Jessica Benjamin
Biographic Data
| ID | 3742867 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica Benjamin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica |
| FAMILY NAME | Benjamin |
| SIGNATURE | BENJAMIN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8966-4214 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 247 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Talking in a Time of Violent Destruction: Introduction to a Dialogue Between Orna Guralnik and Christine Harb
Thinking about moral injury and the making of reparations; Comments on Connolly and Nichols
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Thus wrote Martin Luther King in his Letter from Birmingham jail, in which he countered the liberal voices who urged patience and, in effect, submission to the order of racial oppression and continued exploitation. “You cannot build a country on a crime against humanity and act as if it doesn't matter…
T aking I t P ersonally
The author reviews some of her personal and intellectual connections and experience in dialogue with Philip Bromberg, touching on a few ideas that have central importance for her as well as how he conveyed his own experience and feeling of what was important. She highlights how Bromberg influenced her and summarizes the way she understands her differences with him
Tilting Back Toward Development: Response to Steven Cooper’s “Donald Winnicott and Stephen Mitchell’s Developmental Tilt Hypothesis Reconsidered”
In this commentary on Steven Cooper’s paper (this issue), the author agrees with his exposition and discussion of the issues attendant on Stephen Mitchell’s theory of the developmental tilt, in particular with his proposal that relational analysis needs to pay more attention to Winnicott’s contributions. In reviewing Mitchell’s thesis we find a problematic either/or regarding the clinical value of developmental focus on infancy and early childhoo…
Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third
In Beyond Doer and Done To, Jessica Benjamin, author of the path-breaking Bonds of Love, expands her theory of mutual recognition and its breakdown into the complementarity of "doer and done to." Her innovative theory charts the growth of the Third in early development through the movement between recognition and breakdown, and shows how it parallels the enactments in the psychoanalytic relationship. Benjamin’s unique formulations of intersubject…
Beyond Doer and Done To
Beyond doer and done to
Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third
Non-violence as respect for all suffering: Thoughts inspired by Eyad El Sarraj
The ‘too muchness’ of excitement: Sexuality in light of excess, attachment and affect regulation
This paper brings together contemporary thinking about early attachment and affect regulation with our clinical and theoretical understanding of the problems of adult sexuality. In addition to recent theories of affect regulation and attachment, we incorporate Laplanche's idea of 'excess', which was an important transitional concept integrating real experience with fantasy in sexuality. We elaborate the idea of excess-- 'too-muchness' --to illumi…
Masculinity, Complex: A Historical Take
The author recapitulates the history of the changes in second-wave feminist psychoanalytic thinking regarding masculinity, beginning with the critique of the Freudian-Lacanian position of phallic monism adumbrated by Juliet Mitchell. It traces the reversal brought about by the North American position, represented by Stoller and Chodorow, that emphasized the boy’s problem in breaking his primary identification with the mother. Continuing, the auth…
The Bonds of Love: Looking Backward
In giving this brief account of the development of and influences on the book I hope to make it possible to see its location in a particular moment of not only psychoanalytic history but also the social and intellectual history of my generation. I delineate the influence of specific individuals, but more important, the way in which I was located in a number of transformational movements and disciplinary currents: the German student movement and t…
Andy Rabinbach as an Inspiration for a Work of Feminist Theory
This article gives a brief account of the influence of Anson Rabinbach on the work of his personal partner, Jessica Benjamin. Benjamin describes the significant points of convergence between the two thinkers' sensibilities in regard to critical theory, left-wing movements, and fascism. Both concurred in rejecting the privileging of rationalism and the repudiation of helplessness, which Benjamin identified in the thinking of Sigmund Freud and Theo…
Facing Reality Together Discussion: With Culture in Mind: The Social Third
Like the papers it speaks to, Jessica Benjamin's deft discussion works at once on 3 different levels: the clinical moment where mind and society meet, the critique of social and psychoanalytic theory, and the assessment of social forces. It aims to “highlight what is gained or lost or made more troublesome by admitting the intensity of interpellation, which our psychoanalyst authors allow themselves to experience.” Following the “thread of mourni…
Response
A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship (the shared third)
Relational psychoanalysis has emphasized that the analyst’s awareness of her failures in recognition and hurtful re-opening of old wounds requires of her an internal struggle with self-regulation, with her own shame and guilt. This struggle takes place in the watchful presence of someone who is (sometimes hypervigilantly) listening to and monitoring the signs of the analyst’s internal state. If, in response to the patient’s hyper-arousal, the ana…
Two-Way Streets: Recognition of Difference and the Intersubjective Third
jessica benjamin is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City who also teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminisms, and the Problem of Domination (Pantheon, 1988), Like Subjects, Love Objects (Yale University Press, 1995), and Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1998).
Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness
Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept…
V. The Question of Sexual Difference
V. The Question of Sexual Difference
Response to Commentaries by Mitchell and by Butler
This paper is a response to a discussion of my work by Stephen Mitchell and Judith Butler. I treat number of issues raised by those writers. Chief among the issues raised by Mitchell are the status of drive theory and the interrelation of the intersubjective and the intrapsychic. I clarify that, although I do value the paradoxical tension between opposites in relation to many binaries, I do not aim to preserve Freud's instinct theory alongside cu…
Hoffman's Ritual and Spontaneity: Three Reviews and a Response
In this issue we introduce a new format for the JAPA Review of Books. In our first Book Forum, Irwin Z. Hoffman's Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process is evaluated by three reviewers—Jessica Benjamin, Lawrence Friedman, and Louis Sass. Each provides in-depth commentary on this important new contribution to the psychoanalytic literature. Their reviews are followed by an equally thoughtful reply by the author. In this manner the dia…
Shadow of the other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis
Shadow of the Other is a discussion of how the individual has two sorts of relationships with an "other"--other individuals. The first regards the other as a s work apart is her brilliant utilization of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing tensions: masculinity and femininity, subjectivity and objectivity, passivity and activity, love and aggression, fantasy and reality, modern…
"Special Section: "Contemporary structural psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis": Commentary.
Special Section: "Contemporary structural psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis": Commentary
Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness
Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept…
A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship (the shared third)
Relational psychoanalysis has emphasized that the analyst’s awareness of her failures in recognition and hurtful re-opening of old wounds requires of her an internal struggle with self-regulation, with her own shame and guilt. This struggle takes place in the watchful presence of someone who is (sometimes hypervigilantly) listening to and monitoring the signs of the analyst’s internal state. If, in response to the patient’s hyper-arousal, the ana…
The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination
The ‘too muchness’ of excitement: Sexuality in light of excess, attachment and affect regulation
This paper brings together contemporary thinking about early attachment and affect regulation with our clinical and theoretical understanding of the problems of adult sexuality. In addition to recent theories of affect regulation and attachment, we incorporate Laplanche's idea of 'excess', which was an important transitional concept integrating real experience with fantasy in sexuality. We elaborate the idea of excess-- 'too-muchness' --to illumi…
Authority and the Family Revisited: Or, a World without Fathers
Two-Way Streets: Recognition of Difference and the Intersubjective Third
jessica benjamin is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City who also teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminisms, and the Problem of Domination (Pantheon, 1988), Like Subjects, Love Objects (Yale University Press, 1995), and Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1998).
Masculinity, Complex: A Historical Take
The author recapitulates the history of the changes in second-wave feminist psychoanalytic thinking regarding masculinity, beginning with the critique of the Freudian-Lacanian position of phallic monism adumbrated by Juliet Mitchell. It traces the reversal brought about by the North American position, represented by Stoller and Chodorow, that emphasized the boy’s problem in breaking his primary identification with the mother. Continuing, the auth…
Non-violence as respect for all suffering: Thoughts inspired by Eyad El Sarraj
The Bonds of Love: Looking Backward
In giving this brief account of the development of and influences on the book I hope to make it possible to see its location in a particular moment of not only psychoanalytic history but also the social and intellectual history of my generation. I delineate the influence of specific individuals, but more important, the way in which I was located in a number of transformational movements and disciplinary currents: the German student movement and t…
Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview
The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Knowledge
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Carol Gilligan
Take Heart
The Crows
Authority and the Family Revisited: Or, a World without Fathers
Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview
The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination
Shame and Sexual Politics
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Carol Gilligan
Germans, Leftists, Jews
That anti-Semitism has nothing to do withJews has been noted; this is even more the case with the Jewish debate that has recently emerged*in West Germany. Touched off by a special issue of the Berlin journal, Asthetik und Kommunikation entitled, Germans, Leftists, Jews,' the newJewish problem has to do with German responsibility, guilt, the generational conflict, national identity, etc. The fate of the Jews as such has played almost no role. Neve…
Die Fesseln der Liebe: Zur Bedeutung der Unterwerfung in erotischen Beziehungen
Comment on “When Interpretation Masquerades as Explanation”
Die Fesseln der Liebe: Psychoanalyse, Feminismus und das Problem der Macht
An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition
Image and Institution: Gender and Representation in the Sociology of Culture
The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Knowledge
"Special Section: "Contemporary structural psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis": Commentary.
Special Section: "Contemporary structural psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis": Commentary
Special Section: "Contemporary structural psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis": Commentary
Shadow of the other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis
Shadow of the Other is a discussion of how the individual has two sorts of relationships with an "other"--other individuals. The first regards the other as a s work apart is her brilliant utilization of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing tensions: masculinity and femininity, subjectivity and objectivity, passivity and activity, love and aggression, fantasy and reality, modern…
Hoffman's Ritual and Spontaneity: Three Reviews and a Response
In this issue we introduce a new format for the JAPA Review of Books. In our first Book Forum, Irwin Z. Hoffman's Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process is evaluated by three reviewers—Jessica Benjamin, Lawrence Friedman, and Louis Sass. Each provides in-depth commentary on this important new contribution to the psychoanalytic literature. Their reviews are followed by an equally thoughtful reply by the author. In this manner the dia…
Response to Commentaries by Mitchell and by Butler
This paper is a response to a discussion of my work by Stephen Mitchell and Judith Butler. I treat number of issues raised by those writers. Chief among the issues raised by Mitchell are the status of drive theory and the interrelation of the intersubjective and the intrapsychic. I clarify that, although I do value the paradoxical tension between opposites in relation to many binaries, I do not aim to preserve Freud's instinct theory alongside cu…
V. The Question of Sexual Difference
V. The Question of Sexual Difference
Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness
Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept…
Two-Way Streets: Recognition of Difference and the Intersubjective Third
jessica benjamin is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City who also teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminisms, and the Problem of Domination (Pantheon, 1988), Like Subjects, Love Objects (Yale University Press, 1995), and Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1998).
Response
Psychology (29 works) · Psychoanalysis (22 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications (16 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Psychoanalytic theory (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Psychotherapist (7 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (6 works)