Concept
Mutual recognition
Jessica Benjamin's term, adapted from Hegel, for the relation in which each of two subjects is affirmed by the other and at the same time acknowledges the other as a separate subject with a mind of their own. She holds that the need for recognition contains a paradox: we depend on another to confirm our independence, and so must bear the fact that the other is beyond our control. Development, in her account, runs through repeated breakdown and repair of this tension, as when the other survives the child's destructiveness. When the tension collapses, one party takes the place of subject and the other of object, and there she finds the root of domination and submission, erotic and social.
- Broader concept
- Intersubjectivity
- Introduced by
- Jessica Benjamin
- Key works
- 4
- Related
- Thirdness
introduced by
- Jessica Benjamin 1988 Benjamin took the idea of recognition from Hegel's account of master and slave and made it a psychoanalytic concept in The Bonds of Love (1988), where its breakdown explains domination. Her 1990 outline of intersubjectivity set it out as a line of development.
gave rise to
- Thirdness Benjamin's thirdness grew out of her earlier theory of mutual recognition: the third is the shared space or principle that makes recognition between two subjects possible, as the subtitle of her 2017 book on recognition theory and the third reflects.