Benjamin, Jessica

The Bonds of Love

In The Bonds of Love, Benjamin examines the structure of domination inherent in “ideal love” relationships and the self. Focusing on the pre-Oedipal and early mother-child relations, she explores the possibility that a child's awareness of the mother as distinct yet similar—as a separate subject in her own right—is both normal and desirable. She argues that it is only through recognition by the child of the mother as sovereign that the child's independent identity can emerge, leading to healthy object-love and a reciprocal, mutual relationship free from the distortions of domination and submission.

Identifkatory Love in Girls and Boys

In contrast with Benjamin's reading of this developmental phase is a traditional Freudian interpretation, where the mother and child are not separate but contiguous. Repudiated as the child's forbidden object of desire, she is relegated to the lesser status of Other. In this traditional interpretation, because of the mother's lack of independent subjectivity and the impenetrable attachment between mother and child, the child's sense of independence and separation from her can only be realized through the father, who represents agency and autonomy. He intervenes in their relationship of attachment, embodying what Benjamin refers to as “identificatory love.” For boy children, father-identification results in the idealization of male power and a sense of independence and control. Rather than developing identificatory love with the mother, which would be a means to avoid domination or submission, instead the boy child rejects the mother if she does not offer him a “subject” with whom he can identify. In contrast, girls—who may identify only with the mother and then only if she has her own sense of self—a lack of identification with the father (who in fact does not invite it) results in girls' failure to see themselves as independent. This results in a tendency in adult relationships toward masochism, or the desire to submit to a strong man or master, and a final attempt by the ego to save itself from obliteration.

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