Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis

Shadow of the Other (Routledge, 1998) collects three essays by the American psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin that carry forward her earlier work on intersubjectivity and gender. As the publisher describes it, the book distinguishes two kinds of relationship a person has with an other: in one, the other is met as a being entirely different from oneself and yet still recognisable; in the other, the other is grasped through its function as a repository for qualities the self has cast out of itself. Benjamin asks how the self reconciles these two relationships and what follows for relations between men and women, and in doing so takes part in contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis, including feminist and postmodern critiques of the subject. The first essay, "The Primal Leap of Psychoanalysis, From Body to Speech", began as a 1995 paper at New York University's conference "The Psychoanalytic Century" and reads the founding passage of psychoanalysis from body to speech in Freud's early cases; the second, "Constructions of Uncertain Content", questions fixed categories of gender; the third, "The Shadow of the Other Subject", argues for keeping a subject who can own what it projects.