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.