Intersubjectivity On The Couch

7
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
ON THE COUCH
Recognition and Destruction
in the Work of Jessica Benjamin
Johanna Meehan
T
he work of Jessica Benjamin complicates the notion of
intersubjectivity found at the heart of Jürgen Haber-
mas’s communicative theory of ethics and creates space
for a feminist understanding of relationships in the personal and
political sphere. While Habermas famously emphasizes the
significance of language and rationality in the dynamics of
intersubjectivity, Benjamin describes the extralinguistic forces
that propel the psychic self.1 Not denying the importance of lan-
guage and rationality, Benjamin offers a way to understand the
origins of language in extralinguistic forms of intersubjective
experience and explains how the irrational, the unconscious, and
the negative influence the way we relate to and communicate
with others.
In her work, Benjamin contrasts two kinds of interactive
experience. In a fully interactive experience, mutual recognition
characterizes the experience and enables intersubjectivity. In
what Benjamin calls “destruction,” the intrapsychic process fails
to attain true intersubjective relatedness. Both experiences are
inevitable dimensions of subjectivity and relationships with
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186 Y Johanna Meehan
others.2 In her theory of the moral third, Benjamin recasts

communicative interaction to include an appreciation for the
dynamics of psychic interaction and the role these dynamics play
in achieving fuller experiences of intersubjectivity. Benjamin
writes, “We might speak of thirdness as a quality of mental space,
of intersubjective relatedness.”3
The achievement of recognition and thirdness are marked by
struggles between selves and social groups. Domination is always
a possibility, and Benjamin’s account of destruction illuminates
its psychic temptations and dynamics. The resources we find in
Benjamin’s work deepen and extend Habermasian conceptions
of discursively mediated intersubjectivity. Her theories allow us
to understand the extradiscursive elements of domination that
so frequently mark gender, racial, ethnic, and national distinc-
tions and the role these play in violent and exploitative human
interactions.
BENJAMIN’S THEORY
OF RECOGNITION
Habermas rehabilitated the aims of the Enlightenment and elab-

orated an alternative model of reason, one that distinguishes
communicative from instrumental rationality. It locates a nor-
mative core in communicative interaction and in the reason-
giving practices developed in social and political institutions
that allow the “unforced force of the better argument” to struc-
ture personal, local, national, and international interaction.4 Ben-
jamin asserts that despite the insight Habermas offers, with its
focus on language and its confidence in rational argumentation,
he fails to theorize the psychic and affective dimensions of our
interactions with others, including violently destructive ones.

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Intersubjectivity on the Couch Z 187
Thus, she claims, Habermas does not account for the negative
aspects of an intersubjective relationship that also constitute a
sense of self and other. Benjamin argues that linguistic rational-
ity, no matter how important, is not the sole dimension of inter-
subjective relating. Linguistic rationality is not the only, or even
the most significant, axis constituting self/other identities.5
We experience a sense of self and other by engaging not only
through linguistically mediated rational engagement but also
through feelings and fantasy, love and identification, repudiation
and projection, and introjection and splitting. Understanding
this is crucially important in conceiving how we might engage
ethically with others as well as in the diagnosis of domination.
Thus an account of intersubjectivity that offers real insight into
human domination and its possible alternatives must include an
analysis of the psychological aspects of our relationships to our-
selves, to others, and to the world. Benjamin argues that only
when we acknowledge and understand the irrational, extralin-
guistic dimension of intersubjectivity can we begin to grasp the
mechanics of domination and attempts to dominate disguised
as rational acts, bending language and desires to their ends.6
Without an understanding of the bonds of love, the capacity
for hate, omnipotence, and submission, the potential for mis-
recognition and destruction, and the ordinary versus the extraor-
dinary, positive and negative aspects of human interactions
remain outside the purview of our theorizing and beyond the
ken of our emancipatory aims. With such an account in hand,
we can begin to think about what responsible and moral psychic
intersubjectivity might be like and understand why a moral psy-
chic intersubjectivity requires a reflective responsibility for recip-
rocal interactions with others.
Affective understanding can be reached only by what Benja-
min describes as the position of the third, a psychic position that

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recognizes not only the desires of the self or the desires of another
to whom we submit, but a position that also manages to sustain
the tension of affectively holding both at once. Benjamin’s notion
of the third is an interesting rethinking of normative inter-
subjectivity, one that includes linguistic as well as psychic
dimensions.
BENJAMIN’S ACCOUNT OF
SELF/OTHER RELATIONSHIP S
In The Bonds of Love, a landmark study in gender domination,

Benjamin describes a critically important analysis of how infants
become human beings—gendered human beings—through rela-
tionships characterized by psychically mediated, culturally
organized, and power-imbued interactions with a primary care-
giver who is commonly a woman.7 In three subsequent volumes
and dozens of articles, Benjamin continues this analysis in ever
more insightful ways, describing the dynamics of power, gen-
der, and subjectivity; dynamics that are integral to the intersub-
jective relations that give rise to a sense of self.
Benjamin follows the tradition of object relations theory when
she argues that an intensely affective, caring engagement with
another person is among the most elemental of human needs;
the recognition of the importance of such relationships is
fundamental to Benjamin’s description of human infant devel-
opment. Like Anna Freud, John Bowlby, and Donald W. Win-
nicott, Benjamin turns to the preoedipal relationships with
caregivers to locate the founding of the subject. Like them too,
she understands the need for attachment to be not a secondary
drive, linked as Freud thought to orality, but as primary as the
need for food. Bowlby, Benjamin points out, “drew on extensive

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research which showed that separation from parents and depri-

vations of contact with other adults catastrophically under-
mined infant emotional and social development.”8 Without
at least one secure attachment relationship, an infant cannot
thrive and is unable to develop a secure sense of self or of others.
Unlike American ego psychology, and the claims of Margaret
Mahler, the attachment theory that Benjamin turns to proposes
that an infant is poised for relationship from birth onward.
There is no period of fusion with another from which an infant
self must “hatch.” An emergent subject is present from the
start. The problem, Benjamin argues, with this formulation is
the “idea of separation from oneness: it contains the implicit
assumption that we grow out of relationships rather than becom-
ing more active and sovereign within them, that we start in a
stage of dual oneness and wind up in a state of singular one-
ness.”9 Benjamin points to the work of Daniel Stern, which
emphasizes the active presence of an infant who is engaged in
relating (in limited ways, but relating nonetheless) from birth
onward.10
Benjamin traces the idea of intersubjectivity to its relatively
recent lineage in the contributions of object relations and self
psychology, to Daniel Stern and Colwyn Trevarthen’s work on
infant development, and, from there, to Habermas’s description
of “the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding.”11 Both Stern
and Trevarthen view the infant as a partner in relation to the
mother from the start. While the parent does a lot more of the
emotional work of relating, infants are aware and attuned to their
caregiver from birth, and it is in interaction with the caregiver
that a child’s sense of self emerges over time. Stern distinguishes
between intersubjective relatedness and core relatedness. Inter-
subjective relatedness builds on the core relatedness of the earli-
est months of life; it is then that the earliest experiences of the

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self are organized and begin to establish themselves. Where

Mahler’s theory would have described the self as separating from
the mother, Stern describes real intersubjective experience, the
experience of being experienced by the other, as just beginning.
It is with this leap into intersubjectivity—the joining of two sub-
jective experiences—that Stern locates fully social relationships.
Trevarthen makes a distinction between the primary and sec-
ondary intersubjectivity that distinguishes very early forms of
relating between infants and caregivers, calling them primary
form of intersubjectivity, and later ascribes to infant-parent pairs
more fully developed forms of intersubjectivity; what for Stern
is intersubjectivity, Trevarthen calls secondary intersubjectivity.12
For Benjamin, the ultimate test of intersubjective recognition is
whether a relationship not only allows recognition but “is depen-
dent upon the self ’s agency and responsiveness to create a work-
ing pattern of co-created action.”13 The cocreation of action is the
realization of intersubjectivity because cocreation not only
requires recognition, it enacts it.
The capacity for creating and sustaining relationships in which
a sense of self can be founded is what Benjamin calls recogni-
tion; it stretches to include the early shared rhythmic movement
of the parent and child to the shared understandings that speech
makes possible. “Recognition,” she writes “is so central to human
existence as to often escape notice or rather it appears to us in so
many guises that it is seldom grasped as one overarching con-
cept.”14 Recognition for Benjamin includes “the ideas of attun-
ement, mutual influence, affective mutuality and sharing states
of mind.”15 She argues that only in relationships of mutual rec-
ognition can affectively charged psychic representations and felt
experiences of self and other emerge. Benjamin stakes this psy-
choanalytic position on the importance of recognizing the dif-
ference between real relationships (with a fully externalized

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other) and those that are merely fantasized (relating from the
intrapsychic space of the unconscious and its operations of
fantasy).
Benjamin and other similarly committed contemporary psy-
choanalysts emphasize the significance of understanding the
nature of relationships between people as an antidote to past
monadological tendencies in the field. This does not exclude a
recognition that both intrapsychic and intersubjective under-
standings are crucial to understanding the relational formation
of selves. Benjamin further clarifies, “To recognize the intersub-
jective self is not to deny the importance of the intrapsychic; the
inner world of fantasy, wish, anxiety, and defense; of bodily sym-
bols and images whose connections defy the ordinary rules of
ordinary rules of logic and language. In the inner world, the sub-
ject incorporates and expels, identifies with and repudiates the
other, not as a real being, but as a mental object.”16 Indeed, the
intrapsychic dimension gives the self its interiority, its depth, its
unique associations and meanings. It forms the background
against which “the real other stands out in relief.”17 The interac-
tion of the intersubjective and the intrapsychic relational per-
spectives, and the ability to sustain both perspectives while
maintaining their distinctness—in theory and in practice—will
prove to be the critical and normative center of Benjamin’s
theory.
Like intersubjective theorists of all persuasions, Benjamin
maintains that nature, individual will, and activity do not fully
determine the self. In a self-consciously neo-Hegelian move,
Benjamin locates the self ’s genesis in someone’s response to it.18
While the human infant might survive without the attachment
experience so connected to another’s recognition of it, its self-
hood depends upon a certain kind of social engagement. We
become present to ourselves when someone becomes aware of

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us, responds to our presence, and we become aware of that

response. It is through the felt experience of a caregiver’s gaze,
voice, and affective engagement that an infant first experiences
itself as a self. Benjamin writes, “A person comes to feel that ‘I
am the doer who does, I am the author of my acts,’ by being
with another person who recognizes her acts, her feelings, her
intentions, her existence, her independence.”19
Experiencing one’s self through another’s experience of us is a
crucial first step toward personhood and a crucial aspect of rela-
tional engagement. Yet it is an incomplete experience. As long as
only one person recognizes the other, the relationship—as Hegel
showed us long ago—remains incomplete. Because it is incom-
plete, the reflection of self is also incomplete. Only when recog-
nition is mutual, when being recognized accompanies recogniz-
ing the one who recognizes, can full intersubjectivity, and with
it a full sense of self and other, be achieved. Mutual recognition
is required for a full sense of self and other because the dynam-
ics of incomplete recognition obscure the extent to which it is a
relationship. A relationship requires at least two people, and rec-
ognizing that a relationship exists makes it possible for a self to
know itself as a separate self. Mutual recognition is not easily
accomplished. It requires the ability to retain a psychic grasp of
the separateness of each partner in the relationship. At the same
time, it requires accepting dependence upon the relationship
and each other. Further, it requires the ability to assert oneself
while recognizing another.
Hegel chose the master and the slave relationship to exem-
plify the obstacles to mutual recognition. Marx, too, used this
model, but it is not helpful for an account of the genesis of inter-
subjectivity. Benjamin turned to a developmental account of
intersubjectivity to provide a more useful model that traces
capacities for recognition to the relational negotiations of a

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parent and child. In order for a child and parent to establish a

mutual relationship, both must recognize the other as distinct
yet emotionally related beings. The intrapsychic fantasy of the
other must exist with a psychically felt recognition of the other
as an externally present self with an intrapsychic interiority,
will, and desires. To establish mutual relationship, this means
a parent must relinquish a fantasy-only relation to the infant
and come to recognize the child as a real existing other with a
mind, will, and desires of its own. These real children, as all par-
ents learn at one time or another, are often annoyingly unlike
the ones of their fantasies. Children, too, must come to experi-
ence their parents as fully separate beings, externally real, annoy-
ingly unlike their fantasies, and outside of their control. This
requires accepting difference, dependence, and limits; it means
not defensively warding off the threat that accepting difference
and thus the limits of the self can provoke—not once again
assimilating the parent intrapsychically, fantasizing them, for
example, to be the all-powerful, will-destroying monsters so
common to fairy tales.
The felt experience of the other as a real person that exists
independent of the self is both threatening and satisfying. It is
threatening because it means the self is not all there is. The self
cannot expand to fill the universe. The self has weaknesses and
needs. The will, needs, and demands of the other create limits
on the self. This experience of other can also be satisfying
because it means that the self is not alone; it can feel and enjoy
the presence and company of another. If the self asserts its will
and the other does not resist, completely capitulating to the
self ’s bid for omnipotence, the asserting or dominating self may
feel abandoned and alone, even while feeling triumphant, because
the other did not resist; it didn’t survive the attack. The other
did not persist in its being as a person, external yet related to the

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asserting or attacking self. For example, a child who insists on

having her own way and views her reasonable mother as a hate-
ful witch is succumbing to fantasy. This fantasy is more likely if
a child experiences an absolute struggle of wills taking place. In
a more benign situation, a child might discover that the mother
asserts limits firmly but kindly, and, while the limit is real and
unwanted, mom is not a witch after all. This struggle to recog-
nize both wills in the process of conflict resolution makes clear
to the child that the parent is in charge but able to engage and
suggests that recognition of will and desire is a two-way street.
Therefore, when a child’s bid for omnipotence is resisted by the
parent, who makes clear that the child cannot have and be
everything, and does this without retaliating or acting like the
fantasized will-destroying monster, the child is able to come
away from the experience feeling herself and the parent to be
distinct, real beings that can coexist.
GENDER AND THE INFANT
The experience and understanding of two distinct selves affec-

tively connected to one another is the experience of relationship.
It is the only route, as Donald Winnicott pointed out, to love.20
Having survived the temptations of omnipotence, always nego-
tiating the dynamic of assertion and recognition, child and
parent take pleasure and comfort in the felt experience of
intersubjectivity.
Some theorists view negation, breakdown, and relational
repair as obstacles to mutual recognition. It is crucial to under-
stand that this is not Benjamin’s view. Benjamin, in fact, con-
siders these difficulties essential for the achievement of mutual
recognition. They are necessary because our way of being in

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relation to others is both to use the other intrapsychically and to

relate to the other outside of self.
According to Benjamin, “From the intersubjective standpoint,
all fantasy is the negation of the real other, whether its content
is negative or succumbing to fantasy—just as is the child who
persists in viewing the mother as good fairy does.”21 Indeed, from
the intrapsychic view, all external reality is simply internalized
in fantasy. Since our relationships are always intrapsychic as well
as potentially intersubjective, they necessarily involve a struggle
between our recognition of an unassimilated other and the
omnipotent assimilation of that other to the self ’s fantasy of it.
A narcissistic tendency to expand in the direction of omnipo-
tence drives assimilating fantasy, while the need for a real exter-
nal other with whom we can experience relationship drives
recognition.
Meanwhile, the other’s tendency to omnipotence leads to
resisting the self ’s attempt to assimilate the other to its fantasy
and provokes opposition, resistance, and struggle. The dynamic
of negation and recognition inherent to the achievement of inter-
subjectivity means that it is impossible, even in the most har-
monious relationships, to “take the sting from the encounter with
otherness.”22 Recognizing this dynamic directs our attention to
how difficult it is for human beings to respond to difference with-
out negating it entirely or at least limiting its reality by assimi-
lating it to ourselves through complex denials of difference.
Benjamin argues that the struggle for recognition is at the
heart of human identity and that gender, an early universal fea-
ture of human identity that requires culturally negotiating highly
significant differences between one’s self and others, is one of
the first and most powerful axes around which self/other forma-
tion turns. The gendering of others and claiming one’s self to be
gendered happens relatively early in life. By about age two, most

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children tend to identify themselves and others as male or female.

This psychic/social, power-saturated, symbolically mediated fan-
tasy of gender is one of the most enduring and fundamental of
fantasies. Of course, the content of these identities varies because
no psychic relationship occurs outside culture and thus no one
is exempt from the social inscriptions of specific social relations.
Benjamin considers gender a dimension of the intersubjec-
tively and intrapsychically negotiated self. As children move
through early infancy to childhood, a historically laden fantasy
of maleness and femaleness plays out in their lives, creating and
recreating a familiar system of gender complementarity and nor-
mative heterosexuality in the dynamics of the struggle for rec-
ognition through processes of identification and repudiation. As
infants become toddlers, their desires and abilities for autonomy
and increasing independence from those on whom they most
passionately depend, as Nancy Chodorow argued in the late sev-
enties, coincide with entry into language, heightened gender
awareness, and, eventually, a psychic sense of gender.23
Fully exploring the sophistication and complexity of Benja-
min’s tracings of the way love for the mother, repudiation of
dependence upon her, and identification with her, as well as
love for and identification with the father, and how these are
tied to cultural fantasies of gender is beyond the scope of this
essay. However, we can note that such forces play themselves
out internally and with others, as children consolidate gen-
dered identities that are at the same time multiple and unsta-
ble, unique and tediously rigid, and that produce recognizably
gendered patterns of desire. While acknowledging the remark-
able complexity of the identities and desires of actual men and
women, Benjamin also notes that, “like bacteria, gender cate-
gories often seem to be able to mutate just enough to produce
resistant strains.”24

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GENDERED SUBJECTIVIT Y AND

BENJAMIN’S CONCEP T OF “ THE THIRD”
Central to the development of gendered subjectivity is the pro-

cess in which a toddler begins to seek independence from the
primary caregiver and looks for an ally to support the toddler’s
bid for separation, turning oftentimes to the father—felt to be
an exciting outside other with whom they can identify. Psychi-
cally, the toddler uses this identification to escape the ego-
difficult experience of sameness with and dependence upon the
primary caregiver, who is typically the mother. The position of
that outside other, whether in actuality or merely in cultural fan-
tasy, is understood to be male. The degree to which gender
awareness requires identifying with the mother, or denying one’s
likeness to her, or being like the father, or not like him, has an
impact on how difficult it is for us to recognize sameness across
gender difference and to not repudiate difference as threatening.
Associating femaleness with passivity, dependence, and emo-
tionality, and maleness with activity, independence, and reason,
splits these complementary aspects of the self along the fault lines
of fantasized gender. Heterosexual relationships become spaces
for enacting the dynamics and repudiation of these split-off iden-
tifications. Although these gendered dynamics are an impor-
tant part of individuation, and they help make sense of the poli-
tics as well as the erotics of male domination and female
submission, they are not the whole story.
When individuation is held to be the result of the paternal
disruption of the maternal dyad (the story told by most psycho-
analysts), the moments created by mother and child since early
infancy are diminished. These earlier experiences, in which what
is experienced is not just the self and the other as either merged
or distinct, are experiences of something that Benjamin calls

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“thirdness.”25 The earliest form of the experience of a “third” are

patterns of interaction that arise in the context of mother /infant
negotiations of sleeping and eating, gazing and babbling. Micro-
analyses of these interactions reveal both partners adjusting to
the other, responding to each other’s responses, attuning move-
ments, sound, and gaze so that a pattern of mutual response
evolves. As Benjamin describes it, “it is the place where self-
regulation and mutual regulation meet.”26 Because it is a space
where we cocreate patterns that accommodate not just self
and other but the self/other interaction, this accommodation
and creation of patterns indicates our earliest experiences are
not just of being a self or even of being two selves together.
These shared patterns are evidence of being a part of a “third”
that two selves create by responding to the other’s response
to them.
Benjamin argues that this early unconscious experience of an
affective space of shared feelings is the root of the ability to
occupy the position of the third. It is the ability to distinguish
one’s own affects from another’s while maintaining an aware-
ness of both. This awareness is not necessarily a self-conscious
one, especially on the part of the baby, but it creates patterns of
interaction that accommodate two interacting affective beings.
This happens, for example, when a mother responds to her baby’s
fear with an expression that both acknowledges and responds to
those feelings. In other words, she signals an interpretation of
the child’s fears while also making clear that she is not confus-
ing her own feelings with those of her child. The mother’s affec-
tive engagement proceeds from the distinction she experiences
between herself and her child. Projective identification does not
collapse the distinction between their feelings; one might
describe her response as one that takes up the affective position
of the other without becoming the other.

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Benjamin argues that representing feelings, not simply hav-

ing feelings, initiates recognition. Because the differentiation of
self and other while sharing an emotion fosters the experience
of both distinctness and mutuality, these shared emotions lay the
psychic groundwork for the child’s developing sense of self as a
locus of shareable affective agency. Eventually, the child becomes
aware of the experience of both distinctness and mutuality and
ultimately becomes responsible. Of course, children are at first
limited in their ability to be self-consciously aware of their own
feelings as well as other’s, let alone capable of symbolically repre-
senting them. These capacities, which Benjamin views to be at the
heart of moral enterprise, are prefigured in prelinguistic rhyth-
micity, responsive adaptation, and in early linguistic interactions.
Contrary to the typical account, which views the encounter
with otherness as taking place through a disruption to an undif-
ferentiated maternal/infant unity through an experience of mater-
nal lack or phallic power, the first encounter with otherness that
Benjamin describes is one that is part and parcel of relational
subjectivity and the relationship between an attuned mother and
her child. However, the experience of being with and respond-
ing to another person characteristic of a successful child-parent
interaction is far easier to accomplish than developing a capacity
to apply and maintain the position of “the moral symbolic third”
required for repairing breakdowns inherent in the dynamics of
mutual recognition in the political and moral sphere.27
THIRDNESS IN P SYCHIATRY
AND POLITICS
In Benjamin’s account of the psychoanalytic relationship, the

idea of the moral third is equally important and achieved through

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a specific kind of relationship between patient and analyst. An

analyst delivering theoretical insights to a patient who, when not
resisting, discovers authenticity, transparency, and autonomy
does not indicate the arrival of a moral third. A true third is a
relationship based on a collaborative encounter and the construc-
tion of truth as it emerges through a shared intersubjective pro-
cess of negotiating meaning through an affectively engaging
form of speech. 28 Thus negotiations take place not just on the
level of dialogue but through shifts enabled by a process of
recognition that allows for the affective renegotiation of sub-
jectivity. This is not Habermas’s ideal of the unforced force of
the better argument at work; these are intersubjectively devel-
oped affective abilities that allow analysts to “connect to the
other’s mind while accepting her separateness and difference.”29
Benjamin notes, “Thus, the position of the moral Third, how-
ever abstract it sounds, is not a function of mere “reason” but
founded in the embodied connection of two minds.” 30 The
engagement that is required exceeds the rational and the
linguistic and requires a negotiation with an other who is an
affective and an embodied being at the same time. This is, of
course, Benjamin’s description of mutual recognition. It is as
critical for achieving thirdness in the analytic relationship as it
is in the relationship between parent and child. Indeed, the ear-
lier experience of thirdness between parent and child, what
Benjamin calls the “primordial third,” is the foundation for the
eventual thirdness achieved through linguistic and other forms
of engagement.31
Benjamin argues that in politics, as in parenting or in analy-
sis, it is also crucial for us to develop “true thirdness”: affective
responses that do not confuse the erasure of self or other with
reconciliation, self-abnegation with making amends, or love with
submission. She recently identified the idea of the moral third

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as an explicitly political position in an article in Tikkun maga-

zine that describes her work with the Acknowledgment Project.32
Benjamin and the Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El-Sarraj initi-
ated a series of dialogues between Palestinian and Israeli psy-
chiatrists. The purpose of the dialogues was to enable Palestin-
ians and Israelis “to acknowledge having caused harm and injury
and to recognize each other’s suffering, while being aware of the
power asymmetry and the need to come together in opposition
to the Occupation, rather than be separated by it.”33 In this work,
as well as in her work for the Moving Beyond Violence project,
Benjamin shifts her perspective from thirdness as a potential
space of interaction between men and women, caregivers and
infants, and analyst and patients to thirdness as an explicitly
moral or political position.34
Thirdness as a political or ethical perspective “transcends the
oppositions of us/them (doer or done-to). It is the position from
which violations of lawful behavior and dehumanization can
be witnessed or repaired.”35 From the psychically grounded posi-
tion of the moral third, Benjamin argues, we are able to recog-
nize others not as our projections but as actual others that, like
us, have multiple identities and occupy ambiguous and com-
plex political positions.
Fantasies allow us to split off what is found disgusting in the
self by projecting it onto the other. Instead of labeling the weak
and disgusting parts of ourselves as “other” and justifying the
construction of whomever becomes “other” to us as vile or dan-
gerous, and thus an appropriate object of our destructive wrath,
taking up the position of the moral third requires that we tran-
scend our own fantasies and reject “the binary between weak and
strong, vulnerable and protected, helpless and powerful, and
especially discarded and dignified.” 36 This refusal to view the
other as a split off and abjected aspect of the self opens a space

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in which we can experience others as being like us—good and

bad, weak and strong, perpetrators and victim—but, most impor-
tant, worthy of dignity and deserving of life. Only from the
perspective of the third, with its entailed relationship of recogni-
tion and respect, can we begin to imagine that both “we and the
other can share at a level that makes safety and compromise pos-
sible.”37 “Holding the third in mind,” argues Benjamin, “makes
it possible to move beyond self-interest to identification with the
other. The capacity for the moral third is the capacity to see the
subjectivity of the other, a capacity that liberates agency.”38
Only in the context of the moral third can meaning be actively
negotiated between subjects rather than constituted by defensive
projection. The space of the third makes ethical communication
possible: “The experience of surviving breakdown into comple-
mentarity, or twoness, and subsequently of communicating and
restoring dialogue is crucial to a more advanced from of third-
ness, what we might call the symbolic Third.”39 Benjamin’s model
of the third recognizes the psychic and affective demands
imposed on those who aspire to normative discourse.
Benjamin claims that even being a witness to the violation
of others, recognizing their lives, and communicating the
injustice of what victims have suffered is a way of including oth-
ers in the moral space of the third. While taking up the position
of the moral third is no substitute for other kinds of change,
whether political or juridical, Benjamin argues, “witnessing and
acknowledging injuries and injustice—especially ones we have
perpetrated—creates the possibility of lawful social behavior and
responsibility for fellow human beings.”40 Thus it is the moral
third that allows for the establishment or reestablishment of
communicative interactions and the institutions in which it is
achieved. Human vulnerabilities compete with the equally vital
need for recognition that acknowledgment and witnessing make

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possible. We see these vulnerabilities in the fragility of the human

psyche and its consequent defenses, the passing on of trauma-
induced self/other psychic deformations, and the assorted cul-
tural fantasies, identities, and histories that reflect destructive and
politically powerful relations of complementarity (i.e., insider/
outsider, male/female, gay/straight, white/black, worthy/unwor-
thy, victim/perpetrator). All of these thwart our ability to find and
share a genuine moral third from which justice can emerge.
Benjamin does not believe such vulnerability or its attendant
suffering will disappear or even that recognition can be fully
accomplished. She does not think that achieving the space of the
moral third can be permanent; but she does think that conceptu-
alizing its possibility and taking it as our aim are important
projects. It is the moral third that allows for love, forgiveness, the
shouldering of responsibility, political witnessing, and the real,
even if brief, moments of truly shared experience that rescue us
from dangerous destructiveness and solitudes too lonely to bear.
Benjamin’s accounts of the relational self and its imbrication
with power, the dynamics of recognition and repudiation at work
in and between the self and others, the rethinking of the parent-
child relationship and the consequent reconceptualization of
psychoanalytic and political relationships are extremely compel-
ling descriptions of the relational demands of moral interaction.
They offer us a normative ideal of human relating clearly seen at
work in the Moving Beyond Violence and Acknowledgment
projects that Benjamin supports.
BENJAMIN AND HABERMAS
Habermas repeatedly claims that, if human emancipation is ever

to be achieved, the lifeworld and the project of discourse ethics

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must meet each other halfway. Benjamin makes clear what must
be included in that half way and just why achieving it is the hard-
est half, by far.
While Habermas tends to focus on the linguistic dimensions
of intersubjectivity and the role that language plays in consti-
tuting our relationships with others, his original insight is about
the fundamentally intersubjective nature of human development
and social experience. It is first intersubjectivity and then the lan-
guage that it enables and develops that is at the core of human
experience. This central insight suggests that despite his focus
on the role that language and the rationality it enables plays in
intersubjective experience, a communicative account of ethics
should also include a recognition of the pre- and extralinguistic
dimensions of intersubjective relating as well as the role that
affects and irrational and unconscious forces play in our rela-
tionships with others.
Benjamin’s descriptions of the psychic dimensions of inter-
subjectivity, including the role gender plays in that experience,
as well as her description of the complex forms of relating
demanded by the moral third suggest ways to extend and com-
plicate Habermas’s analysis. Benjamin offers insight into dimen-
sions of identity that Habermas does not explore and challenges
his account of the level at which our efforts at egalitarian inter-
subjectivity fail.
Habermas does not explore the impact of gender or sexual-
ity, and he ascribes our moral and political failures to institu-
tional failures or cognitive disruptions. Benjamin describes the
intricate dynamics of social subjectivity and attributes the obsta-
cles facing just and human interactions to the outcome of deep
psychic struggles between the possibility of recognition and the
threat of destruction. Appreciating the pull of these two psy-
chic poles of interaction is critical for understanding relationships

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between women and men, between parents and children, or psy-

choanalysts and clients. Benjamin argues that in the context of
political and military struggles it is equally critical to political
groups with fraught identities and histories.
Seyla Benhabib suggests that we recast Habermas’s discourse
ethics and make rational agreement less central to its aims than
the articulation of the practices of moral conversation that make
reasoned agreement as a way of life more attainable. With this
different emphasis, Benjamin’s accounts of the dynamics of inter-
subjective identity formation, the possibility of recognition, and
the need to limit the processes of destruction that undermine it
offer us critical insights into how such a life might be possible.41
Benjamin’s work also offers important insight for an emancipa-
tory political theory. While holding that breakdowns in recog-
nition are inevitable because negation is a critical aspect of any
relationship, Benjamin remains committed to the normative
potential of human relationships. Insisting that relationships
marked by mutual recognition are possible, Benjamin believes
that taking up the position of the moral or symbolic third, which
allows for the possibility of such relationships, is critical for
establishing humane and just social interactions.
Benjamin expands our understanding of communicative
interaction to include intersubjective psychodynamics and thus
offers a corrective to Habermas’s tendency to operate solely at
the cognitive and linguistic level. That mutual recognition is a
temporary achievement— always threatened by internal and
external psychic and social dynamics— also underscores the
inevitability of the impact of power on human interactions.
Between the lines of Habermas’s interpretation of the emanci-
pation of reason and desire, penned long ago, one can read a call
for communicative openness between reason and desire, the
“I” and the “me,” the self and the other. Benjamin figures this

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openness not as rational transparency but as a relationally negoti-

ated recognition that could make possible, if not justice, then a
more exact fantasy of the conditions of its temporary possibility.
NOTES
1. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the
Rationalization of Society, vol 1. (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
2. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and
Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xix.
3. Jessica Benjamin, “Two-Way Streets: Recognition of Difference and
the Intersubjective Third,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 17, no. 1 (2006): 119.
4. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action.
5. Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of Love, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Prob-
lem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 185–186.
6. Benjamin, 185–186.
7. Benjamin, 19.
8. Benjamin, 17.
9. Benjamin, 18.
10. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psycho-
analysis and Developmental Psychology (New York City: Basic Books,
1985).
11. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action.
12. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 134.
13. Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Inter-
subjectivity, and the Third (New York: Routledge, 2018) 2.
14. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 15.
15. Benjamin, 17.
16. Benjamin, 21.
17. Benjamin, 21.
18. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
20. Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

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21. Benjamin, Like Subjects, 45.

22. Benjamin, 9.
23. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and
the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
25. Benjamin, “Two-Way Streets,” 26.
26. Benjamin, 26.
27. Jessica Benjamin, “Intersubjectivity, Thirdness, and Mutual Recogni-
tion,” 16, a presentation for the Institute for Contemporary Psycho-
analysis, Los Angeles, California, 2007, http://icpla.edu /wp-content
/uploads /2013 /03 /Benjamin -J .- 2007 -ICP-Presentation -Thirdness
-present-send.pdf.
28. Benjamin, 16.
29. Benjamin, 16.
30. Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To, 89.
31. Benjamin, 89.
32. Jessica Benjamin, “Acknowledging the Other’s Suffering: A Psycho-
analytic Approach to Trauma in Israel/Palestine,” Tikkun 30, no. 3
(2015): 15.
33. Benjamin, 15.
34. http://www.movingbeyondviolence.org/.
35. Benjamin, “Acknowledging the Other’s Suffering,” 16.
36. Benjamin, 16.
37. Benjamin, 17.
38. Benjamin, 17.
39. Benjamin, “Intersubjectivity, Thirdness, and Mutual Recognition,” 16.
40. Benjamin, 16.
41. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmod-
ernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 38.

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Intersubjectivity On The Couch

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7

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others.2 In her theory of the moral third, Benjamin recasts

Habermas rehabilitated the aims of the Enlightenment and elab-

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In The Bonds of Love, a landmark study in gender domination,

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research which showed that separation from parents and depri-

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self are organized and begin to establish themselves. Where

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us, responds to our presence, and we become aware of that

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parent and child. In order for a child and parent to establish a

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asserting or attacking self. For example, a child who insists on

GENDER AND THE INFANT

The experience and understanding of two distinct selves affec-

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relation to others is both to use the other intrapsychically and to

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children tend to identify themselves and others as male or female.

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GENDERED SUBJECTIVIT Y AND

Central to the development of gendered subjectivity is the pro-

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“thirdness.”25 The earliest form of the experience of a “third” are

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Benjamin argues that representing feelings, not simply hav-

In Benjamin’s account of the psychoanalytic relationship, the

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a specific kind of relationship between patient and analyst. An

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as an explicitly political position in an article in Tikkun maga-

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in which we can experience others as being like us—good and

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possible. We see these vulnerabilities in the fragility of the human

BENJAMIN AND HABERMAS

Habermas repeatedly claims that, if human emancipation is ever

Brought to you by | provisional account

Brought to you by | provisional account

between women and men, between parents and children, or psy-

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openness not as rational transparency but as a relationally negoti-

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21. Benjamin, Like Subjects, 45.

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