Identificatory love

Jessica Benjamin's term for the love a child of either sex feels, in the period of rapprochement, for a parent who stands for the outside world and for desire of one's own, in the traditional family usually the father: a love that wants to be like the other and to be recognised by them as alike. She argues that boys usually receive this recognition and girls are often denied it, so that a woman may later seek her own desire through submission to an idealised man. Identificatory love is thus one of the routes by which gender polarity is made, and its recognition one of the ways to undo it.