Book
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).
What it shows
- 1988
Jessica Benjamin introduced Mutual recognition
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.
- 1988
Jessica Benjamin introduced Identificatory love
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.
- 1988
Jessica Benjamin critiqued Oedipus complex
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.
Donald Winnicott influenced Jessica Benjamin
Winnicott's paper on the use of an object, with its destruction and survival of the other, is a cornerstone of Benjamin's theory of recognition.