The optical model potential for nucleon elastic scattering is investig
ated within the context of a three-body model. It is shown that the st
andard full-folding optical model potential is obtained as a special c
ase of an approximate solution to such a three-body problem. A new ful
l-folding-type optical model potential together with its corresponding
factorized t rho version are then obtained in the above three-body pi
cture under some plausible approximations.