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Jessica Benjamin, a renowned leader in the relational movement of psychoanalysis, brings to her latest book1 her characteristic theoretical sophistication as well as her dense, difficult style of writing. Although clinical vignettes help to illustrate her theoretical points on sex, gender, play, enactment, and trauma, the book is certainly not one you can read in an afternoon. As a sociologist by training who studied for a few years at the Frankfurt School, Benjamin clearly applies Hegelian dialectics to her theory of recognition. In this book, she engages explicitly with social problems – especially in the last chapter, in which she takes on xenophobia and violence such as it occurs, for example, in the conflict between Israel and Palestine or took place in the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship. Benjamin’s book can thus be seen as firmly rooted in the ethical turn in psychoanalysis.
Benjamin’s book revolves around the concept of recognition, which for her is primary, “a psychic position in which we know the other’s mind as an equal source of intention and agency, affecting and being affected; and second as a process or action, the essence of responsiveness in interaction” (p. 3). Recognition is an action, potentially a verbal one, in which we demonstrate that we know something about the other’s experience. In recognition, we see the other not as an object but as a subject with another mind to whom we can connect. As a relational process, recognition allows children to build a sense of self and is the foundation for any good relationship, including the analytic relationship. Benjamin’s take on recognition was inspired by her work with Beatrice Beebe on mother-infant interaction as well as by the developmental theorizing of Daniel Stern.
When recognition fails, two parties instead embody what Benjamin calls a relation of complementarity. “The idea of complementary relations […] aims to describe those push-me/pull-you, doer/done-to dynamics that we find in most impasses, wh