The Bonds of Love

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.Acknowledgments • vii
Introduction  • 3

1. The First Bond  •  11
2. Master and Slave  •  51
3. Woman's Desire  •  85
4. The Oedipal Riddle  •  133
5. Gender and Domination  •  183
6. Conclusion  •  219

Bibliography  •  225
Notes  •  245
Index  •  295"A clear, closely argued study of power and desire, which succeeds in making psychic life a social reality."
—Richard Sennett, author of The Fall of Public Man

"An important book . . . an amazingly lucid account of the way power all too often becomes intertwined with gender."
—Ethel Person, The New York Times Book Review

"Many of us have long admired Jessica Benjamin's intricate rethinking of social theory and psychoanalytic theory. The Bonds of Love gives us Benjamin at her best, and psychoanalytic social theory at its best, as she demonstrates brilliantly the complex intertwining of familial, gender, and social domination."
—Nancy Chodorow, author of The Reproduction of MotheringJESSICA BENJAMIN is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City and is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her highly acclaimed articles have been published in feminist and psychoanalytic journals and are widely anthologized.CHAPTER ONE
 
The First Bond
 
 
Psychoanalysis has shifted its focus since Freud, aiming its sights toward ever earlier phases of development in childhood and infancy. This reorientation has had many repercussions: it has given the mother-child dyad an importance in psychic developments rivaling the oedipal triangle, and consequently, it has stimulated a new theoretical construction of individual development. This shift from oedipal to preoedipal—that is, from father to mother—can actually be said to have changed the entire frame of psychoanalytic thinking. Where formerly the psyche was conceived as a force field of drives and defenses, not it became an inner drama of ego and objects (as psychoanalysis terms the mental representation of others). Inevitably, the focus on the ego and its inner object relationships led to an increased interest in the idea of the self, and more generally, in the relationship between self and other.
 
In this chapter I will show how domination originates in a transformation of the relationship between self and other. Briefly stated, domination and submission result from a breakdown of the necessary tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition that allows self and other to meet as sovereign equals.
 
Assertion and recognition constitute the poles of a delicate balance. This balance is integral to what is called “differentiation”: the individual’s development as a self that is aware of its distinctness from others. Yet this balance, and with it the differentiation of self and other, is difficult to sustain. In particular, the need for recognition gives rise to a paradox. Recognition is that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self. It allows the self to realize its agency and authorship in a tangible way. But such recognition can only come from an other whom we, in turn, recognize as a person in his or her own right. This struggle to be recognized by an other, and this confirm our selves, was shown by Hegel to form the core of relationships of domination. But Hegel formulated at the level of philosophical abstraction can also be discussed in terms of what we now know about the psychological development of the infant. In this chapter we will follow the course of recognition in the earliest encounters of the self with the nurturing other (or others), and see how the inability to sustain paradox in that interaction can, and often does, convert the exchange of recognition into domination and submission.
 
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