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In this collection of essays Jessica Benjamin deepens her exploration of themes probed in The Bonds of Love (Benjamin, 1988) to which it will inevitably be compared. In this work, her concerns are more broadly based, and she analyzes in greater depth developmental, gender, and treatment issues discussed, but not focused on, in her first book. The result is an innovative and invaluable contribution to the psychoanalytic theory of gender and development that achieves a depth of insight and subtle complexity rarely found in psychoanalytic writing. This collection, consisting largely of expanded versions of previously published papers, confirms what many of us have suspected for some time: that Jessica Benjamin is one of the most creative of contemporary contributors to psychoanalytic theory. No review of this length could possibly do justice to the richness of thought in this stimulating volume, so I will attempt only to provide a flavor of some of the more prominent themes.
Benjamin's mission is to fill gaps and overcome simplicities of traditional psychoanalytic theory. Her first and most fundamental target is the lack of a psychoanalytic theory of the experience of the other as a subject in his or her own right and the experience of the self as a subject of desire. Benjamin correctly points out that most psychoanalytic theory views the object for what it does or does not do for the self with little regard for how the child becomes able to recognize, appreciate and love the other as an independent self. One of her critical distinctions is between object and other, and she makes this difference the crux of her preference for relational over object relations theory. She points out that the other must be recognized as a subject for the self to experience her own subjectivity fully in the other's presence. Thus, there is, in her