In “The Story of I Perspectives on Women's Subjectivity”, as in The Bonds of Love (1988), Jessica Benjamin makes what I regard as an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory by drawing attention to the distinction between object love and what she calls identificatory love and to the importance of the latter in establishing in both sexes a sense of the self as a desiring subject or agent — that is, when such identificatory love for a parent representing agency and desire is recognized and affirmed. Her argument is that, in patriarchal society in which