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I met Dr. Jessica Benjamin for the first time in 1988 in San Francisco. She was here to present with Otto Kernberg at a conference titled “Love.” Her first book, Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, had just been published to great acclaim. As a feminist therapist at that time, for me, this was a historical moment — personally, politically and for psychoanalysis — that a woman analyst had found a way to bring a feminist perspective together with Marxism and psychoanalysis to the clinic. This was revolutionary at that time, and I wanted to meet the woman who had the mind and fortitude to accomplish such a feat. We have been connecting cross-country ever since.
For this interview, we met in a brown-shingled home in Berkeley on May 20, 2016, on the day preceding her presentation at the NCSPP Annual Lecture: “More Than One Can Live: Reconceiving Harm and Reparation in the Intersubjective World.”
SS: Where shall we begin? Where is the beginning? Why don't we start off with your early studies of philosophy, which included studies at the renowned Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in Germany, then your return to New York University, and your ultimate participation in the formation of the Relational School of Psychoanalysis? You have been part of many large and transformative movements!
JB: In the '60s, I was studying philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, which is where I learned about the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Marcuse's book Eros and Civilization was very much part of what we read and thought about. At that time, psychoanalysis was part of the anti-authoritarian student movement that was centered in Frankfurt. So, I went to Frankfurt and took part in the movement's attempt to return to psychoanalytic the work of the 1930s — I wrote about this in my paper celebrating “Bonds of Love: 25 Years Later”1 — to try to recoup the psychoanalytic