Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love

Jessica Benjamin is a feminist psychoanalyst who is interested in reconciling intersubjective theory with intrapsychic theory, in challenging the bias in psychoanalytic thought towards gender complementarity and in finding a space within theory for tensions and contradictions that have traditionally been foreclosed in psychoanalytic thought. In her words, intrapsychic and intersubjective theory must complement each other because "without the intrapsychic concept of the unconscious, intersubjective theory becomes one-dimensional, for it is only againstthe background of the mind's private space that the real other stands out in relief" (21).

In The Bonds of Love (1988) she puts forward a theory of sadomasochism that departs both from a drive-oriented Freudian account of masochism as aggression turned inward and from feminist accounts of women as unwilling victims of male domination. Instead, she insists that women are complicit with their own subordination and views sadomasochism through the lens of intersubjectivity (which asks us to think in terms of simultaneity rather than linearly, to see the self-other dyad from two different perspectives at the same time), as rooted in an imbalance between assertion of self and recognition of otherness. Our paradoxical dependence on others for our own sense of self is the core of the problem: if we destroy the other, there's no one left to recognize us but there's no way of avoiding the danger that the other can destroy us. For Benjamin the solution for the paradox of recognition is for it to continue as a constant tension.

The first chapter "The First Bond" focuses on the tension between recognition of self and other for both subjects of the preoedipal mother-child dyad. Some of her concepts here are useful to a new understanding of the imaginary, namely:

1) Her critique of the Hegelian notion of master-slave relations as inevitable, resulting from the clash of two self-consciousnesses. In Subjectivity without Subjects Kelly Oliver critiques Hegel on similar grounds, using Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of vision to argue that there is no split between a subject and an object, no gap between the seer and the seen; that the eye touches, is connected to the things of the world. Seems both Oliver and Benjamin reject the Hegelian dualism implied in Aufhebung, his notion that tensions between subjects cannot be sustained but must break down and polarize. In other words, for both Oliver and Benjamin identification does not have to be alienating and narcissism does not have to be pathological. Intrinsic to the Hegelian subject and to the classical subject of psychoanalysis is a subject who forms his ego from the external world, and who wants to assimilate otherness to himself (internalization) or whose identity is formed through a negative relation to another who is "not-me" (abjection). For Benjamin, the self is neither wholly formed by nor the sole creator of external reality.

Although Hegel acknowledges reciprocty, asserting that "they (the two subjects) recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another," he posits a self who experiences himself as absolute, whose goal is to be cut off from the other, an omnipotent "I." Benjamin posits a subject who can "be" with the other or share similar states without demanding that the other give up his or her difference as other; she borrows this concept of being with the other that allows room for mutuality and difference from Daniel Stern and from Winnicott and defines it as follows:

"To transcend the experience of duality, so that both partners are equal, requires a notion of mutuality and sharing. In the intersubjective interaction both partners are active; it is not a reversible union of opposites (a doer and a done-to). The identification with the other person occurs through the sharing of similar states, rather than through reversal. "Being with" breaks down the oppositions between powerful and helpless, active and passive; it counteracts the tendency to objectify and deny recognition to those weaker or different-- to the other. It forms the basis of compassion, what Milan Kundera calls "co-feeling," the ability to share feelings and intentions without demanding control, to experience sameness without obliterating difference." (48)

While Benjamin's intersubjective notion of recognition allows for sameness and difference to co-exist, Kelly Oliver challenges a notion of space and vision that is presupposed in neo-Hegelian theorists from Lacan to Butler, for "what our eyes cannot see are the elements that fill the space between ourselves and our objects and link us in the circulation of light and air that make circulation possible" (155). She uses the fetal-maternal body as a metaphor for an intersubjectivity that is very much like the one described by Benjamin and that is reminiscient of Irigarayan metaphors of placenta, angel and threshold to describe a mother-daughter relation that is "neither one nor two." Jan Campbell reads these as metaphors of a female imaginary that connects the real with the symbolic, body and language, history and psychoanalysis. The female imaginary is predicated on a notion of connection rather than of unbridgeable alienation between subjects, on a radical reconfiguration of postmodern subjectivity which assumes a gap between signifier and signified and a subject who has had to distance herself from the mother's body in order to be a subject at all. With the notion of the female imaginary subjectivity itself must be thought of in a new framework: narcissism, desire, recognition, the relationship between body and language, Oedipal dynamics, the death drive, Eros/Thanatos, etc.

Unlike Benjamin, Oliver privileges the notion of witnessing" to that of mutual recognition, which she still views as "presupposing a recognizer who has the power to determine who is in and who is out" and which risks reinscribing master-slave dynamics by excluding the other. She also writes that "what is recognized in the act of recognition is sameness, which continues to reinscribe the position of mastery by requiring that the other be assimilated in order to be recognized at all" (173). This conflation of recognition with identification precludes the simultaneity of two dynamic subjects in process which Benjamin's intersubjectivity incorporates and contradicts her theory of vision as fluid, mobile and traversing a network of sensory relations between subjects.

2) Benjamin also critiques Mahler's (an ego psychologist) theory of separation/individuation with its delineation into the three phases of differentiation, practicing and rapproachement (refers to phase in child development in which toddler has to reconcile grandiose ambitions with reality). For Mahler the internalization of the mother as a structure inside oneself resolves rapproachement by creating a sense of object permanency: one ventures out into the world as a separate subject, but with the mother "inside her." Since the mother's subjectivity is not considered in his account, the child's subjectivity is also incomplete. As Benjamin notes, the internalization of mother as a constant object "does not tell us how the toddler comes to terms with the difficulty that his own freedom depends on the other's freedom" (36).

Benjamin borrows Daniel Stern's "discovery" in the eighties that the infant is never totally undifferentiated (symbiotic) from the mother, but can distinguish from the very beginning itself from the world of others and reunites this with Winnicott's notion of "using" (creatively benefiting from) the object by destroying it in fantasy, which she sees as a solution to the Hegelian problematic: if the object is destroyed inside, then we know it to have survived outside. You destroy your fantasy of the object in order to come to terms with its otherness. For Benjamin Winnicott's theory of destruction "suggests a reality principle that is a positive source of pleasure, the pleasure of connecting with the outside, and not just a brake on narcissism or aggression. Beyond the sensible ego's bowing to reality is the joy in the other's survival and the recognition of shared reality" (41).

Winnicott's notion of the transitional space goes beyond internalization; during this phase the child uses transitional objects "as a passage towards the awareness of otherness, towards establishing a boundary between inside and outside" when that boundary (a linguistic one) has not yet hardened" (41). In this space the child "can play and create as if the outside were as malleable as his own fantasy." This turning of the real into an imaginary space is the precondition for agency, a sense of self; here the child knows the objects she plays with to be "outside," separate from the (mental, inner) self, yet suspends this belief in the otherness in order to enter the realm of play, creating as well as discovering the object. Intrapsychic dynamics exist in tandem with intersubjective ones: the self can not be located inside or outside the fiction of play, but on the boundary between the two, where they (the world of representations and the otherness of the objects) exchange places. This is where I locate the quixotic subject of women's fiction, at the meeting place between intrapsychic and intersubjective, where she does not have to choose between the inner world of mental representations and the outer world of real objects; this is our phenomenological reality before we enter the symbolic order and the polarities it sets up between inner and outer, representation and object.

Benjamin sees Winnicott's transitional space as a re-engagement with reality rather than a retreat into a fantasy realm. There is no opposition between reality and play in this realm; this opposition (false) is only set up when we enter the symbolic. If we take the transitional space as conceptualized by Winnicott to refer to the space of the female imaginary, then the imaginary in Benjamin's reading involves a creative engagement with reality rather than an identification with static mirror images that do not correspond to anything in the "real" world.

3) Benjamin defines Eros as "a life force that aims at creating unities" and contends that Freud's neglect of Eros accounts for a missing links in theories of domination and subordination. A return to Eros, conversely, enables us to understand how the otherness that cannot be reconciled to the self can be a source of freedom (she takes this up in Like Subjects, Love Objects in more detail, postulating Eros as "the striving towards the other, the process of recognition").

How does this imaginary implied in Benjamin's work play itself out with the quixotic subject of women's fiction? The books written by twentieth-century women writers seem to illustrate the negative consequences of a masculine imaginary at the same time that they point towards an alternative (female imaginary). I'm thinking in particular of de Cespedes' Dalla parte di lei, in which there is a breakdown between recognition of self and of other like the one Benjamin describes. Reversing Winnicott's formula in "The Use of an Object," for instance, Alessandra kills her husband to preserve him in fantasy, rather than killing her fantasy so that her husband can survive in reality. However, since the book is framed as the autobiographical account in the aftermath of her trial, the "I" who writes the book is at a remove from the "I" as subject who can not distinguish between fantasy and reality; this "I" is aware of the otherness of Francisco and of her mother, a like subject whom Francisco replaces. If the murder of her husband is the result of a breakdown when she is confronted with the violence of a negative masculine imaginary, she undoes splits in her subjectivity by representing them (another way in which what I call the female imaginary manifests itself), creating a textual space that holds open the tension between recognition of self and of other. Also, within the frame of her fiction de Cespedes' narrative subject creates an erotic imaginary that connects with her mother and with Francisco on a bodily level.

In "Master and Slave" Benjamin relies on Winnicott's theory of destruction and survival to further develops a theory of masochism and of sadism from an intersubjective perspective which she juxtaposes against Hegelian and Freudian account of masochism. Winnicott, as we've seen, opens up a productive space within psychoanalytic thought for thinking about the imaginary, although she does not use this term: her notion of transitional space and transitional objects presumes a third intermediate space exists in between fantasy and reality, inner and outer, in which the baby who is moving towards rapproachement (differentiation of self from mother which Benjamin sees as present from the beginning but realized consciously by the subject through his or her entry into the symbolic) experiences herself as neither separate from nor one with the mother, an extension of her body. This third space is creative, as the child symbolizes through play a relationship with the mother that moves from destruction (rooted in the desire to be recognized by her) to joy in her survival (she neither imposes her will on the child or assimiliates herself to her child's will; she is made to appear to the child as a separate but similar subject). Benjamin argues that we destroy the m(other) in fantasy so that she can survive in reality. Unlike the Freudian model which posits aggression as inherent in the subject, Benjamin sees the joy of connection with a subject who is unlike me as the driving force behind civilization: tensions result when the other does not survive the self's destruction or the self is made to disappear through the other's assimilation of it. Both masochism and sadism, then, stem from a need for recognition and to be recognized (the two are intricately linked). The sadist needs the masochist to survive his destruction of her to be recognized; the masochist needs the sadist to destroy her in order that she might survive. It is not the pain itself she enjoys but the connection she experiences with her lover who witnesses her in her most vulnerable state, who releases her from her inauthentic self. Polarized master-slave relations result from breakdown in tensions of recognition also becomes a search for self and other, a vehicle for bringing foreclosed tensions back into play. But this vehicle (sadism or masochism) fails to accomplish any life-affirming drive towards otherness, since the polarized relationship never allow the tensions to be sustained. The masochist becomes a thing and thus cannot satisfy the master's need for her to survive her; rather than acquire a subjectivity, she loses more and more of herself until she is his no-thing (the trajectory of The Story of O).

Reading this chapter I became confused by her adaptation of Winnicott's notion of destruction and survival to the notion of masochism and sadism. I took Winnicott (whom I have yet to read) to be referring to a destruction that takes place only on an imaginary plane, that is symbolized but never really lived in relation to the mother; in other words, sublimated destruction. But here Benjamin is referring to "real" destruction which takes the form of violence against/upon bodies. If in the former case the other survives because I do not violate him in reality, only in fantasy, how can the other survive when violence is experienced on a corporeal level? In other words, how does the masochist survive the other's violence?

In Like Subjects, Love Objects she revises her account of masochism and sadism to reconceptualize the relationship between Eros and Thanatos. Eros is no longer the goal of Thanatos, Eros and Thanatos exist side-by-side and the tension between these polarities is never resolved. If with Eros (desire for connection with an other who is unlike me) comes Thanatos (aggressive energy which desires to destroy otherness, either incorporating it into the self or abjecting it) the play between the two is a never-ending dialectic. Neither the shared desire to connect with an other nor the desire to destroy otherness is originary in this revision of the Hegelian/Freudian account. This seems to make more sense given the direction of history; it can also be recast as a sustained tension between "masculine" and "feminine" imaginaries.

I like the fact that she de-pathologizes masochism and sadism while emphasizing its danger for subjectivity, but I also felt she needed to historicize them more. In exploring the association between gender and master-slave relations, she at times conflates femininity with masochism and masculinity with sadism, particularly through her habit of returning to parenting styles (authoritarian vs. permissive) in early childhood for explanations of the masochistic or sadistic adult. The need to be recognized by the other means something different in an individualistic culture like the one we have in the U.S. and this was only vaguely addressed; she dismisses the idea that we internalize modes of relationality way too readily and universalizes what is a culturally determined desire.

Chapter 4: “The Oedipal Riddle”

Benjamin deconstructs Freud’s reading of the Oedipal myth to show how it is predicated on binary oppositions that preclude the recognition of difference: if we do not acknowledge the mother as a separate subject on a theoretical and a practical level, Benjamin argues, then we cannot come into being as separate subjects either; for the self if dependent on the mother for the recognition she seeks, and if that mother does not survive, the self does not survive either. (“Survival” to Winnicott means not repudiating or withdrawing from the child). The repudiation of femininity that is written into the Oedipal complex by Freud as the incest taboo—the Oedipal injunction that one must not be like the mother in order to possess her, or the splitting off of identificatory love from object love, the latter of which reduces the other’s subjectivity to a thing—has disastrous consequences for the boy’s development of selfhood and agency. Benjamin focuses her critique on two aspects of Freud’s reading of the Oedipal myth:

1) His idealization of the Oedipal father, which for her conceals masculine anxiety about the aggressive aspect of the primal father, who would rather kill the son than have the latter succeed him and inherit his kingdom (think Laius). According to Benjamin, this violence is projected onto the mother, who represents a dangerous narcissistic regression, a siren.

2) His neglect of the role of the Oedipal mother, who is eroticized by the child, and of the role of the rapproachement father in the development of early narcissism. Benjamin calls for a distinction between maternal and paternal ego superego and ego ideal that does not polarize the mother into a representative of fusion and the father into a representative of the exciting outside, the principle of separation, and makes the case for a healthier narcissism by referring to the boy’s need for a “playful, secondary identification with femininity.”

She argues for a New Oedipus, a “rereading of the story as a confrontation with the knowledge of self and other” that “presumes the possibility of a postoedipal separation in which individuals are able to turn back and look at their parents, to critically assess their legacy rather than simply identifying with their authority” (180).

My critique of Benjamin’s reading (which is also Campbell’s critique): Why not think outside the Oedipal altogether in the sense of creating symbolic space for imaginaries that do not, have never adhered to an Oedipal framework, while acknowledging the persistence of the Oedipal as a cultural imaginary?