differences, we are suggesting that triadic dynamics and conflicts seem to be played out differently in the social life of girls and boys. We second Chodorow’s caution about making generalizations regarding gender differences. As social institutions such as family structure and cultural proscriptions for gender change, the underlying triadic/persephonal dynamics and patterns that we have been addressing may change as well.

Case 1

Mrs. E. is a married woman in her late twenties in analysis for a couple of years for mild feelings of depression and insecurity. She reports a relatively good relationship with her mother, but complains that her mother has always been very devoted to her father, which has always left her without enough energy for Mrs. E. and her brother and sister. She has always suspected that her mother prefers her sister to her. Mrs. E. comes in five minutes late for a session, the time and day of which the analyst had changed. Confused, she had texted to ask about the time. She explains she was late because she was helping a woman with directions.

The patient, who constantly feels she may not be liked or wanted, begins talking about a birthday party given her by several girlfriends. At first she didn’t want to invite her sister, who is several years older and not really part of the group, but she insists that she doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Eventually she did invite the sister but, after some pondering, not her mother—because she is “of a different generation.” Her difficulty with the decision reflects her obsessive concern about who is excluded and who isn’t and about hurting feelings. Then she says, “I don’t know if I am crazy. Some things really bother me too much. I did handle that situation well. No one’s feelings were hurt. Why can’t I get over it?”

Then she switches to another incident that bothers her concerning her girlfriend W., whom she has known since childhood. She explains how W. has always been “mean,” and describes her as “competitive” (as if competitiveness were a bad thing). Recently, she recounts, she and W. had a lunch date and at the last minute W. canceled. Mrs. E., deciding to go out anyway, saw her friend lunching with another woman. Here is betrayal and yet another rejection. She said to herself, “That’s it—this is a mean girl.” She thinks she will remain friends with W., however (because of her need to be friends with everyone). But then another rejecting incident occurred, and Mrs. E. announced to her husband, “I won’t take it anymore!”

Here the patient’s anger is evident to the analyst, probably brought on by the analyst’s changing the time but expressed through her displaced descriptions of and preoccupation with her social interactions. Mrs. E. continues the session by telling the analyst that two days earlier she had seen W. walking down the street with another “mean” woman. She asks herself, “Why should I care? I have my friends, yet it bothered me to see them together.” She imagines that the two women “hate” her and are talking about her. Then her thoughts switch to her father: “I can’t talk easily with my father. The relationship has been distant because he has difficulties relating and I’ve distanced myself from that pain. But he always has seemed to be close to my mother.” She adds, “My mother—when she talked to me about the party she was critical in insisting I invite my sister.” When she told her husband about all of these feelings, he was very supportive but puzzled. He asked her, “Why can’t you get over it? It wouldn’t bother me at all.”

The analyst suggests that she can’t “get over it” because she is so angry and feels that she cannot express her anger to her mother, her father, and today to her analyst, who switched her session around. Mrs. E. agrees, uncomfortably. She finishes the session by talking about her husband and how supportive he is. We can see that she needs a man who will soothe her inner fears of not being wanted, not desired, not chosen. Perhaps she is also contrasting the husband’s support with that of the analyst and other women who let her down. We also can speculate that earlier “horizontal” conflicts with her sister, about which we know nothing at this time, may have set the tone for her subsequent triangular conflicts; but after an inner struggle she includes her sister, not their mother, in her birthday party.

This core of this session revolves around more typical sibling rivalry or, perhaps more accurately, sibling oedipal rivalry, two siblings vying for the love of the mother, on a developmentally higher, object-related level, as described by Sharpe and Rosenblatt. The patient is competing with her sister for their mother’s favor and seems to feel that the mother/analyst prefers a third party (the sister) to her. She is unconsciously angry and hurt, perhaps that the analyst changed the time for someone else’s benefit, and acts that out by coming late. But there are also brief glimpses of the traditional persephonal/oedipal triangle—mother, father, and daughter who is jealous of the father’s closeness to mother. In the middle we see jealousy playing out in the twos and threes phenomenon of being snubbed by a peer. Who the peer might unconsciously represent—mother, father, sibling—is not clear here. Throughout this session we can see variations of twos versus threes. The shadow of the persephonal/oedipal triangle that comes up associatively suggests that this is more than simple dyadic sibling rivalry, but the theme of two versus threes predominates from the very beginning, as the patient begins by creating a third—the person she stops to help, leaving the analyst waiting. This acting out presages the theme of the session, which emerges in the material to follow: feelings of being excluded and recurring expressions of various rivalries. The dynamics are set for the two-versus-three phenomena, and her confusion about the time change is symptomatic. In helping someone who makes her late, she may also be identifying with the analyst, who she imagines was helping someone else. Thus, she excludes the analyst and makes her wait.

Note that Mrs. E.’s husband seems bewildered by all this drama; as we have said, boys seem to have an easier time than girls do in managing “two versus three” in relationships, and are less obsessed with that kind of social problem than girls are. We have speculated that this difference is another reflection of girls’ need to hold on to their mothers as they move away into the world of adult sexuality.

Case 2

This session in the analysis of Ms. T., a single woman in her early thirties, begins with a dream: “I’m kissing a guy in a weird way in a corner. I look and where spectators are standing is his wife. And she was talking about how her relationships with people are always a problem.” Ms. T.’s thoughts turn to experiences in early adolescence, and she says, “Girls are excluders. They are able to go in twos and not threes. I’m always feeling in the middle. It’s just not fair.” Here again is the theme of painful exclusion, explicitly stated in terms of twos and threes. She complains about what happens when she introduces her friends to each other. She feels that the two become friends, displaying no loyalty to her, and that she becomes marginalized.

She goes on to say that a friend, who holds s superior position at the PR firm where they both work, is giving a party to which she has not been invited. The reason, she was told, is that one of the intended guests, Ms. P., is her immediate boss and would be uncomfortable if Ms. T., an underling, were there. Ms. T. complains bitterly that Ms. P is more important than she is to her friend, and therefore her needs must be catered to. “Like I am dangerous and going to hurt her!” This outburst is a denial of the murderous rage unconsciously evoked by her jealousy and exclusion.

That association sparks the memory of another part of the dream: “I’m stuck outside a house. I walk around with just a towel on and I try to find the entrance to get back in.” The image of a towel had come up many times in Ms. T.’s analysis. It alluded to an important primal scene experience in which her parents had hurriedly covered themselves with a towel when she walked in on them. In the first part of the dream, there are other possible allusions to the primal scene—for instance, spectators watching the patient in a “weird” kiss. (The analyst thinks that perhaps “weird” refers unconsciously to homoerotic desires of the patient toward her, but feels she must leave this aside at this point.) “P. [the boss] is just like my mother, insecure,” Ms. T. goes on. “I felt that my mother would feel left by me and jealous maybe if I was prettier, younger, and more successful in school than she was. I was supposed to be loyal to her, just like P. expects me to be loyal to her. [The patient is saying that P., who is included in the party over her, represents her mother.] I felt this loyalty thing when I was talking to her about how this other guy in the firm is so experienced and I wanted to work with him. P. yelled, ‘I’m fed up with hearing about him!’ I guess she didn’t want to hear me praising a man and feeling that he was so great, better than her maybe. I felt that both my mother and P. wanted to thwart my development.”

“I felt that I couldn’t love both my mother and my father: that it could only be one or the other or they would be jealous.”

At this point relatively early in the analysis the patient idealized the analyst and contrasted her seeming equanimity with her jealous mother and the equally jealous Ms. P. Only later did this image crumble to allow negative and competitive feelings to emerge in the transference.

This example shows the loyalty conflict of the Persephone story clearly. The patient explicitly begins with the idea of twos and threes during adolescence, but quickly gets into persephonal/oedipal triangles as she attempts to deal with the feelings characteristic of such unresolved conflicts by means of an unconscious re-creation. In her evoking her supervisor’s (mother’s) jealousy by praising the man and evoking her jealousy, the patient tells us that what has been evoked for her is the difficulty of negotiating a threesome and balancing loyalties and desire toward father and mother. Also evoked are old feelings of being excluded from a threesome—in the present a peer, a female boss, and herself, overtly a SOT, but a persephonal/oedipal triangle just beneath—at first she, a rival girlfriend, and the supervisor— which quickly morphs into another configuration: she, a male coworker, and the supervisor, and then finally settling on the triangle of mother, father, and herself. Reversing the roles to become the one doing the excluding, she undoes this narcissistic wound. Here in this session, as in real life, triangular and preoedipal themes are interwoven, united by feelings of jealousy and exclusion around both female and male figures. Where there has been trauma (parental ineptitude, preference, or overstimulation, as in this case), there may be a greater vulnerability to jealousy and feeling left out, and more conflicts and eventual difficulties.

Case 3

Mrs. Z., in her mid-forties and a lawyer in a large firm, was in her third year of analysis. She had become friendly and involved with two other women, K. and J., who worked with her, and they often had lunch together. All three were ambitious and wanted to become partners. An underlying competition was in motion.

The following session occurred after the analyst had taken a short break, and the patient had canceled the session after her return to go to the beach (an action-oriented response to exclusion), obviously connected to the transference and feelings of rejection. However, when the analyst had tried to explore these connections, the patient denied that her cancellation had any meaning. She was usually more insightful, so this defensiveness suggested strong underlying emotion.

She says, “I guess I am a jealous person.” The analyst asked her to elaborate. “Yesterday I was feeling that K. and J. are better lawyers than I. They feel I am not as good as they are. It makes me feel really bad. And to make it worse they left early and went to lunch without me. I can’t get past this sibling stuff!” (We had discussed her feelings about K. and J. in terms of her rivalries with her siblings.) The two of them seem to be more in with T. [one of the older male partners], kidding around and talking about cases. And they seem closer together than they are with me.” On other occasions Mrs. Z. has reported being praised and getting good feedback from this man. “I have to work harder; it seems to me, than K. and J.”

After a few moments’ silence she says,” I am thinking about my father and how he and I would kid around and play with the dog. My mother was so tough all the time. She would take away pleasantness, spoil the fun, and be critical of our kidding around.” Then, after a pause, she continues, angrily: “The only reason you would ask me about my being away was to take away fun [this seems to express an unconsciously co-created transference—a critical maternal superego]. I was not jealous about your going away [note the disavowal and negation returning to the opening affect here and the patient’s denying of any meaning to her going away]—just sad at your going away, probably to be with your family or husband.”

The analyst remarks: “So you did have other painful feelings that were expressed by your staying away on Friday.” The patient nods and becomes thoughtful.

This session starts with what seems like jealousy around easily recognizable rivalrous sibling issues. (The patient had an older sister, close in age, and a younger brother.) The twos versus threes dynamic is obvious. But as the session progresses, we see that the exclusion by the two women seems to have re-evoked persephonal/oedipal/triadic conflicts: fun with her father in a erotized tone (playing with the dog), followed by the memory of her mother’s perceived critical attitude about the fun, and perhaps having fun with her father.

Then the patient herself brings in the affect of jealousy, which the analyst has not mentioned, and the feeling of being left out by the analyst; she alludes to the analyst’s trip with her family and her husband—the latter suggestive of a primal scene. In an attempt to manage the painful feelings of rejection and not being included, she unconsciously retaliates by rejecting the analyst in turn and going off with her own husband and family.

The analyst was surprised by the patient’s intense resistance at first, and felt herself pulled internally into being somewhat critical, like the mother who takes away the fun. Competition with her peers, K. and J., for T.’s attention seems on the surface like sibling oedipal rivalry (two siblings vying for a parent’s or older sibling’s favor and attention), but the patient’s associations are entwined around her father, her mother, and herself, along with triadic persephonal/oedipal exclusion and painful narcissistic wounds.

Two year later, preoccupations with this triangle composed of Mrs. Z. and her friends K. and J. receded, as erotic feelings and fantasies toward the analyst took center stage in the analytic relationship and began to be understood. Triadic themes also emerged, as the patient jealously imagined the analyst having sex with her husband, or as she tried to make the analyst feel left out by hinting that she was finding a captivating male replacement for her. Occasionally K. and J., as well as T., appeared secondarily as characters in dreams linked with the figure of the analyst. Following is a session that signaled the beginning of this turbulent period in the analysis.

The patient begins: “I had a dream last night. Ted [her thirteen-year-old son] had a friend over. They were playing Pokemon. I was enjoying the two of them. Then when I was going to sleep I was thinking about how we had talked about how you write about sex and I had said, ‘You write about sex and that’s why I picked you.’ What does it mean I picked you and what does it mean about you?” So, the dream:

I’m looking for you to give you something and wanted tell you I found a rare Pokemon. I was in your house and all the walls were white. It was all open space. I looked down the hall into the kitchen. You had on a little skirt that skaters wear and a bed jacket on and blue slippers which were roller blades and you were skating around the kitchen. . . . There was a white, curly-haired dog. You put the roller skates on the dog on the front paw and back paw. I asked what has this to do with sex. You answered, “We’ll have to research it.” . . . there were a lot of books in a loft. Then I became uncomfortable. Your skirt went up. Saw your hip and leg. “Ugh,” I said, “I don’t want to see this!”

“I think of my mom’s leg,” she says. “When you called Monday to say you were sick, I panicked. K. wears her skirts short, shorter than I do. More attractive to men than I am. This dream doesn’t feel so important.”

The analyst remarks on the anxiety:” I think you are getting to some uncomfortable feelings that are important.”

The patient replies, “I don’t know what to make of this dream. For a long time I have had dreams where I am searching. Or there were feelings of being trapped and looking for a way out. This one was all open. [The analyst was aware of a sense of lightness and playfulness in the room. She wonders if that signals progress—a shared open analytic space like Britton’s triangular space (2004)—to observe what was going on.] In recent dreams, I was looking for Dr. B. [her former male therapist] for a tryst. . . . I have been working with K. on a case. Working intensively. It is like intercourse—we get lost in it.”

“I saw too much of my mother when she was getting dressed and undressed when I was a kid. It was irritating, overstimulating. . . . I had gone into the bedroom earlier in the day, putting on my sweatpants. I turned and saw Ted watching me. I had left the door open. I set the thing up, not consciously. I felt bad. The look on his face was sexual. How could it not have been sexual for me?” She pauses.

The analyst suggests that in the dream Mrs. Z. was looking at the analyst.

The patient nods: “Yes. . . . It was traumatic to see my mother in the hospital [a few years before]. I think she was wearing a bed jacket then.”

The patient associates to the roller blades: “You were being a kid. I didn’t know whether to take you seriously. It was exciting and wrong and crazy. K. has this white dog. It thinks I’m the greatest. It is attached to me.”

(The analyst is thinking that the curly-haired dog may represent herself, suggesting an acknowledgment, if unconscious, of a positive bond between them. But it is the curly-haired dog that is crazy about the patient, not the patient who is crazy about the curly-haired analyst. And it was a dog that had brought the patient shared pleasure with her father. She is also aware of a sense of pleasure and a stirring excitement within herself.) Going back to the how the patient introduced the dream, the analyst asked,” Is my writing about sex exciting to you?”

The patient laughs. “Absolutely! Voyeuristic, I guess.”

Analyst: “What’s that about for you?”

The patient, hesitates, then says, “Have you had similar sexual experiences to mine? Do you enjoy sex with your husband?” She goes on to talk enviously about how the analyst seems to have her sexuality well-channeled in writing. She then reports that she imagined bringing the analyst soup when she was sick, and how she would like to bring in her recent positive evaluations from work because it was hard for her to integrate the good in herself and feel accomplished. She finishes the session by saying, “I had the dream after you told me that what I said was insightful. It was like a hug. I do think you like me. . . . I don’t’ think K. likes me lately. This is mixed in with the analysis somehow. . . . I’m getting along better with J. lately though. My mother didn’t like me. It was hurtful. I know Dad liked me and was proud of me.” (The feeling her mother did not like her is undoubtedly partly her projection, although the mother was critical and severe, not fun-loving like the father.)

This session does not contain clearly triadic material, except that there are three figures— the patient, K., and a dog—and the reference to a tryst with a male therapist. The sexual feelings, replays of an earlier excitement with her mother, seem like those of a little girl on the cusp of the triangular stage looking at her sexual mother with curiosity and awe. She experiences the analyst as seductive, exciting, and excited by her. Yet the sexuality belongs to the mother and not yet to the daughter. There are indications of unconscious anger at her analyst/mother for leaving her, covered by solicitousness (the chicken soup), but she loves and needs her and her positive regard as well. The idea that working with K. is like intercourse suggests working with the analyst has become erotized for her.

Here the friends from the twos and threes situation, K. and J., and the analyst are brought together—who likes her and who doesn’t—and then equated with parents, one of whom likes her while the other does not. The triangle of friends becomes the parental triangle. The curly dog, a packed image, connects to K., perhaps to the analyst, and to her father, and may also represent a younger child or baby. If we look at the characters in the dream as all representing parts of the self, then we have the skating analyst, who is the disavowed but wished-for sexual self (and the cold researcher who excites but does not gratify); the curly-haired dog who represents the side of the self, the child, who is very attached to the analyst and mother and to the patient herself, the onlooker.

A few months later came another dream, in which she is beginning to acknowledge her erotic feelings toward the analyst: “A blending of your office and Joe’s [a gay colleague]. I hugged him. Is that my homosexual thing toward you?” She laughs anxiously.

With termination is sight almost two years later, and triadic issues being worked through (we concur with contemporary thought that the persephonal/oedipal complex is never really “resolved”), Mrs. Z. describes a dream after having good sex with her husband: “I dreamed of being part of a family. You were there, too. There was a picture of you when you were a little girl. Curly hair but gray.” (This is reminiscent of the dog in the dream above.) “Cute. In the dream, you write songs in addition to the book and that’s why your husband married you. [She laughs.] He fell in love because of the music you made.”

Thus, the overly exciting sexual book has become beautiful music that the marital couple make together, perhaps picturing the analytic creation or baby made by the analytic couple. It would seem that the patient had reached a point where she could tolerate, even joke about, the parental couple, as in Britton’s concept of triangular space (2004).

By the time Mrs. Z. terminated and had worked through her triadic conflicts, as well as significant early trauma, she was more comfortable with her positive loving feelings toward the analyst/mother, as well as in her relationships with female friends and colleagues. There was no more preoccupation about who liked whom better. In a session a few weeks before terminating, she speaks of what good friends she and K. have become and how now she is enriched by being part of a small group of friends that includes K. “K. went to lunch with J. the other day. She had asked me first, but I couldn’t go and it didn’t bother me like it would have before. I am glad those childish feelings are gone, or almost gone,” she adds laughingly.