Benjamin, Jessica

Jessica Benjamin (b. 1946) is a practicing psychoanalyst who is internationally known for bridging classical psychoanalytic theory with feminist thought. She is acclaimed for her efforts to integrate seemingly opposing positions within psychoanalysis, such as the divide between Freudian “drive psychology,” or what is called the one-person model, versus recent “relational theories,” or two-person models. While she aligns herself with object relations theorists (that is, a two-person model that stresses the effects of human relationships on psychic development), she also argues for preserving a focus on how internal psychic conflicts and unconscious fantasies shape psychological life and social interaction. Benjamin embraces both categories of experience—the intersubjective and the intrapsychic—and intertwines them in a multilayered rubric for understanding gender polarities, sexual differences and desire, and male domination (1988).

Benjamin was born in 1946 in Washington, D.C. Her parents were left-wing activists who had immigrated as children from Jewish communities in Russia. Their values played an important role in Benjamin's life as she pursued her interests in both the politics and psychology of domination. Benjamin received her MA in sociology and philosophy at the Institute for Social Research of Frankfurt, West Germany, and her PhD in sociology from New York University. She uses the German philosopher Hegel and social theorist Habermas to extend relational psychoanalysis and feminist thought. Her first book, The Bonds of Love (1988), reconsiders psychoanalytic theories of gender identification and sexual domination in light of philosophical critiques of Western binaries and modes of thinking that pit the self-as-subject against the other-as-object. Her account merges psychodynamic explanations of splitting (the breakdown of self and/or other into two opposing sides, where one side or person is idealized at the expense of the other) with social structures of power and domination that do the same. This book demonstrates the complex web of gender, sexual, and social domination and lays the groundwork for understanding mutual recognition as a human capacity that while not easily realized, can transform unequal relations of power.

Benjamin argues that there is an inherent tension between recognizing the other and asserting the self, which, while not [Page 51]inevitable, more often than not results in a power struggle. Insofar as psychic and social structures buttress subject/object splitting (e.g., male versus female, mother versus child, giver versus taker, doer versus “done to,” powerful versus powerless), so that individuals are allowed to take on only one role or the other, then the capacity for mutual recognition is thwarted. Similarly, gender and sexual polarities also restrict the range of human identification and desire wherein maleness is posed in opposition to femaleness and homosexuality is posed in opposition to heterosexuality. Benjamin (1995) emphasizes that the ability to “see the world as inhabited by equal subjects” (p. 31) is key to transforming sexual and gender relations that cast women as objects of men's desire and not as desiring subjects in their own right.

One of Benjamin's (1995, 1998) most important contributions is to foreground the paradoxical process of recognition and delineate its role in development. Her outline of the developmental trajectory of intersubjectivity and mutual recognition begins with a reconsideration of the mother–child relationship and extant theorizing about separation-individuation. She critiques lopsided accounts, including those of object relations theorists, that center on the child as self/subject moving toward autonomy and separation while portraying the mother as the other/object who either facilitates or hinders this development. Acknowledging pathbreaking findings in infant research (Stern 1985), Benjamin poses an alternative view of mother–child development that emphasizes reciprocity as well as the mutual reinforcement of both the child's and the mother's need for and enjoyment of recognition.

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