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THE PUBLICATION OF The Bonds of Love (1988) established Jessica Benjamin as a leading developer of relational psychoanalysis. The current volume is a collection of essays, most of them previously published, in which she extends her ideas regarding the tension between psychoanalysis and feminist theory. She is interested specifically in a discussion of Lacanian and object relations theories, and in delineating dilemmas of gender that can be “understood by reference to the issues of envy and loss, identification and repudiation, that object relations theory has foregrounded” (p. 15).
Benjamin intends to develop the idea of the analytic situation as intersubjective. The term, introduced in psychoanalysis by Atwood and Stolorow (1984), refers to the intersection between two subjects, as opposed to a meeting of a subject and an object. Benjamin does not state, however, how her ideas about intersubjectivity differ from those of Atwood and Stolorow’s self-psychological view, or from those of other contemporary relational theorists.
In her previous work, Benjamin took Hegel’s idea of the master unable or unwilling to recognize the slave’s subjectivity as a starting point for understanding male-female relationships. She described how the father’s lack of recognition of the daughter as a subject of desire and lack of acceptance of her “identificatory” love for him leads to masochism in women.
In the present book’s first essay, “Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity,” Benjamin again uses Hegel’s ideas about the need of the self to affirm its absolute independence and to be recognized by another. The recognition that the other is a subject like oneself means that the other can be equally absolute and independent. Recognition is defined as meaning that “the other is mentally placed in the position of a different, outside entity but shares a similar feeling or state of