![]()
Introduction: The Bonds of Love at 25
Eyal Rozmarin, Ph.D.
New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
In this brief introduction to the collection of essays that follows, I point to what in my mind are some of the most pertinent and powerful aspects of Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love (1988), the author and book to whom this collection is dedicated. I tell of my first encounter with Jessica Benjamin and the impact the encounter had on me. I comment briefly on the book’s place in contemporary psychoanalysis. Using Jessica Benjamin’s own words, I highlight what in my mind is one of the book’s greatest achievements: the reframing of the relations between knowledge and ethics in the light of a feminist critique of gender.
The Bonds of Love, which burst into our discourse in 1988 and changed it forever, is in its very name a fantastic reminder of the full ambition of psychoanalysis: making sense of and taking a stance toward love and domination, that is, human relations, their conflicting drives, their confounding expressions, their spiraling power structures and paradoxical consequences. The Bonds of Love was, and remains, a path-blazing effort to survey the field of human relations and to reexamine the psychoanalytic expedition still making its way through its enigmatic landscape. It is at the same time a scathing critique and a love letter, to both human relations and psychoanalysis, as they are and as they should be. It is a project steeped in the ambition that gives Jessica Benjamin’s entire oeuvre its unique power, the ambition to not only account for things as they are but also to propose ways to make things better. It is, as it should be by its own dialectical measure, a work of negation and recognition, a living, desiring paradox for which the characterization “theoretical” is an understatement. “My conclusion,” writes Benjamin in the last paragraph of the book, tracing its entire trajectory,
is both modest and utopian. The renewal of mutual recognition in the wake of its breakdown is not a final, redemptive “end of history”; rather, it is a necessary part of the continuing process of individual and social change. … To attempt to recover recognition in personal life does not mean to politicize personal life relentlessly or to evade politics and give up the hope of transformation—although all of these failures happen in real life. It means to see that the personal and social are interconnected, and to understand that if we suffocate our personal longings for recognition, we will suffocate our hope for social transformation as well [Benjamin, 1988, p. 224].
The Bonds of Love created one of those rare psychoanalytic moments, hardly seen since the days of Red Vienna and the Kinderseminar at the Berlin institute, where psychoanalysis attempted to address both the intimacies of individual and familial life and their ideological underpinning, to reveal their interdependence in the service of both knowledge and progress. This unique lacing together of psychology, social critique, and ethics is one reason The Bonds of Love is such an important contribution to the psychoanalytic project.
My own first encounter with Jessica Benjamin was as a graduate student at the New School. I participated in a seminar she led as part of the New School’s short-lived psychoanalytic studies program on psychoanalysis and feminism. Attending that seminar changed the course of my thinking, and perhaps my very life, dramatically. We read many important texts, each leaving its own mark. But the one that stood out for me then, and still does, was The Straight Mind by Monique Wittig (1992). For someone who came to clinical psychology from pre-postmodern philosophy, with my own cobbled-up readings in mostly classical and object relations psychoanalysis, that seminar offered nothing short of a revolution. I still remember the last sentence in Wittig’s essay: “Lesbians are not women” (1992, p. 32). Lesbians are, of course, not women in the sense that “woman” has in what we have come to call heterosexist discourse. But this “of course,” that is, the necessity of observing concepts in their socio-historical contexts, was far from evident to me then, and it was foreign to mainstream psychoanalytic discourse. It was Jessica who put such texts on our reading list at the New School, and she was one of the first to put them, with The Bonds of Love and the books that followed, on psychoanalytic reading lists everywhere. The encounters with feminism and with critical theory that permeate The Bonds of Love gave me and others in my generation the kind of license we needed to begin thinking both psychologically and critically, both against and through a subject, to make a socio-historical analysis of premises a premise in the study of human psychology. Jessica’s work has been part of a movement: a feminist, gender, and queer conscious critical confrontation of traditional psychoanalysis that, with contributions by the likes of Nancy Chodorow, Adrienne Harris, Muriel Dimen, Virginia Goldner, Ken Corbett, and others, brought about a true expansion of psychoanalytic theory and technique. Without that movement, gender and sexuality would have retained their traditional ahistorical character, there would have been no relational psychoanalysis with its achievements and controversies, and all of us would remain closeted in our strangeness masking as countertransference and our authority masking as neutrality. Twenty years later, almost to the day, now a co-editor of a journal that was born of this movement, I, and all of us at Studies in Gender and Sexuality, cannot be more pleased to be able to recognize Jessica’s monumental contribution to our undeniable collective progress.
The collection of articles presented here traces, by necessity, only some of the themes addressed by and following The Bonds of Love. Some of the contributors to the collection are Jessica’s contemporaries reflecting on their encounter with the book and its resonance with their own work and circumstances. Some represent a second generation of thinkers who look back and forward as they contemplate and elaborate on the book’s contribution to our discourse. The essays come to us from the West and East coasts of the United States, from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Israel, and Australia. Some of the contributions are more personal, some more theoretical. There are quite a few poetic moments to be found, and there are even photographs to look at. Finally, there is an essay by Jessica. There is a lot. And so we have decided to publish these essays, 14 in all, including this introduction, in two consecutive issues of the journal.
This first issue includes essays by Gillian Straker, Francisco J. González, Andrea Celenza, Fran Bartkowski, Boaz Shalgi, and Régine Waintrater. The second issue will include essays by Jessica Benjamin, Uri Hadar, Galit Atlas-Koch, Noreen O’Connor, Martin Altmeyer, Stephen Hartman, and Donna Bassin.
All of us at Studies in Gender and Sexuality wish to extend our deepest gratitude to the contributors to this collection. The Bonds of Love is an immensely inspired and far-reaching text and for that very reason not an easy one to comment on. The contributors took upon themselves a formidable task when they agreed to take part in this project. The result is a resounding testimony to the reach of the book, now 25 years after its publication, but no less so to the depth and potency of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking.
As will become evident when you read through the essays that follow, each of the contributors found in The Bonds of Love his or her own idiom to respond to. For me, it is the way the book pivots around and succeeds in reframing our most basic conception of the relations between knowledge and ethics vis-à-vis a feminist critique of gender. In Jessica’s words,
Let me be clear about the stakes of this critique: it is not a matter merely of exposing bias, or of the exclusion of women from a world they wish to enter. If the rational, autonomous individual’s claim to neutrality is compromised, then so is his claim to universality. If his way of being in the world is not simply human, but specifically masculine, then it is not universal. And this means that his way is not the only or inevitable way of doing things. Furthermore, if this subject establishes his identity by splitting off certain human capabilities, called feminine, and by refusing to recognize the subjectivity of this feminine other, than his claim to stand for equality, liberty, free thought, and recognition of the other is also invalidated. And this means that his way cannot be the best way of doing things [Benjamin, 1988, pp. 188–189].
REFERENCES
Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Wittig, M. (1992). The Straight Mind. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
![]()
The Racialization of the Mind in Intimate Spaces: The “Nanny” and the Failure of Recognition
Gillian Straker, Ph.D.
University of Witwatersrand and University of Sydney
Jessica Benjamin’s (1988) notion that relations of dominance and submission reflect an original difficulty between child and caretaker is reviewed. The need for caretakers to be affected by the child’s robust attempts to control them while at the same time neither retaliating nor capitulating is affirmed as is the idea that gender relations can compromise this endeavor. This article then takes further Benjamin’s focus on gender relations in the family to include an exploration of the role of siblings. The article then moves to expand Benjamin’s focus on gender relations in society to include race relations. The intersection of race and gender relations in apartheid South Africa is explored with special reference to the “nanny.” Within this context I question Benjamin’s placing of an ethical obligation on the oppressed to establish themselves as subjects and explore the complexity of this issue. However, I validate Benjamin’s fine analysis of the factors that may inhibit some oppressors’ attempts to be subjects in the face of the oppressed; these factors include a bypassing of shame and attempts to short-circuit the anger of the oppressed.
When Eyal Rozmarin asked me to write a piece in honor of Jessica Benjamin’s (1988) book, I found myself pulled back to a Sunday afternoon at the home of a friend, Rise, in South Africa; we shared much in common and read many books together, mostly novels with a feminist slant. It was with Rise that I first began to read Bonds of Love. It is a testament to the groundbreaking nature of this book that I remember not only its contents but also the context in which I first encountered it so many years ago. This is especially so as there is much I have forgotten about my own personal life during that tumultuous political time.
My knowledge of feminism at that time came mainly from novels, for two reasons: first, South Africa was in the midst of an academic boycott; second, the academic reading and writing I was engaged in was dominated by the urgency of engaging with issues of racism and apartheid. It was a double pleasure therefore to receive Jessica’s book, sent to me as a gift by Melanie Suchet, a South African living in the United States and now known by many readers of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. In it was a note that read, “Hey Gilly read this book. It’s great.” It certainly is.
Jessica’s book presents an analysis of human relations of great relevance to issues of apartheid and racism, even though this is not its explicit agenda. My only regret is that I did not have access to it earlier when I was writing a paper on the institution of the “nanny” and its role in the development of racism. My paper was published in 1990, two years after Jessica’s book was published in New York. However, I received the book only after I had written my paper. Her insights would have substantially furthered my understanding, and I intend now, in this article, to revisit questions raised in my original paper, with the additional insights Jessica offers into the roots of domination and submission, a mode of relating that characterizes racism of all kinds. In doing so, I hope that you, the reader, will factor into the equation that gender relations is not my area of expertise; I hope nevertheless to honor Jessica’s work and to acknowledge its contribution to our understanding of all relationships of dominance and submission. What follows are thoughts and ideas stimulated by Jessica’s work, which I present for discussion and development, as they are works in process.
The first idea pertains to the possibility of extending Jessica’s ideas concerning gender relations to race relations. The second idea pertains to extending family influences that shape gender relations to encompassing the role of siblings. A further thought pertains to the possibility, or, more accurately, the impossibility of resisting such shaping. In this regard, I applaud Jessica’s notion that each of us might have an ethical responsibility to resist submission and assert ourselves as subjects when we are members of an oppressed group. However, I question the viability of this in circumstances of extreme oppression. My final thoughts pertain to Jessica’s extension of the idea of dominance and submission to notions of sadism and how this might explain some of the more extreme forms of racism that continue to plague postapartheid South Africa.
I begin with recapping my understanding of Jessica’s thoughts concerning how it is that patterns of domination and submission come to be sedimented into our being in the first place. I choose as my specific focus Jessica’s notions concerning the influence of the mother-child relationship on the development of this mode of relating. I leave out of the equation Jessica’s focus on the father, not because he is unimportant, and indeed, it is a strength of Jessica’s work that she highlights his function. I do so because my focus is on the role of the nanny in the development of relationships of dominance and submission based on race. As such, my focus is on women and the role of the mother. I am well aware of the distinction between mothers and fathers as women and men, and maternal and paternal functions, which can operate independently of the gender of the person. However, it remains true that in most societies there is a strong tendency to assign these functions according to gender. Thus, my focus on women in this article is also a focus on the maternal function and the effects of its failure.
BENJAMIN ON RECOGNITION
Benjamin (1988) essentially argues that a preoccupation with domination and submission is the result of a breakdown of equal, mutual relationships. She sees the capacity for mutual relationships as having its roots in childhood. Mutuality is based on the development of the capacity for recognition of the other. The development of recognition has several moments. The first of these is the pleasure that infant and caretaker may share in the experience of similar affects. This pleasure is experienced when both parties share ...
