| Like Subjects,
Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. By Jessica Benjamin.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Reviewed by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl,
Ph.D.
This volume collects the essays Jessica
Benjamin has written since The Bonds of Love appeared in 1988. Like
Subjects, Love Objects is at once a critical review of the earlier book's leading
ideas, a statement of their implications, a survey of the author's ideational terrain as
it has evolved over the last ten years, and a new effort to situate her ideas in order to
influence how that terrain will be understood.
Benjamin is a theorist. She certainly
makes reference to her psychoanalytic practice, drawing from it one-sentence vignettes,
presenting an interesting extended dream interpretation, and trying to suggest how her
ideas affect her practice, but primarily she is a theorist. So she gets oriented in
theory, and for her that means in three traditions--one evolving from
late-nineteenth-century Hegelian Marxism down through the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, and
Habermas; a feminist one generated in the wake of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex
and now drawing on postmodernist French philosophy (particularly as it concentrates on how
selves are historically and discursively constructed); and one growing from Freud into the
interpersonal and cultural Freudian schools of America in the 1950s, Winnicott and the
British Middle Group in the 1960s, and on into what is now known as a "relational
perspective." Because her work, like a great river, draws on many tributaries,
it offers psychoanalytic readers an excellent perspective on what might be called
"the widening scope of psychoanalytic theory."
Through most of the early 1980s, the
meeting of psychoanalysts and feminism that centrally concerns Jessica Benjamin was
conducted in this country by feminists. After a decade of repudiating psychoanalysis
in a tone set by works like Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), second-wave
feminist theorists, let by Juliet Mitchell and Nancy Chodorow, began to reassess Freud and
the Freudians. Their concern was with what psychoanalysis, critically appropriated,
might bring to social theory. Mitchell wanted to make British Marxism aware of its
neglect of the oppression of women, even when it had been receptive to the work of Reich
and other Left Freudians; Chodorow wanted to awaken the American sociological
tradition, or that part of it indebted to Talcott Parsons and others who had sociologized
Freud, to the ways in which social institutions perpetuate what are now called gender
roles. In this context, Benjamin focused on domination, not as a problem of
Hobbesian wolfish human nature needing authority to control it, but as a problem of
relationships, a problem involving the hearts and minds of dominated people. She
wanted Freudian-influenced social theory to see that domination is not simply repression
or coercion but a complex process of forming and shaping dominated people into
participants in their domination. And she wanted attention paid to the primary
category of dominated people. "What is extraordinary about the discussion of
authority throughout Freudian thought is that it occurs exclusively in a world of men.
The struggle for power takes place between father and son; woman plays no part in
it, except as a prize or temptation to regression, or as the third point of a
triangle." Women were considered not so much dominated as naturally
subordinate.
A decade after Mitchell's Psychoanalysis
and Feminism and Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering, and at about the
time of Benjamin's The Bonds of Love, there began within psychoanalysis itself an
assimilation of feminist theory: Psychoanalytic theory, not just social theory, was
challenged by feminists--quite a number of whom, including Mitchell and Chodorow, by then
trained as psychoanalysts--who took aim at Freudian views of both female and male
development. They were continuing a line of critique begun in the 1920s by Klein,
Jones, and Horney with regard to female development and adding to work begun in the 1960s
by Ralph Greenson, Robert Stoller, and others on male development. Gender identity
construction was the leading theme, and any idea of the natural subordination of women was
rightly rejected as a relic of the period preceding the feminist revolution.
In this current collection of essays,
Benjamin approaches this gender identity theme with two characteristic convictions.
First, she is an includer, a synthesizer. She looks over the history of
psychoanalytic theorizing in America and understands that it is very American--that is,
faddish and cliquish. New voices are forever rising up and declaring old voices
either opposite or obsolete. So, if you adopt object relations theory you must
abandon libido theory; if you are an intersubjectivist you must eschew the intrapsychic;
and so forth. Benjamin, by contrast, believes in holding onto the multiplicity of
perspectives--most basically, a multiplicity of images of the baby and its mother--and
moving back and forth among them, combining them when they can be combined, translating
when they cannot. This is not eclecticism. It is a thinking procedure built
upon a refusal to be monistic or to be trapped in binary oppositions, to "allow
competing ideas to be entertained simultaneously" (p. 4). Second, she believes
in giving attention to phenomena, moments in developmental processes, or types of
theorizing that have been neglected, thought to be over and done with, or misconstrued;
she is a recuperator, or, to use her own language, so redolent of her dialectical
heritage, she is dedicated to "reintegrating the excluded, negative moment to create
a sustained tension rather than an opposition" (p. 23).
In this collection, two of Benjamin's many
concerns are central, one related to each of the two convictions just noted. As a
synthesizer, she develops the concept of recognition, which was also central to The
Bonds of Love. As a recuperator, she develops the related concepts of
identificatory love and overinclusivity. Let me try to evoke the richness of her
essays by sketching just these two contributions.
Recognition is Benjamin's term--taken
originally from Hegel's reflections on the master-slave dialectic--for the mode of
relation (or intersubjectivity) between two people in which each can compass the other as
an independent subject, both like and not-like. She wants to construct something
like a developmental line of recognition. To do so, she begins with the work of
infant researchers like Daniel Stern who have insisted that prototypes of recognition are
present ab ovo--that is, her baby is not swaddled in Freudian primary narcissism.
From Winnicott, then, she draws the image of a later intersubjective moment of
differentiation, of perceiving an objective object, beyond a subjectively conceived
object--a breast actually outside, giving milk, beyond a wished-for breast. Freud's
baby would need to be interrupted or frustrated by reality in order to get real in this
way, Benjamin argues, but Winnicott's baby learns from its mother's recognition and its
own recognition of her to curb inwardly its omnipotence, its hallucinating of the breast.
Good adult lovers, good psychoanalysts, and good democrats are thus foretold:
"Denial of the mother's subjectivity, in theory and in practice, profoundly
impedes our ability to see the world as inhabited by equal subjects" (p. 31).
In the realm of the nonrecognizers, Benjamin studies exemplars: theorists oblivious
to subjectivity, political oppressors, pornographers (chap. 6).
In the preoedipal development of
recognition a child can acquire capacities to keep the period of its sense of
complementarity--the oedipal period of "the other," the different--from
rigidity. A preoedipal child who recognizes its mother can then recognize difference
without rejection, denial, or excesses of envy. The preoedipal period is, further,
the period--in Benjamin's view--of identificatory love. She notes several times that
Freud distinguished primary identifications from those later identifications that follow
upon object love or the dissolution of the oedipus complex. Although Freud tended to
neglect the primary identifications, she thinks these--as modes of love--are crucial t to
a preoedipal child's "overinclusivity" (a concept drawn from Irene Fast's Gender
Identity). Because children have identificatory love for parents and others of
both sexes, they experience themselves as both. Later, oedipal delimitation can be
built up on this overinclusive basis, rather than on a basis of disidentification, being
thereby not caricaturedly or stereotypically all-masculine or all-feminine.
Benjamin, true to her conviction about the importance of negative dialectical moments,
focuses on neglected preoedipal identifications--the boy's with his mother and the girl's
with her father (chap. 4).
Both for its battle maps of current
theories and for its diplomacy, this is a very valuable book. For its contributions
to the rapidly emerging field o psychoanalytic gender theory, it is a challenging
one--perhaps even a prolegomena to the future clinical studies that field so urgently
needs.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
409 W. Stafford Street
Philadelphia, PA 19144
E-mail: Eyoungbr@haverford.edu
Young-Bruehl, E. (1998). Review of Like subjects, love
objects:essays on recognition and sexual difference., J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn.,
46:634-638.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who has a
private practice in psychoanlaysis in Philadelphia, is the author of a number of books,
including Anna Freud: A Biography, Creative Characters, and The Anatomy of Prejudices.
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Subjects, Love Objects : Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference
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