Concept
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.
Development
1988
introduced by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin described identificatory love for the father in The Bonds of Love, where she explains the daughter's later ideal love as a result of its frustration. She returned to it in the essay on father and daughter collected in Like Subjects, Love Objects.
In Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (1995);The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (1988)
Relations
- 1988 introduced by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin described identificatory love for the father in The Bonds of Love, where she explains the daughter's later ideal love as a result of its frustration. She returned to it in the essay on father and daughter collected in Like Subjects, Love Objects.
Works
- 1988
The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination
Jessica Benjamin's first book asks why people accept, and take part in, relations of domination and submission. Drawing on Hegel's account of recognition, object relations theory and infancy research, it argues that domination grows out of a failure of mutual recognition: the tension between asserting oneself and recognising the other collapses into a split in which one side becomes subject and the other object. The book follows this split into erotic domination, the Oedipus complex and the polarity of masculinity and femininity, and criticises Freud's account of the father as the sole bearer of separation and desire. It appeared in Hebrew in 2005 as כבלי האהבה (Dvir, translated by Tamar Almog).
- 1995
Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference
Jessica Benjamin's second book, published by Yale University Press in 1995, gathers six essays that develop a psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity and bring it to bear on gender and sexual difference. Its guiding question is what changes when another person is recognised not merely as an object of one's own mind but as a subject in their own right; because recognition concerns how difference is met, it leads to the question of how the sexes are alike and different, which Benjamin answers with what she calls gender heterodoxy. She presents intersubjective theory as a complement to the intrapsychic, individual-centred tradition rather than a replacement for it, and the book keeps to this "both/and" stance throughout, holding together relational and Freudian views, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and clinical and theoretical material. The opening essay, "Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity", reads Winnicott's account of the destruction and survival of the object as the way the other comes to be recognised as a separate subject. The essays that follow propose an "overinclusive" view of gender, examine the fantasy of the omnipotent mother, describe the daughter's identificatory love for the father, and turn to the erotics of the transference and to sexuality and aggression in pornography.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference1995Evidence for a relation
- The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination1988Evidence for a relation