Concept
Doer and done to
Jessica Benjamin's name for the complementary relation into which two subjects fall when mutual recognition breaks down. Each experiences the other as acting upon them and only one point of view seems able to survive, so that one is the doer and the other the done to, and the roles can switch. In analysis she sees it in the twoness of impasses and enactments, where analyst and patient each feel coerced by the other and each defends their own reality. The way out is not for one side to win but for both to reach a third position, often begun when the analyst acknowledges their own part in the deadlock.
Development
2004
introduced by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin named the complementary relation of doer and done to in her 2004 paper on thirdness, where it describes the twoness of analytic impasse and enactment. Her 2017 book took it into social conflict as well.
In Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness (2004);Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2017)
Relations
- 2004 introduced by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin named the complementary relation of doer and done to in her 2004 paper on thirdness, where it describes the twoness of analytic impasse and enactment. Her 2017 book took it into social conflict as well.
- 2004 opposes Thirdness
In Benjamin's account the complementary twoness of doer and done to is what thirdness is lost to: when the shared third collapses, each partner feels done to by the other, and surrender to the third restores recognition.
Works
- 2004
Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness
In this paper, published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2004, Jessica Benjamin argues that analytic work which takes both participants, analyst and patient, as subjects needs a discipline rooted in the structural conditions of thirdness. She distinguishes two forms of the third. An early form rests on experiences of union and mutual accommodation, which she calls the one in the third. Later moral and symbolic forms introduce difference, which she calls the third in the one. In clinical work, she uses the idea of a third co-created by analyst and patient to explain two things. Impasses and enactments collapse the relationship into the twoness of complementarity, a relation of doer and done to. Recognition is then restored through surrender.
- 2017
Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third
Beyond Doer and Done To is Jessica Benjamin's book-length statement of the theory of mutual recognition she first set out in The Bonds of Love. It gathers and reworks papers written after her 2004 essay of the same name, which opens the book. Its central argument is that recognition between two subjects tends to break down into a complementary relation of "doer and done to", and that thirdness is what restores it. Benjamin traces how the Third develops in early life as experience alternates between recognition and its breakdown: first a rhythmic third of attunement between infant and caregiver, then a moral third of shared values and acknowledgment. She shows the same movement inside the psychoanalytic relationship, where impasse and enactment are its forms. The book stresses the power of acknowledgment, including the analyst's acknowledgment of error, to repair a relationship and to heal both individual and social trauma. It carries the theory from the consulting room to social conflict and the witnessing of collective trauma. After an introduction on recognition, intersubjectivity and the Third, the chapters take up acknowledgment, the failed witness and the fear of harming; mutual recognition, vulnerability and asymmetry; excess, affect and gender complementarity in sexuality; the uses of enactment and play; negation and the lawful world; and the moral Third, with witnessing that goes beyond the logic of "only one can live". The publisher addresses it to psychoanalytic therapists and to theorists in the humanities and social sciences.
See also
People
References
- Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness2004Evidence for a relation
- Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third2017Evidence for a relation