An Expansion of Intersubjective Theory: Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. By Jessica Benjamin

Jessica Benjamin has been examining the issue of recognition in much of her work. In The Bonds of Love (1988), Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995), and Shadow of the Other (1998), she explores aspects of this phenomenon, especially in the context of her interests in feminism, human development, and relations between parents and children as well as between men and women. In Beyond Doer and Done To, she acknowledges that she is speaking from a particular position; that is, as a white woman who experienced many difficulties growing up in relatively privileged circumstances in the United States, while also identifying beginning in her teens with the oppressed, despite the fact that in her community she was one of a distinct minority.

In the process of doing this, she locates her work in the psychoanalytic tradition, particularly the intersubjective perspective as defined by Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange. Benjamin speaks of their work in the

context of the earlier emergence of object relations theory which privileges the relationships between people, both real and imagined, in contrast to Freud who thought that the basic foundation of human development was the instincts, conceived of as biologically rooted.

Nevertheless, she utilizes parts of Freud’s work that are useful to her in presenting her ideas. For me, one of the strengths of her book is her ability to use certain aspects of the thinking of various theorists whose work in general is understood as belonging to a different school of psychoanalytic thought than her own. She does this primarily by relying on attempts to speak about clinical matters that are less abstract, rather than the metapsychology of these theorists, which can often be experience distant and more easily contestable. She skillful