Concept
Intersubjectivity
The view that mental life takes shape between subjects, and not only inside a single mind. The term comes from phenomenology and entered psychoanalysis from the late 1970s and the 1980s by two main routes. Robert Stolorow and George Atwood's intersubjective systems theory treats every clinical phenomenon as arising where the subjective worlds of patient and analyst meet. Jessica Benjamin, drawing on Hegel and on infancy research, uses it for a developmental achievement: the capacity to recognise the other as a separate centre of experience, equivalent to oneself, rather than as an object of one's needs or fantasies. In her account the intersubjective dimension complements the intrapsychic world of internal objects instead of replacing it.
Development
1990
developed by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin's 1990 outline proposed an intersubjective theory of development, centred on recognising the other as a separate subject, to stand beside the intrapsychic theory rather than replace it. Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995) and Shadow of the Other (1998) extended it to gender.
In An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition (1990);Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (1995);Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (1998)
Relations
- 1990 developed by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin's 1990 outline proposed an intersubjective theory of development, centred on recognising the other as a separate subject, to stand beside the intrapsychic theory rather than replace it. Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995) and Shadow of the Other (1998) extended it to gender.
Works
- 1990
An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition
Jessica Benjamin's 1990 paper in Psychoanalytic Psychology argues that the psychoanalytic theory of the self needs an intersubjective dimension alongside the intrapsychic one. On her account development follows two complementary lines: the internalisation of object relations, and a separate trajectory along which the child gradually becomes able to recognise the other person as a subject in their own right, with the attunement and tolerance of difference this requires. Looking at differentiation in the first two years of life, she rereads Mahler's rapprochement phase as a struggle for recognition whose outcome is not only object constancy but the beginning of the capacity to recognise another's subjectivity, and she takes up Winnicott's account of the use of an object: the other's survival of destruction is what allows them to be found as real and outside. Recognition is thus a tension between asserting oneself and acknowledging the other, which can break down into domination; and differentiation is not simple separation but a continual breakdown and repair of mutuality, a view that leaves room for fantasy and aggression in a relational theory of the self. The paper was reprinted as "Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity".
- 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.
- 1998
Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis
Shadow of the Other (Routledge, 1998) collects three essays by the American psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin that carry forward her earlier work on intersubjectivity and gender. As the publisher describes it, the book distinguishes two kinds of relationship a person has with an other: in one, the other is met as a being entirely different from oneself and yet still recognisable; in the other, the other is grasped through its function as a repository for qualities the self has cast out of itself. Benjamin asks how the self reconciles these two relationships and what follows for relations between men and women, and in doing so takes part in contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis, including feminist and postmodern critiques of the subject. The first essay, "The Primal Leap of Psychoanalysis, From Body to Speech", began as a 1995 paper at New York University's conference "The Psychoanalytic Century" and reads the founding passage of psychoanalysis from body to speech in Freud's early cases; the second, "Constructions of Uncertain Content", questions fixed categories of gender; the third, "The Shadow of the Other Subject", argues for keeping a subject who can own what it projects.
See also
People
References
- An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition1990Evidence for a relation
- Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference1995Evidence for a relation
- Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis1998Evidence for a relation