Jessica Benjamin (born 1946) is an American psychoanalyst whose work brings together psychoanalysis, feminism and critical social theory. Her central question is simple: why do relationships that begin in love so often turn into relationships of control and compliance? Her answer, first set out in The Bonds of Love (1988) and refined over the following three decades, is that love depends on mutual recognition. This means two people experiencing each other as separate, each with their own feelings and will. When recognition breaks down, domination and submission take its place.
This article is part of the Psychoanalysis of Love series. It explains the main ideas of The Bonds of Love and her later theory of "the third", shows how they apply to couples and psychotherapy, and looks at the main criticisms.
Where Benjamin's ideas come from
Before training as a psychoanalyst, Benjamin studied social theory, including a period in Germany where she engaged closely with the Frankfurt School tradition of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. These thinkers had used Freud to explain why people accept, and even desire, authority.
Benjamin changed the question. Rather than lamenting the decline of the father's authority, she asked why authority is so often bound up with love, and why dominating and submitting tend to divide along gender lines.
Her work also belongs to the relational turn in American psychoanalysis associated with Stephen Mitchell, whose Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1988) appeared in the same year as The Bonds of Love. Relational psychoanalysis sees the mind as formed in and through relationships. It treats therapy as a meeting between two subjects, not one person observing another. Here, a "subject" simply means a person with a mind and intentions of their own.
What it means to be recognised
In classical Freudian theory, the infant is mainly a bundle of drives seeking release. In object relations theory, the infant is mainly looking for a good "object", that is, a good caregiver to depend on. For Benjamin, however, from the beginning the infant is also engaged with another subject: a caregiver who has a mind, moods and intentions of her own.
Drawing on the infant research of Daniel Stern and others, Benjamin pointed to the early exchanges of gaze, play and attunement between infant and caregiver. "Attunement" means sensing and responding to another person's state. In these exchanges, each responds to and is affected by the other.
Recognition, in Benjamin's sense, is more than approval. It means being seen and affected by another person, while seeing and being affected by them in turn. In adult life, a partner who simply agrees is not the same as one who genuinely takes in what is said and is moved by it.
The paradox at the heart of love
The core of Benjamin's theory is a paradox. To feel ourselves as independent people, we need to be recognised by someone else. Yet recognition only counts if it comes from someone we accept as independent, and therefore free to withhold it. A person who is controlled can only echo. Praise from a partner who would never dare to disagree carries little weight.
So asserting oneself and recognising the other cannot be separated, and the need for recognition means depending on someone we cannot own.
Benjamin found the philosophical form of this paradox in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in the famous dialectic of master and slave. In Hegel's account, two self-conscious beings each seek recognition from the other; when the struggle ends with one dominating and the other submitting, the master finds that the recognition he receives is hollow, because it comes from someone he has reduced to a thing. Benjamin read this as a picture of what happens psychologically when mutual recognition cannot be sustained.
She found the developmental form of the same paradox in Winnicott's paper "The use of an object" (1969). For Winnicott, the other person becomes real, rather than a creature of the infant's all-powerful fantasy, when they survive the infant's destructiveness without retaliating or collapsing. Benjamin read this as the inner side of recognition. Destroyed in fantasy, the other survives in reality, and is thereby discovered as someone outside one's control.
Love, then, does not require the absence of aggression, but another person who can withstand it and remain themselves.
When recognition breaks down: domination and submission
This tension is difficult to hold. Benjamin argued that when it collapses, it tends to split into two complementary positions:
- The subject who acts. One person asserts, decides and controls.
- The object who accommodates. The other person complies and seeks recognition by giving up their own will.
Instead of two subjects, there is now a subject and an object. In everyday life, one partner may make every decision while the other goes along, hoping to be loved for it.
Neither position is simply a matter of power or weakness. The dominating partner denies their own dependence, but in doing so loses the recognition they need, since a subordinated partner can no longer give it freely. The submitting partner hopes to be recognised through the other's power. They feel they exist by being chosen by someone who seems to have the agency they lack. Both try to solve the paradox by removing one side of it.
Fantasies of domination
A widely discussed chapter of The Bonds of Love, "Master and Slave", applies this analysis to fantasies of erotic domination. Its main example is the French novel Story of O (1954), published under the pseudonym Pauline Réage.
Benjamin neither pathologised nor endorsed such fantasies; she was interested in what they reveal about the wish for recognition. The submitting figure seeks to be known through total surrender, while the dominating figure seeks proof of his own reality through the other's yielding. Because neither kind of recognition can be complete, the relationship is driven towards escalation rather than satisfaction.
The analysis is not limited to sexuality. Benjamin used the novel to show a pattern visible in many ordinary relationships, in which love becomes organised around control. She linked it to a culture that treats independence as masculine and dependency as feminine.
Gender, the father and "ideal love"
Benjamin's analysis of gender drew on, and revised, the work of Nancy Chodorow and the developmental theory of Margaret Mahler. In traditional psychoanalytic accounts, the mother tends to stand for dependency and closeness, while the father stands for separation, the outside world and freedom. In the Oedipal model, the father is cast as the "liberator" who frees the child from the pull of the mother.
Benjamin argued that this division harms both sexes. In the phase Mahler called rapprochement, when the young child is discovering both independence and its limits, the child often turns to the father as a figure of excitement and agency. Benjamin called this identificatory love, meaning love for someone who represents what one wishes to become.
- Boys, she suggested, are typically encouraged in this identification, but at a price: they are expected to reject their earlier identification with the mother and with dependency itself.
- Girls have more often been denied it, and so may grow up seeking access to agency and desire through a man rather than in themselves.
This is the background to what Benjamin called ideal love, in which a partner is idealised as the one who carries the strength and desire one feels one cannot have oneself. It contains a legitimate longing to have one's own desire recognised, but when that desire can only be lived through another person, love easily slides into submission. Her argument here overlaps with Kernberg's concern with idealisation in love relations, although her emphasis is social and developmental rather than structural.
In later works, including Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995) and Shadow of the Other (1998), Benjamin moved away from a fixed account of masculine and feminine development. She proposed that healthy development involves an "overinclusive" capacity to hold several identifications at once, rather than a rigid choice between being like one parent and loving the other.
The inner world and the real other
Benjamin's work is often summarised as a shift from intrapsychic to intersubjective psychoanalysis. "Intrapsychic" refers to what happens inside one mind; "intersubjective" refers to what happens between two minds. She did not see these as alternatives.
The intrapsychic view, prominent in Klein, describes how others exist in our inner world as fantasies; the intersubjective view, how we meet them as real, separate people. In love, partners relate partly to these inner figures and partly to each other as they actually are. A partner may react to a small criticism, for instance, as if it came from a harsh parent. The task is to keep fantasy from entirely replacing the real other.
The third: stepping out of blame
In a landmark paper, "Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness" (2004), later expanded into the book Beyond Doer and Done To (2018), Benjamin developed the concept of the third. The third is not a third person. It is a shared mental space from which two people can observe and reflect on their relationship, rather than being caught up in it.
Without it, relationships fall into what Benjamin called complementarity: a "doer–done to" structure in which each person experiences the other as acting upon them. In couples, each partner feels like the injured party and sees their own behaviour as a reasonable reaction. One says, in effect, "I only shout because you withdraw"; the other, "I only withdraw because you shout". The relationship becomes a contest in which only one version of events can be right, and admitting one's own part feels like defeat.
Benjamin described several forms of thirdness:
- the rhythmic attunement between infant and caregiver, in which neither partner leads entirely
- a moral third: a shared commitment to fairness, truthfulness and the acknowledgement of harm, which stands above either partner's point of view
Following Emmanuel Ghent, she also distinguished submission to another person from surrender: a letting go into a shared process that does not require giving up one's own subjectivity.
The third is never a permanent achievement, and breakdowns into complementarity are inevitable. What matters is the capacity for rupture and repair: to notice when the relationship has collapsed into doer and done to, to acknowledge one's own part, and to restore a space in which both partners exist as subjects. In Beyond Doer and Done To, Benjamin extended this idea beyond the consulting room to the acknowledgement of harm between communities in conflict.
What this means for couples
For Benjamin, a loving relationship is one in which the partners neither merge nor stay safely independent, but hold the tension between connection and separateness. Each partner must tolerate the other's freedom to disagree, to disappoint and to want different things.
Many recurring difficulties can then be understood as breakdowns of recognition. The question is not who is right, but whether the couple can recover a shared position from which both perspectives count. Benjamin's emphasis on reciprocity complements Fromm's view of love as an active capacity that involves respect for the other's separateness.
Criticisms and debates
Benjamin's work has been both challenged and built on:
- Reading Hegel. Some philosophers have questioned her psychological reading of Hegel. Others, notably Axel Honneth in The Struggle for Recognition (1992/1995), took up her combination of Hegel and Winnicott as a foundation for social theory.
- Negativity and destructiveness. Judith Butler, in the essay "Longing for Recognition" (collected in Undoing Gender, 2004), argued that Benjamin's ideal of mutual recognition may underestimate the role of negativity and destructiveness in forming the self, and that recognition can never be fully reciprocal or free of misrecognition.
- Love as partly imaginary. For Lacanian critics, following Lacan, love is always partly imaginary, and the hope of being fully recognised by another may itself be a fantasy.
- Gender and the family. Her early account of gender has been criticised as rooted in the heterosexual, two-parent family of its time, a framework her later writing largely revised.
Benjamin has replied that she never claimed recognition could be complete. Breakdown is built into her model, and the emphasis falls on repair. As with much psychoanalytic theory, her developmental claims are also not easily tested scientifically.
Why Benjamin's ideas matter in therapy
Benjamin's ideas have influenced individual therapy, couple therapy and the wider relational tradition. They help make sense of patterns such as:
- one partner consistently accommodating while the other decides
- repeated cycles of mutual blame, in which each feels like the injured party
- love organised around idealising a partner who seems to carry all the strength and desire
- people-pleasing that feels like love while leaving one partner unrecognised
The therapist is also a participant: therapist and client can fall into the same doer–done to patterns, and such enactments are treated as a chance for understanding rather than a failure of technique. When the therapist can acknowledge, without defensiveness, their own part in an impasse, the deadlock can loosen; this is one reason the therapeutic relationship itself is seen as a vehicle of change. As in Winnicott, the therapist's capacity to stay present through anger, without retaliating or withdrawing, helps the client discover the other as real and separate.
In couple work, the focus shifts from blame to pattern: helping each partner see the complementarity they are caught in, and their own share in it.
Conclusion
Jessica Benjamin showed that love and domination are not opposites but closely related outcomes of the same need: the need to be recognised by another person who is free. Her concept of the third adds a practical point: what sustains love is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to step out of blame, acknowledge one's own part and repair what has broken. Where patterns of control, accommodation or mutual blame shape a relationship, psychodynamic psychotherapy, individually or as a couple, can help to understand them; online sessions are available to book here.
References
- Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Pantheon Books.
- Benjamin, J. (1995). Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. Yale University Press.
- Benjamin, J. (1998). Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
- Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46.
- Benjamin, J. (2018). Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. Routledge.
- Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. Routledge.
- Chodorow, N. (1978). The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. University of California Press.
- Ghent, E. (1990). Masochism, submission, surrender: Masochism as a perversion of surrender. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26(1), 108–136.
- Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1807)
- Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Polity Press. (Original work published 1992)
- Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. Basic Books.
- Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Harvard University Press.
- Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Basic Books.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 711–716.