Abstract

Restorative justice aims to combine welfare with discipline in the hope of restoring the fractured relationships between young offenders, victims, and communities. This chapter argues that its success depends on a richer and more relational model of restoration and community-based professional practice than is presently available—one that implies seeing the other as an equivalent centre of subjective experience. Relational psychoanalysis may have something to offer, in so far as it interprets the intra and intersubjective interplay of creativity and destructiveness as integrally related within and between selves. Relational practice is orientated to the use of all the dimensions of thirdness within the intersubjective field, and bodily interaction may be the primary means by which some subjects express themselves and change each other. Jessica Benjamin's account of the intersubjective thirds focuses on the interpersonal dynamics of encounters between two people, which, in the case of the energetic third, is already present within the mother–infant dyad.