Why do people submit to authority and derive pleasure even others have over them? What is the appeal of domination and submission, and why are they so prevalent in erotic life? Why is it so difficult for men and women to meet as equals? Why, indeed, do hey continue to recapitulate the positions of master and slave?In The Bonds of Love, noted feminist theorist and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin explains why we accept and perpetuate relationships of domination and submission. She reveals that domination is a complex psychological process which ensnares both parties in bonds of complicity, and shows how it underlies our family life, our social institutions, and especially our sexual relations, in spite of our conscious commitment to equality and freedom.

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 recognition theory illuminates the radical potential of acknowledgment in healing both individual and social trauma, in creating relational repair in the transformational space of thirdness. Benjamin's unique formulations of intersubjectivity make essential reading for both psychoanalytic therapists and theorists in the humanities and social sciences. Book jacket

In this important book, the author of The Bonds of Love discusses gender issues from the perspective of developmental psychoanalysis. Jessica Benjamin, a well-known psychoanalyst and feminist, makes a case for what she calls "gender heterodoxy"--a highly original view of the similarities and differences between the sexes--and in the process she illuminates aspects of love, sexuality, aggression, and pornography. Benjamin elaborates and develops the psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity, taking up the question: What difference does it make when I consider the Other to be not merely an object of my mind but a subject in his or her own right, with a center of being equivalent to my own? This question of recognition is closely related to how we frame, tolerate, and theorize difference and is therefore tied to the issue of gender. Benjamin argues that intersubjective theory does not replace but rather adds to the existing intrapsychic theory of psychoanalysis, which focuses on the individual. Her both/and (as opposed to either/or) approach is carried throughout the book, for Benjamin brilliantly integrates relational and Freudian positions, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and clinical and theoretical information.

"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, modernism and postmodernism, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective. Benjamin s work apart is her brilliant utilization of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing other as a mental repository fo unwanted characteristics cast from the self. Jessica benjamin shows the implications of this dual relationship for male/female hierarchy and offers a possibility for balancing the two. This book continues the author's well-known explorations of the themes of intersubjectivity and gender, taking up issues at the forefront of contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis."