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In The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin (1988) outlined her thesis on domination, noting the mutually exclusive nature of the pursuits of love and power. Her in-depth discussions of domination, particularly
between men and women, point up the fact that the pursuit of power is inevitably perverse, ultimately leading to the destruction of the relationship. Focusing her gender-based discussion along intersubjective lines, she proposes mutual recognition of separate selves as the reasonable alternative to submission of one person, or one sex, to the other. In Shadow of the Other, Benjamin continues to interweave the themes of gender, the pursuit of power, sexuality, conceptualizing the “Other,” identification, intersubjectivity, and feminist theory with psychoanalysis. If this effort seems more than a little ambitious, it is. In spite of its monograph length (only 120 pages), Shadow of the Other takes the reader on an intellectual roller coaster ride through the labyrinths of Benjamin's fertile mind.
She succeeds in integrating her ideas about power relations (particularly between the sexes) with intersubjective theory but does not effectively apply this integration to analytic practice. When Benjamin does talk about clinical psychoanalysis, she works from the position of discussing the undesirability of power relations (of which “gender” seems to be a subset) and advocates the more equal footing found in intersubjectivity. But it seems that her main subject area—gender—gets lost in this application. If gender is, in fact, such a widespread arena for power relations, how does this get translated into analytic practice? Why doesn't Benjamin talk about how gender roles inhibit, enhance, or in any way affect the analytic process? If she proposes that men and women have to change the way they interact with each other, how do male analysts need to change the way they treat female patients, and vice versa? She speaks frequently about how each person plays a role and colludes