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PB 4(2):220-236 (1993)

The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination by Jessica Benjamin New York: Pantheon, 1988, ix + 304 pp., $22.95

Author: Louis S. Berger PhD

Abstract

Jessica Benjamin characterizes her rich and stimulating book about psychoanalysis and feminism as “an analysis of the interplay between love and domination” (p. 5). She outlines the structure, content, and goals of her work thus:

I will show how the structure of domination can be traced from the relationship between mother and infant into adult eroticism, from the earliest awareness of the difference between mother and father to the global
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images of male and female in the culture. We will begin with the conflict between dependence and independence in infant life, and move outward toward the opposites of power and surrender in adult sexual life. We will see how masculinity and femininity become associated with the postures of master and slave—how these postures arise in boys' and girls' different relationships to mother and father, and how they shape the different destinies of male and female children. We will observe the identification of girls as object and boys as subject in the central psychoanalytic model of development, the Oedipus complex, and see how this opposition distorts the very ideal of the individual. Finally, we will follow this ideal into the culture at large, which preserves the structure of domination even while it appears to embrace equality. (p. 8)

The polarized dyad that is central to her presentation of the child's traversal of the evolutionary tasks from neonate to adult is assertion of self opposed to recognition of the other. Ideally, this opposition should evolve into a capacity for mutuality, a relatedness based on nondefensively maintaining the tension between the poles; but in our culture at least, the sets of needs associated with these two poles are likely to be in conflict. Assertiveness tends to lead to self-centeredness, where others are seen as impediments to, or simply impersonal vehicles for, gratification; whereas the desire for recognition, which requires one to acknowledge the other's existence, tends to lead to dependency, a

PB 4(2):220-236 (1993)

The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination by Jessica Benjamin New York: Pantheon, 1988, ix + 304 pp., $22.95

Author: Louis S. Berger PhD

Abstract

I will show how the structure of domination can be traced from the relationship between mother and infant into adult eroticism, from the earliest awareness of the difference between mother and father to the global
Page 220
images of male and female in the culture. We will begin with the conflict between dependence and independence in infant life, and move outward toward the opposites of power and surrender in adult sexual life. We will see how masculinity and femininity become associated with the postures of master and slave—how these postures arise in boys' and girls' different relationships to mother and father, and how they shape the different destinies of male and female children. We will observe the identification of girls as object and boys as subject in the central psychoanalytic model of development, the Oedipus complex, and see how this opposition distorts the very ideal of the individual. Finally, we will follow this ideal into the culture at large, which preserves the structure of domination even while it appears to embrace equality. (p. 8)