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".