Person
Jessica Benjamin
American psychoanalyst and feminist theorist, born in 1946, one of the founding figures of relational psychoanalysis. After studying psychology, sociology and philosophy at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and taking a doctorate in sociology at New York University, she brought Hegel's idea of recognition into psychoanalysis: in The Bonds of Love (1988) she traced domination and the polarity of gender to a breakdown of mutual recognition between subjects. Her later work on intersubjectivity and the third describes how analyst and patient fall into a complementary relation of doer and done to and how they find their way out of it; she teaches at New York University's Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
- Born
- 1946
- Influenced by
- Donald Winnicott
introduced
- Mutual recognition 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.
- Identificatory love 1988 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.
- Doer and done to 2004 Benjamin named the complementary relation of doer and done to in her 2004 paper on thirdness, where it describes the twoness of analytic impasse and enactment. Her 2017 book took it into social conflict as well.
critiqued
- Oedipus complex 1988 In The Bonds of Love Benjamin criticised the Oedipal model for making the father the sole agent of separation and desire and the mother an object to be left behind, a split she held to reproduce gender domination.
developed
- Intersubjectivity 1990 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.
- Relational psychoanalysis Benjamin was one of the first New York analysts of the relational school and brought feminist theory and the idea of recognition into it. Mitchell and Aron reprinted her outline of intersubjectivity among the founding papers of the tradition.