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Jessica Benjamin's Beyond Doer and Done To is revolutionary. It is a manifesto whose consequences, Benjamin explains, are hoped to “reach across the disciplinary barriers and enable non-psychoanalysts to access the social and philosophical implications of intersubjective psychoanalysis” (p. 1). Benjamin's intention
is congruent with my original interdisciplinary starting point in the critical theory of society- a social theory aimed at unmasking hidden pathologies of power and domination- as well as my current concern with the processes of social healing and witnessing of collective trauma (indeed, in light of current events, with non-violent resistance). (p. 1)
These, together with Benjamin's experience of motherhood, study of mother-infant interaction, passionate involvement in second-generation feminism, international political activism, as well as long clinical practice, underlie a powerful document.
Benjamin's force and clarity are to be appreciated. Her banner of “intersubjective psychoanalysis” is specific to her understanding, so differentiated from other definitions of “intersubjectivity” (pp. 22-26). It radically regrinds the individualist lens through which earlier psychoanalytic vernaculars view the world; and that has defined Western philosophy (and so, psychology) since Spinoza's fashioning of our philosophical spectacles, as trenchantly observed by Heine and mirrored by Fromm (Fromm, 1964; Geller, 2007). The psychoanalytic project, first conceived by Freud (which Benjamin references as Freud's “Cartesianism” (p. 22)), proceeded under this turn from the instinctual premise of our biological drives and consequent interpersonal acts, locating the individual as the creator of her own experience. In so doing, psychoanalysis followed Spinoza in turning from the medieval assumption that individual identity was defined by membership in a societal collective (Fromm, 1964; Nadler, 1999). Yet still, by the 19th century, Freud himself confronted and sometimes identi