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.
Development
1988
introduced by Jessica Benjamin
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.
In An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition (1990);The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (1988)
Relations
- 1988 introduced by Jessica Benjamin
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.
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).
- 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".
- 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
- An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition1990Evidence for a relation
- The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination1988Evidence for a relation
- 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