A two -person conception of freedom: The significance of Jessica Benjamin’s idea of intersubjectivity

Introduction

Hegel suggests that the modern conception of being human is shaped by the principle of subjective freedom. ¹ Phrased in terms of post-Freudian psychoanalytic language, it becomes the prerogative of the individual to shape her life in terms of a sense of self. Her action is to be expressive of her sense of self – of what Hegel (1991) calls ‘subjective satisfaction’ (p. 151, §124). For Hegel, the question of how the subject of freedom encounters reality in such a way that both terms of this relationship (the freedom to subjectively invest reality, and the ‘objectivity’ of reality itself) are conserved is crucial. This is a non-subjectivist approach to freedom, one where the claims of reality can be made and respected. Such an approach can be found also in Donald Winnicott’s (1971) account of ‘creative living’ as this idea is further developed by Christopher Bollas and, in the case considered here, by Jessica Benjamin.

Bollas (1992) posits the self as simply the uniqueness of the individual’s way of being alive, ² or as he puts it, her ‘idiom’ – ‘the core self is the unique presence of being that each of us is; the idiom of our personality’ (Bollas, 1989: 9). He speaks of the self’s encounter with ‘objects’ (people, other creaturely beings and things that lie outside the self) that ‘free idiom to its articulation’ (Bollas, 1992: 17). Such objects become vehicles for the self’s expression. Idiom remains latent except as it is both disclosed and constituted by means of ‘subjective objects’ (Bollas, 1992: 20). Bollas works with Winnicott’s idea of ‘intermediate space’, a space that opens up where the object is both subjectively or psychically signified and retains its own intrinsic value (Bollas, 1992: 20) such that it resists being taken over and destroyed by subjective fantasy. In this way, Bollas suggests a realm of ‘self experiencing’ where the subject both uses the object, so that it loses its ‘simple integrity’, and, simultaneously, the subject is played by the object in such a way that her prior self-states are destroyed, and she acquires new ones. Or, as Hegel (1991) puts it, ‘[w]hat the subject is, is the series of its actions’ (p. 151, §124).

The Hegelian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic construction of the terrain of freedom in terms of a mutually transformative encounter between the subject and the object world offers a conceptually and ethically more adequate idea of freedom than the conventional idea of freedom. This is one that focuses on the subjective term of this relationship, usually conceived as freedom from interference, or in the republican emphasis given by Philip Pettit (1997, 2014), as freedom from domination. I see the significance of Jessica Benjamin’s work as residing in her contribution to a non-subjectivist approach to freedom. She takes the promise of the Hegelian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic approach to freedom, and she makes the move that enables this promise to be realized. This move is to argue that our idea of freedom has been practically and conceptually limited by a one-person conception, and that what, in order to fulfil the ethical promise of post-Hegelian critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis, we need now is a two-person conception of freedom.

Benjamin argues that our idea of freedom has been framed in terms of the standpoint of the single subject. From this standpoint, it is inevitable that all that lies outside the subject presents as opportunities for her self-articulation, or as Benjamin puts it, self-assertion. This is correct as far as it goes, but Benjamin’s point is that it cannot be a complete account. She takes the point so powerfully made by Hegel (Rauch and Sherman, 1999) in his analysis of the master–slave dialectic that the subject can acquire a sense of reality for its self only if there is another subject who provides recognition of the former’s self-expression or self-assertion. Winnicott makes the same point: the sense of feeling real can be acquired by the infant only if she has the good fortune of experiencing ‘ordinary devotion’, a reliable and continuous environment of good-enough care (Abram, 1996: 159). Both Hegel and Winnicott begin to move us away from a solipsistic one-person conception of freedom, and in the direction of a relational, two-person one, but they still position the other subject in terms of what the subject singular needs. What Benjamin does is to insist that the other subject is present not just as the subject’s environment but as a subject in her own right, and that, accordingly, freedom is a matter of a subject-to-subject relationship. This is an intersubjective view of freedom:

The intersubjective view maintains that the individual grows in and through the relationship to other subjects. Most important, this perspective observes that the other whom the self meets is also a self, a subject in his or her own right. It assumes that we are able and need to recognize that other subject as different and yet alike, as an other who is capable of sharing similar mental experience. Thus the idea of intersubjectivity reorients the conception of the psychic world from a subject’s relations to its object toward a subject meeting another subject.

For Benjamin, the one-person conception of freedom is characteristic of the subjective phenomenology of a patriarchal modernity. Its inadequacy is expressed in how the subject of freedom positions the object world as simply presenting as a vehicle for his self-assertion. For this sense of self, freedom is confused with domination. Such confusion can be undone only if a two-person conception of freedom opens up as a historical–practical alternative. Benjamin’s feminist critique of the historical phenomenology of a patriarchal idea of freedom shows how it requires a hierarchical relationship between the subject and the subject’s other whose sense of self is shaped by her role of serving the subject in assisting his freedom to translate his fantasies into reality. Her role instantiates the patriarchal category of the feminine where women are expected to compromise their sense of self in service to that of the men who are their lovers, husbands or fathers. Benjamin thus brings to her critique of patriarchal freedom expressed as domination a two-person perspective: the patriarchal subject and the subject’s other have different kinds of subjective investment in this system, and if there is to be a disentangling of freedom as a genuine two-person relationship from domination, each of them has to give up this investment.

Benjamin works within second-wave feminist theory and practice as a historically situated immanent critique of the modern patriarchal subject formation where the critique reveals how a one-person conception of freedom implicitly depends on a two-person relationship. In bringing to light the relational nature of the one-person idea of freedom, feminism creates both the challenge and the opportunity of a two-person, subject-to-subject, approach to freedom. The patriarchal subject can change his idea of what it means to be both a centre of subjective experience and free only if he recognizes the opportunity for him that is created by the refusal of women to continue to serve his narcissism. Benjamin (1988) argues that if the other presents as a subject in her own right, then each self has the opportunity of enjoying ‘a life-giving exchange’ (p. 22) with another self. In this context, the relationship can be instrumental for each, but such instrumental value is not independent of the quality and vitality of the relationship considered as intersubjective process. Mutual recognition becomes a vehicle of play as a mutually responsive dynamic of self-expression, and its enjoyment an end in itself. Thus, Benjamin (1988) transforms the traditional account of the self in terms of a subject–object relation so that we have two living subjects (p. 16) engaged in interaction.

Benjamin (1988) emphasizes how the discovery of the reality of the other by the subject involves pleasure in connecting with what is outside the subject (p. 41). She sustains Hegel’s proposition that the subject can become real only if it engages with what lies outside itself, but, for Benjamin, the critical question is how the subject does this: whether the subject attempts to incorporate or identify with external reality, thereby refusing the independence of what lies outside itself, ³ or whether the subject is able to engage with the difference of the other’s presence. She is interested in what is involved in ‘an invitation to face reality together’ (Benjamin, 2011: 29), where the difficulties of reckoning with messiness of subject-to-subject dynamics can become known within a collaborative process of creative living.

As already suggested, the two-person conception of freedom comes into being within a historical process of contestation of patriarchal individuality. Such contestation is made in the name of those who are positioned within the structure of patriarchal individuality as ‘object’ in relation to the self-assertion of the subject. In the new frame, it is not legitimate to regard children or women as extensions or instruments of patriarchal self-assertion – their status becomes one of being subjects in their own right entitled to live life as a self. Once both children, notably infants from birth, and women are included within the status condition of being a subject of freedom, the idea of freedom has to be rethought. It has to accommodate the deep relational dependencies of infancy and childhood, as well as a mode of self-assertion that is ‘maternal’, or more analytically, a mode of self-assertion that is expressed in the provision of a facilitating environment (Winnicott’s language) for the growth and development of another.

Benjamin’s thinking is historical, but not historicist. She approaches the patriarchal idea of freedom as a historical formation that gives birth to its antagonist, an inclusive post-patriarchal idea of freedom. However, just because an alternative to the patriarchal formation develops does not mean that modern patriarchy withers on the vine. On the contrary, it continues with considerable force. Perhaps it becomes even more insistent as a new historical iteration that is shaped as a reaction against the development of a post-patriarchal conception and practice of freedom.

Benjamin’s primary focus is on the challenge of what it means to engage in subject-to-subject relating. She presupposes that this can come into play only if an ethical commitment to intersubjectivity has become socially and culturally intelligible. She presupposes also that it is in the practice of this commitment that we learn what it demands of us. Here, her primary concern is with asymmetrical relationships where a more mature and powerful subject is responsible for providing what Winnicott calls a facilitating environment for another’s growth and development. She offers a non-redemptive account of the practice of intersubjectivity: the struggle to open the horizon of its promise within a relational setting is dynamic, contextual and never over. Achievements that are made by way of intersubjective engagement with each other are shadowed by failure and breakdowns of recognition. The promise of freedom understood as intersubjectivity is only fully revealed in the individual’s acceptance of and reflection on such failure, and in the work of reparation and growth to which such reflection leads. The value of Benjamin’s two-person, relational account of freedom is its historical contextualization as a political–ethical response to the one-person conception of freedom. It is a practical as much as a theoretical response. It gives us insight into both the psychic and relational conditions of what is involved in exploring the modern challenge of freedom. Having now introduced her project, I will now elaborate on it.

Benjamin’s critique of the ‘one person’, patriarchal, approach to freedom

Like others who participated in the zeitgeist of the new social movements of the 1960s and beyond, Benjamin understands the political impetus of her work as anti-authoritarian. It is the modern patriarchal regime of subjective freedom that is her (Benjamin, 1978a, 1978b, 1988, 1995, 1998) target. Her critique is directed primarily at Freudian psychoanalysis as it has informed both the tradition of classical psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental rationality. The problem as she sees it with the Freudian conception of the subject is that it operates in terms of the subject–object dualism. The subject is unable to work with the other as another subject, that is, with ‘the problem of the other’s consciousness’ (Benjamin, 1998: xi, 2013: 2). In this formulation, Benjamin acknowledges her debt to Simone de Beauvoir’s two-person existentialism. ⁴ Benjamin (1998) elaborates, ‘The problem of how we relate to the fact of the other’s independent consciousness, a mind that is fundamentally like our own but unfathomably different and outside our control has been a throughline in my work’ (p. xii)’.

Like Beauvoir, and the second-wave feminist theorists who built on Beauvoir’s legacy, Benjamin is clear that it is the structure of the subject/object dualism that is at issue. It is a structure that is expressed as a metonymically linked set of dualisms: active/passive; independence/dependence; and, not least, masculine/feminine or male/female. It is this structure that inheres within the one-person conception of subjective freedom and authority. In The Bonds of Love published in 1988, Benjamin (1988) proposes that all gendered subjects, men and women, have been historically acculturated within ‘the psychic structure in which one person plays subject and the other must serve as his object’ (p. 7). The feminist temptation to reverse the patriarchal structure of the dualisms does not take us beyond this structure of domination:

Every binary split creates a temptation to merely reverse its terms, to elevate what has been devalued and denigrate what has been overvalued. To avoid the tendency toward reversal is not easy – especially given the existing division in which the female is culturally defined as that which is not male. In order to challenge the sexual split which permeates our psychic, cultural, and social life, it is necessary to criticize not only the idealization of the masculine side, but also the reactive valorization of femininity.

Benjamin’s critique of this system of domination is indebted to Hegel’s analysis of the master–slave dialectic and its influence on the existentialist critique of domination. ⁵ It is not just that woman as other is positioned as merely the extension of the masculine subject’s sense of self, but that this means that the masculine self is bereft of another self who can recognize his subjectivity. Moreover, the masculine subject’s sense of self is profoundly compromised by how it is structured as compliance with an internalized authority. Here Benjamin’s target is Freud’s (1962) theory of internalization, where, internalizing the authority of civilization as it is represented in the personal authority of his father, the male child constructs an inner authority or conscience (the superego), in the course of which the child’s aggression is directed back against himself in the name of instinctual renunciation (pp. 70–72). The self does violence to itself as it internalizes the subject–object dualism. As Freud (1962) puts it, internalization is the means by which the cultural development of the group is interlocked with that of the individual, which suggests that the differentiation of the self from the group only goes so far (p. 89).

Shalgi’s insightful commentary on Benjamin’s critique of the Freudian idea of internalization enables us to see how this is not just a subject whose sense of self is structured in terms of the subject–object paradigm, it is a self that has a confused sense of what belongs to it as distinct from what lies outside it. First, the subject internalizes the normative authority of society over the individual as an internal structure of self-mastery. Second, he does this in the name of acquiring the capacity to recognize the claim of reality. Shalgi (2013) comments, ‘In Freudian epistemology … the objective dimension of human experience and existence was clearly prioritized over the subjective dimension (and over the intersubjective one)’ (p. 278). Furthermore,

Under such weltanschaunng, the human task seems to be twofold: first, the subject needs to recognize that his or her own subjectivity cannot serve as the route to fulfilling himself and his desires because the ‘objective’ world around him simply won’t let it happen. The child realizes that in order to let himself be fulfilled, he must adapt his needs to reality.

This leads to the third aspect of this structure of subjectivity: adaptation of the self to an externally imposed reality is at the expense of the need for self-assertion. So, Shalgi (2013) suggests, the subject attempts a solution: ‘if … I realize that objectivity precedes my subjectivity, and … I need to assert my subjectivity, why not try to equate my subjectivity with the objective?’ (p. 278). This is what eventuates, ‘the subject tries to assert his subjectivity as the objective reality’, and this legitimizes him in dominating reality and the other’s subjectivity. The conflation of the subject’s subjectivity with objective reality suggests not just how compromised is this subject’s sense of self, but also the difficulty he has in accepting limits to his self-assertion. This conflation between subjectivity and objectivity means that this is a subject unable to know either.

Benjamin (1978a, 1978b, 1988) argues that a subjectivity structured in this way involves splitting: all that cannot be reconciled with freedom understood as self-mastery is split off, and projected onto the other. Women and infants are semiotically coded as exemplifying dependency, weakness, lack of capacity for self-control, and subjection to instinctual life. This is a solipsistic conception of the self, one that has great difficulty in coming to terms with ‘anything external to its own projections and identifications’ (Benjamin, 1998: 90), that is, in distinguishing between its intrapsychic fantasy and the integrity of other subjects, creaturely beings and things.

Benjamin adopts the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian portrayal of the societal dimension of the subject–object dualism as an instrumentally rational and modern capitalism. She (Benjamin, 1988) proposes,

Male domination, as Weber said of rationalization, works through the hegemony of impersonal organization: of formal rules that refer to the hypothetical interaction of autonomous individuals; of instrumental knowledge founded in the subject’s control of the object world; of the accumulation of profit, which bows to neither need or tradition.

At no time in the course of her work does Benjamin suggest that this form of social organization has disappeared. In The Bonds of Love, she presciently suggests that its contemporary iteration is still patriarchal but gender-neutral. It is the ‘protean impersonality’ of this system that makes it both elusive (Benjamin, 1988: 216) and resilient. Benjamin (2013) herself says in a recent reflection on her work, ‘I believe we still need to review and deconstruct Freud’s theory of patriarchy whose fragmented and unstable persistence continues to define many of our political woes’ (p. 11).

The historical development of a two-person approach to subjective freedom

If the system of modern patriarchal domination has lost its monopoly over the idea of freedom, it is because of a major historical shift in our understanding of what being a subject involves. The impact of feminism has combined with that of post-Freudian psychoanalysis to make it impossible to continue to discount the subjectivity of both the female individual and the infant. In 1988, Benjamin declared,

It must be acknowledged that we have only just begun to think about the mother as a subject in her own right, principally because of contemporary feminism, which has made us aware of the disastrous results for women of being reduced to the mere extension of a two-month-old.

The shift in psychoanalytic focus away from the oedipal phase to the pre-oedipal phase of development initiated by Melanie Klein has inspired a rich tradition of empirical infant research. Such research demonstrates that the newborn infant is not just a bundle of natural drives, but is already a centre of self-experience (for a history of this reconceptualization of the status of the infant in psychoanalysis see Steiner, 2000). ⁶ Benjamin’s (2013) recent reflection on the historical context of her discovery of the idea of intersubjectivity in her 1988 work The Bonds of Love is worth citing at some length:

All of the work I encountered [in psychoanalytic thought] was done from the standpoint of the infant as though the mother were simply the answer, the interlocking gear, in relation to the infant’s endogenous structure and needs. Her existence as a separate person was somehow subtly ignored, as if the conflict with her own needs and subjectivity were a nonissue if she was good and devoted enough. The question of what would make it possible for a parent, an adult of either sex, to give that kind of attention and devotion guided my … research question.

She proposes that ‘the attempt to be equally preoccupied with what infants and mothers need’ was a defining tension for her generation of feminist struggle, and then she adds that it was also ‘to be equally crucial for the evolution’ of the relational kind of psychoanalysis to which she has made such an important contribution:

By embedding this tension between mother and baby within psychoanalytic theory … the effort was to make mutual recognition into a container for something much more complex, indeed the origin of so many later dilemmas of intersubjectivity: negotiating the sticky compromises and paradoxes of a dyad in which there is mutuality but asymmetry, identity of needs but conflict of needs, deep attunement but also difference. For my sensibility the profoundest inspiration of feminist theory was the search for a perspective that transcends the either/or of needs and unlocks the impasse that leads to domination – the Hegelian struggle to the death for recognition in which only one can live, the other must die – to show that there can be two subjects in one relationship, neither one subjugating the other, neither having to coerce or defend themselves from the other. In other words, I was determined to have mother and baby ‘live’ in the same theory and so bring together feminism and the psychology of infancy.

Benjamin’s determination to pursue a two-person account of freedom drove some important political judgments. First, while influenced by the post-Kleinian Object Relations tradition, she argued that intrapsychic insight should not be pursued at the cost of neglecting what is an open-ended dynamic between intrapsychic and intersubjective process, for it is here that the possibilities of individual and societal transformation reside. Second, she refused to accept feminism’s tendency to place women outside the relational structure of domination for she insisted that it was important to understand how women ‘participate in their own submission’ (Benjamin, 1988: 9). At the same time, it is women as the subjugated other who can make the difference in halting the cycle of domination. Benjamin (1988) argues that ‘women must claim their subjectivity’ and if they do so, they may ‘offer men a new possibility of colliding with the outside and becoming alive in the presence of an equal other’:

The conception of equal subjects has begun to seem intellectually plausible only because women’s demand for equality has achieved real social force. This material change makes the intersubjective vision appear as more than a utopian abstraction; it makes it seem a legitimate opponent of the traditional logic, of subject and object.

Benjamin’s reframing of freedom as intersubjectivity

Benjamin’s conception of intersubjectivity is specified to three contexts of sociality: first, parenting relationships where an adult has responsibility for facilitating, nourishing and supporting the growth and development of the neophyte as a free subject. Second, relationships of which psychoanalysis is the one Benjamin has in mind, where appropriately trained professionals offer facilitation of the growth and maturation of others as free subjects. Third, inter-group relationships such as the Israeli–Palestinian one that has engaged Benjamin (see Hadar, 2013) where the groups have a choice of either sustaining a destructive dyadic mode of relating or of finding a way to a co-created peaceful co-existence. What these contexts have in common is that a relationship is already in play, and it can function either to support or to deny the freedom of the participants. Domination and intersubjectivity are the two possibilities, but only the intersubjectivity option is the life-enhancing one. Domination is a unilateral structuring of the relationship, and Benjamin conceives it in terms of what she calls complementarity, a competitive dynamic of do or be done to. ⁷

In psychoanalytic circles, Benjamin is known for her conception of intersubjectivity (Brown, 2010; Drozek, 2010; Gerhardt et al., 2000; Hadar, 2013; Mitchell, 2000), but it is fair to say that its significance in remodelling our idea of freedom is not adequately acknowledged in these circles or in others such as political theory that are more directly concerned with the idea of freedom. ⁸ For the most part, psychoanalytic discussants of her work leave either implicit or unexamined her engagement with social and political thought, even as some acknowledge her ‘unique lacing together of psychology, social critique and ethics’ (e.g. Rozmarin, 2013: 238). If psychoanalytic circles leave largely unexamined the nexus between Jessica Benjamin’s psychoanalytic-clinical and her critical theoretical/political commitment, we find a thoroughgoing neglect of the significance of this two-person approach to freedom in social and political thought. ⁹ This is symptomatic of the continuing power of the one-person approach.

Benjamin’s conception of intersubjectivity is explicitly political, and ethical in the Hegelian sense of this term. While after 2000, the societal dimension of her analysis of domination in her early work (Benjamin, 1978a, 1978b, 1988) becomes less prominent, it never disappears. Moreover, in her more clinical reflection, Benjamin (1998) never inhabits the psychoanalytic universe as though it is unconnected with other worlds, and her concern to show how ‘the clinical experiences opened up by the discussion of intersubjectivity deserve to be raised to the level of theory where they will have an impact on other kinds of theorizing’ (pp. xii–xiii) is sustained throughout.

Benjamin foregrounds two related historical developments that constitute the context within which a two-person approach to subjective freedom becomes practically and conceptually possible. The first of these is the repositioning of the baby from birth as already a centre of self-experience as is evident in the work of Daniel Stern among others. The second is the repositioning of the mother as not just the vehicle by which the infant meets its needs, but as a subject in her own right. This shift in status for these two dramatis personae recasts the entire landscape of subjective freedom. It becomes impossible to figure the relationship between infant and mother as a communal identity or symbiosis as occurs in the traditional one-person account of infancy. Simultaneously, it makes sense to investigate the relational conditions of freedom.

Benjamin’s intellectual formation as feminist, critical theorist and relational psychoanalyst, leads to an approach where an ethical commitment to subjective freedom never displaces the relational perspective, or vice versa. She does not commit the mistake of many feminist theorists who, finding themselves unable to think of any other individualism than the one-person variety, tend to jettison individualism in favour of relationality (see Marilyn Friedman’s, 2013 criticism of Jennifer Nedelsky’s relational theory of self on just this point).

In an article published in 2004 (p. 5), Benjamin offers a clear definition of what she means by intersubjectivity as ‘a relationship in which each person experiences the other as a “like subject,” another mind who can be “felt with,” yet has a distinct, separate center of feeling and perception’. Philip Ringstrom (2010) comments of this ‘need to distinguish the experiential subjective reality of the other as a separate subject from one’s sense of self as subject’ that this means

recognizing the other as having her own centre of initiative, her own mind, and that requires coming to terms with ways in which one represents the other in phantasy as opposed to how the other actually experiences her subjective sense of reality.

This means that a subject-to-subject mode of practising subjective freedom requires not only that each subject have the psychological capacity to recognize the other as a subject in their own right but that each learns to use the encounter with the other’s distinct reality to differentiate between what she has intrapsychically projected onto the other, and what the other is actually saying, feeling, thinking or doing.

Against the traditional ‘intrapsychic’ focus of psychoanalytic theory, Benjamin proposes ‘the human mind is interactive rather than monadic’. ¹⁰ From the outset, there is already two subjects in relationship, and their shared challenge is one of engaging with each other as both like and different subjects. This is a process where the intrapsychic life of each self and the intersubjective reality that is constituted by the actual presence of two subjects in relationship come together as different aspects of the same ontology. Benjamin insists that the question of ‘reality’, understood as the question of what lies outside the internal world of the subject, is a crucial challenge for the self. She (Benjamin, 1995) ironically comments of the Kleinian Object Relations tradition’s focus on intrapsychic process,

[p]erhaps the elision between ‘real’ others and their internal representation is so widely tolerated because the epistemological question of what is reality and what is representation appears to us – in our justifiable humility – too ecumenical and lofty for our parochial craft.

Her point is that a good deal is at stake: will psychoanalysis contribute to the culturally induced problem of inviting a monadic intrapsychic orientation to other subjects, and of course other creaturely beings and things, or will it make its distinctive contribution to an alternative social and political practice of intersubjectivity? Thus, she completes the passage just cited with a provocation (Benjamin, 1995: 28): ‘Or perhaps, as psychoanalysts, we are not really troubled by the question of reality’.

Benjamin argues that the dominance of the one-person approach means that the question of how the child takes in the reality of the parent as another subject has been neglected:

Logically, recognizing the parent as subject cannot be the result simply of internalizing her as mental object. This is a developmental process that has barely begun to be explicated. How does a child develop into a person who, as a parent, is able to recognize her or his own child? What are the internal processes, the psychic landmarks, of such development? Where is the theory that tracks the development of the child’s responsiveness, empathy, and concern, and not just the parent’s sufficiency or failure?

She offers a developmental account of the self that responds to these questions, where it becomes clear that the development of the subject is a two-person enterprise.

Drawing on the recently established tradition of empirical, psychoanalytically informed infant research, Benjamin reframes the first developmental phase of infancy as a two-subject interaction. For the baby, freedom begins with self-assertion in mutuality. In this phase, both baby and mother enjoy ‘a relationship of mutual influence’ (Benjamin, 1988: 27) and ‘affective attunement’ (Benjamin, 1995: 35), where each responsively mirrors the other. The mother has responsibility for facilitating the baby’s sense of being real and alive as a centre of self-experience: ‘mother’s recognition is the basis for the baby’s sense of agency’ (Benjamin, 1995: 34). At the same time, the mother is also dependent for her sense of reality and efficacy as a self on the baby’s recognition. ¹¹ If all goes well, mutual recognition is there from the start, and it is accompanied by rhythms of co-existence and pleasure. ¹²

Self-assertion and mutuality are co-constitutive in the early phase of infancy, and this experience forms the backdrop for the stage at which the child is capable of an independent form of self-assertion, in the rapprochement phase (at 14 months or so). It is at this point that the inherent tension between the two aspects of selfhood – self-assertion and mutual recognition – opens up. The toddler experiences a struggle between her desire for omnipotence, and the reality of her continuing dependence on the facilitation of her action by her parent(s). ¹³ Now the child encounters the tension that is inherent in the project of being a self:

In trying to establish itself as an independent entity, the self must yet recognize the other as a subject like itself in order to be recognized by the other. This immediately compromises the self’s absoluteness and poses the problem that the other could be equally absolute and independent. […] [T]he self says, I want to affect you, but I want nothing you do or say to affect me; I am who I am.

The toddler ‘is aware of what she can’t do and what she can’t make mother do – for example stay with her instead of going out’ (Benjamin, 1995: 37). The mother’s role is both to recognize the child’s will and intention as well as to set boundaries, and to insist on her own reality as a distinct subject (Benjamin, 1995: 38).

For Benjamin, the tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition is a given, which means that she rejects the Hegelian ideal of resolution of such tension. ¹⁴ Each of the two constituents of selfhood – self-assertion and mutual recognition – is essential. Without self-assertion, there is no self to be recognized; without mutual recognition, the self cannot enjoy a sense of reality and the rich possibilities of exchange with another self. If there is to be a coherent conception of freedom, self-assertion and the self’s external reality have to come into positive relationship. To show how this occurs, Benjamin uses Donald Winnicott’s conception of play, specifically his idea of destruction where the subject joyfully discovers there is a reality that she is unable to destroy even though she can do this in internal fantasy:

Destruction makes possible the transition from relating (intrapsychic) to … carrying on a relationship with an other who is objectively perceived as existing outside the self, an entity in her own right. That is, in the mental act of negating or obliterating the object, which may be expressed in the real effort to attack the other, we find out whether the real other survives. If she survives without retaliating or withdrawing under the attack, then we know her to exist outside ourselves, not just as our mental product.

There are several important ideas here. First, an inner fantasy of omnipotent desire is crucial to selfhood, for it is here that the self’s creative engagement with its world resides. In his account of play, Winnicott (1971) says the child ‘manipulates external phenomena in the service of the dream and invests chosen external phenomena with dream meaning and feeling’ (p. 51). In speaking of play as ‘a creative experience’, Winnicott (1971) suggests it is ‘always liable to become frightening’, and has a precarious character: ‘The precariousness of play belongs to the fact that it is always on the theoretical line between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived’ (p. 50). The creativity of play lies not just in the hallucination of the object, the internal fantasy, but in the discovery of the real subject or thing as it resists the projection of this fantasy onto it.

Second, the role of the facilitating other (as parent, or as psychoanalyst) is to help the subject contain her excitement and fear, as well as to represent the claim of reality in resisting being taken over entirely by the subject’s fantasy. In this way, the facilitating other takes responsibility for surviving the child’s/analysand’s fantasy, for continuing to be present, and differentiated. In receiving the baby’s action as communicative of the baby’s sense of self, the mother is able to offer recognition of the baby not just as an agent but as an intentional being, the author of its agency: ¹⁵

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. Recognition is the essential response, the constant companion of assertion. The subject declares, ‘I am, I do’, and then waits for the response, ‘You are, you have done’. Recognition is, thus, reflexive; it includes not only the other’s confirming response, but also how we find ourselves in that response.

Third, the survival of the other exemplifies the possibility of the self coming to know, appreciate and to love the reality of which it is part. Here is how Benjamin accounts for the intersubjective version of ‘the reality principle’ in its difference from the classical Freudian one:

While the intraspychic ego has reality imposed from without, the intersubjective ego discovers reality. This reality principle does not represent a detour to wish fulfillment or a modification of the pleasure principle. Nor is it the acceptance of a false life of adaptation. Rather, it is a continuation under more complex conditions of the infant’s original fascination with and love of what is outside, her appreciation of difference and novelty. This appreciation is the element in differentiation that gives separation its positive, rather than simply hostile, coloring: love of the world, not merely leaving or distancing from mother. To the extent that mother herself is placed outside, she can be loved; then separation is truly the other side of connection to the other.

In this process, the reality of the self is confirmed as is the reality of the other, and together they establish a shared reality: ‘It is this appreciation of the other’s reality that completes the picture of separation and explains what there is beyond internalization: the establishment of shared reality’ (Benjamin, 1995: 41). Once the child in the third year of life has achieved a symbolic capacity, her play ‘expands to include the emotional identification with the other’s position and becomes reflexive’ so that she is able to understand that feeling can be shared without this cancelling differentiation, that ‘You know what I feel even when I want or feel the opposite of what you want or feel’ (Benjamin, 1995: 42–43). Benjamin (1995) suggests that when the child is able to ‘imaginatively entertain both roles’ (as in the example of leaving and being left), she ‘begins to transcend the complementarity of the mother-child relationship’ (p. 43). When the child is ready to entertain both roles, as her (good-enough) mother is already able to do, then their relationship does not collapse into complementarity (the dyadic structure of do or be done to), but has the quality of thirdness. Inevitably, their relationship loses this quality, for ‘the clash of two wills is inherent in subject-subject relations’ (Benjamin, 1995: 45), so the issue is whether these two subjects can repair and restore their relationship, and also whether each can grow in relation to the experience of its breakdown: ‘breakdown is a common feature within intersubjective relatedness – what counts is the ability to restore or repair the relationship’ (Benjamin, 1995: 47).

By foregrounding a sociality of two unique beings, or subjects, who must learn what it means to interact as such, Benjamin shows how together they establish intersubjectivity as the model of authority for their relationship. So understood, authority involves an acceptance of reality, but not as in the Freudian account, at the expense of the self. Here reality has three aspects: (1) the reality of the self, (2) the reality of the other self (or selves) and (3) the reality of the world that they share. In her later work, Benjamin opens up the idea of thirdness, an idea that is not fully formed in her work prior to 2000.

Thirdness and ‘law’: The achievement of a shared reality

In asking the question, ‘[h]ow do we get the sense that “there are other minds out there”?’ Benjamin (2004: 6) suggests that we can do this because we have achieved the place of the third: ‘To the degree that we even manage to grasp two-way directionality, we do so from the place of the third, a vantage point outside the other two’ (Benjamin, 2004: 7, emphasis in the original). Benjamin distinguishes this idea of thirdness from the idea of a third point of view that lies outside the relational dyad. This is the traditional way of viewing the father’s role in relation to the mother–infant dyad: his role is to represent the claims of the world that lies beyond this dyad, to bring differentiation from without into the relationship, and, in Lacan’s version of the oedipal story, also language and law. Benjamin rejects this conception of thirdness. She argues that unless there is already differentiation or space within the dyad, this third person cannot represent the principle of differentiation. The two subjects within the dyad have to already have the experience of thirdness, where their connection is a mediated one. After all, it is not as though their relationship is outside language (the infant uses representational action, and the mother has to be able to think about her interaction with her baby): ¹⁶

[U]nless there is already space in the dyad, unless the third person is also dyadically connected to the child, he cannot function as a true third. He becomes a persecutory invader, rather than a representative of symbolic functioning, as well as a figure of identification and an other whom mother and child both love and share.

She continues, ‘The only usable third, by definition, is one that is shared … it cannot originate in the Freudian oedipal relation in which the father appears as prohibitor and castrator’ (Benjamin, 2004: 12–13).

In claiming a starting point in ‘reciprocal action’, in an ‘exchange between two or more beings that, however, asymmetrical, is never one-sided – as opposed to a one-way direction of effects’ (Benjamin, 2006: 116), Benjamin suggests that law is already immanent within this reciprocity. Domination thus represents, as arguably it always does, the abrogation of law. Benjamin identifies law with thirdness which has several aspects. The first is what she (Benjamin, 2004: 24) calls the principle of differentiation. This is exemplified in the mother’s (analyst’s) capacity to ‘maintain internal awareness, to sustain the tension of difference between my needs and yours, while still being attuned to you’ (Benjamin, 2004: 13). Specifically the mother/analyst is able to hold the tension between her identification with the baby’s/patient’s subjective communication, and the observing function (Benjamin, 2004: 14). ‘This mental space of thirdness’ in both its ‘symbolic and soothing aspects’ is felt by the child/patient (Benjamin, 2004: 14) and makes possible ‘the in-between’ (Benjamin, 2004: 10) the two subjects. It is as though the mother/analyst is able to hold the space within which child/patient can both have and explore her subjective experience.

The second kind of thirdness is the principle of attunement. Benjamin identifies this with the co-created rhythms of mutuality that the mother (analyst) and baby (patient) achieve. She uses the metaphor of musical improvisation to suggest such co-created process. These build, she suggests, a ‘capacity for accommodation to a mutually created set of expectations’, and provide a basis for ‘coherence in interaction between persons’ (Benjamin, 2004: 17). She associates the idea of ‘lawfulness’ with this ‘cooperative endeavor’ (Benjamin, 2004: 18).

The third kind of thirdness is the symbolic third where the principles of differentiation and attunement come together. Here both subjects, as facilitated by the more aware and mature subject, become capable of reflecting on their interaction, and specifically, of acknowledging their role in the breakdown of mutuality. For thirdness, Benjamin (2004: 29) argues, must break down in the many instances when one subject’s intrapsychic process hooks the other’s and combines to overwhelm the possibility of intersubjectivity. It is of consequence whether the more powerful subject, the one responsible for providing a facilitating environment for the other, is able to acknowledge her responsibility in contributing to such breakdown. Benjamin suggests that it is ‘surrender’ rather than ‘submission’ that is involved when she (Benjamin is talking of the analyst but it could also be the parent) painfully accepts that she has used her authority/power to shut down the patient’s communication to her, a communication that has hooked her own intrapsychic process, and provoked her into a defensive reactivity. In making such acceptance, and sharing it with her peers, the analyst can learn that it is normal for the subject in her role to contribute to breakdown, for example, to dissociate from the patient’s enactment, and to blame the patient for putting her in this position. The analyst can surrender to the situation in the sense of letting go of wanting to impose her own sense of reality onto it: ‘I suggest that the idea of surrendering rather than submitting is a way of evoking and sanctioning this process of letting go of our determination to make our reality operative’ (Benjamin, 2004: 32). In such surrender, the analyst makes it possible for both subjects to make such acknowledgment and to assume responsibility for their action. ¹⁷

In her emphasis on an intersubjective process that permits the subject to learn how to differentiate between internal fantasy, and the external reality of the object world, in particular the reality of other subjects, Benjamin emphasizes the importance of symbolization. Symbolization is the condition of being able to think and assume responsibility for what it is that one does. The subject who learns to trust an object world as a series of opportunities for self-articulation can trust also that she becomes more and more herself, as her idiom finds its way to expression, while she does not need to hold onto specific identifications and past self-states. In expressing these in the analytic setting (or other settings that function in the same way), and with the assistance of the analyst, she can acquire the capacity to view these stories about self as metaphorical: ‘This metaphorical capacity allows us to hold onto the reality of thoughts and feelings and own them as part of the self without insisting that they be the whole story’ (Benjamin, 1998: 107). Of course, the analyst has to have achieved this capacity too, so that she is able to differentiate between what she receives by way of projective communications from the patient, how these trigger or evoke self-states within her, and, at the same time, to maintain a mental space wherein she is able to observe and think about what is happening by way of intersubjective process. The analyst’s internal space allows her to assist the patient in building her own:

How does the transposition into metaphor occur? The capacity to disidentify with any one version as the whole story and suspend identity is the very premise of the analyst’s work. It is what the analysand may identify with in the analyst. Ordinarily, the analyst leaving on vacation has to be able to identify with the patient’s feeling of abandonment and affirm it – ‘I know you feel left’ – without really experiencing herself as a neglectful, abandoning bad object. Only by establishing this double position, which is of course unconsciously communicated to the analysand, can the latter feel the analyst to have survived her reproaches and truly tolerate her feeling of loss. This allows the other/analyst to become external, and to no longer be wholly identified with the persecuting, inside object.

There are two relational ideas that are central to the idea of thirdness. The first is the idea of relational space. The second is the idea of facilitation of thirdness. Let me take these in turn.

Thirdness as intersubjective space

Benjamin refers to the space of thirdness in different ways. She speaks of ‘a space of collaboration’ (Benjamin, 2006: 139), she refers to ‘a safe space for acknowledgment of responsibility’ (Benjamin, 2006: 139), she speaks of ‘intersubjective space’ (Benjamin, 2009a: 441), and she suggests that when thirdness is operative, there is also an internal space in which to think. The capacity to ‘hear both your voice and mine as can you without cancelling the other out’ (Benjamin, 2009a: 442) demarcates a relational space that operates in all the ways just suggested. In this context, law denotes all that opens up and conduces to space of this kind. The orientation to law is an opening within which subjects can come to life for each other, and in this way move beyond ‘a state of deadness’ that attends their connection when for whatever reason they are unable to practise mutual recognition (as suggested by Benjamin, 2009a: 445). It is telling that Benjamin strongly associates mutual recognition with the quality of being alive to self and to other for (as Winnicott emphasizes) we cannot enjoy creative living if we do not experience a sense of being and becoming alive as the self that we are.

Law understood as an immanent normative structure for intersubjective space permits the ability to link what would otherwise remain unconnected (Benjamin, 2009b especially, emphasizes this). Like other psychoanalytic thinkers, Benjamin sees traumatized states as inviting the fragmentation or splitting of self-experience, where such states can be communicated only through (unconscious) enactment. If the clinician provides a holding environment where it is possible for the enactment to occur, and then to be owned and thought about, the trauma can become transformed into bearable painful feelings, and integrated into the subject’s self-experience (see also Stolorow, 2013). Thinking is possible only if such linking is possible (Bion, 1988). In the following passage, Benjamin (2009a: 444) offers a nuanced account of how the clinician brings her capacity for thirdness to opening up an intersubjective space within which it becomes possible for the patient to transform her dissociated self-state into experience that can be shared and witnessed:

Our [Benjamin is speaking in the persona of the clinician] conversation with the ‘good’ part of the patient whom we sometimes reluctantly see upstaged by a more troubling, less easily contained part is a key to what drives the [patient’s] enactment: the patient’s deep conviction that the analyst doesn’t want to know her dissociated self-state crashing against an urgent need to have him know. Through such enactment, with the facilitating knowledge of the analyst aiming in that direction, the place develops for the analyst as believing and believable witness, specific to the multiple parts of this patient. When as Ferenczi … originally advised, we acknowledge to ourselves the inevitability of such enactments, the symbolic repetition of old wounds we have struggled to avoid, we are less likely to become disregulated and so are able to make use of what has been revealed. When we acknowledge to the patient the felt experience of having created the original injury we are in effect inviting the abandoned, shamed and wounded part to become more vocal. We thus avoid repeating the part where the original abuser or bystander adult denied the child’s reality. In my view, what usually solidifies and makes intractable re-traumatization in the analytic dyad is not the enactment itself but the analyst’s failure to acknowledge, which the patient correctly grasps as the avoidable failure.

The facilitation of thirdness – Asymmetrical equality

That thirdness has to be facilitated is not a new idea for surely this has always been the role of the judicial official. However, the proposition that freedom reconceptualized as intersubjectivity requires thirdness, and thus facilitation, is a very new idea. Here, we begin to cash out a two-person approach to freedom for it becomes clear that there is a distinctive sociality of freedom that involves one subject facilitating the freedom of another. As we have seen, Benjamin’s work is primarily focussed on asymmetrical relationships (parenting, many teaching relationships, and clinical psychoanalysis) that are purpose-built for the provision of a facilitating environment for the growth and development of the subject. Here, one subject’s role in facilitating the freedom of another offers the rationale for how the relationship and its conduct are understood. However, we can ask whether there is an element of facilitation in all relationships between subjects of freedom (or selves). In peer relationships, for example, we can suggest that this element floats in the sense that sometimes one, sometimes the other, assumes a role of facilitation of the subject’s freedom as a centre of self-experience. When one individual actively listens to another in such a way as to offer a holding environment in which this second individual can discover what it is she needs or wants to say, and what she thinks, we have the facilitation of freedom at work.

As we have seen, in context of asymmetrical relationships, Benjamin emphasizes the importance of the facilitating subject being able to survive the other’s need to destroy him or her. For this to be meaningful, she suggests that the facilitating subject has to be able to maintain and develop the relationship as one of attachment (Benjamin, 2004: 36–40, 2009b: 462). Attachment means that the facilitating subject has to be able to hold the other in her mind (Benjamin, 2009: 457), something the other can sense, and to provide an environment in which the relationship can unfold and develop. None of this is likely to go well if the facilitating subject is not able to value and enjoy the difference of the other subject (Benjamin, 2010: 252). For attachment to be generative, the relationship needs to be a pleasure not just a chore (Benjamin, 2004: 6).

Benjamin’s reiterated view that a relationship can be mutual while also being asymmetrical is an important challenge to the established idea of equality as requiring subjects to be equally powerful. Indeed, she associates a form of symmetrical equality with the dyadic structure of domination or complementarity (do or be done to):

Symmetry is a crucial part of what unites the pair in complementarity, generating the takes-one-to-know-one recognition feature of the doer/done-to relation … In effect, it builds on the deep structure of mirroring and affective matching that operate (largely procedurally and out of awareness) in any dyad, when both partners glare at each other or interrupt in unison. In such interactions, we can see the underlying symmetry that characterizes the apparent opposition of power relations: each feels unable to gain the other’s recognition, and each feels in the other’s power.

Conclusion

My intention here has been to suggest how Jessica Benjamin’s idea of intersubjectivity, developed as it is in a theoretical–practical context that integrates critical theory, feminist theory and psychoanalysis, offers us an extraordinarily rich set of provocations for thinking again about what is it that we mean by freedom. As long as the one-person view of freedom is operative, we face a set of dilemmas that arise out of a subjectivist conception of freedom. Essentially, these boil down to the difficulty that a one-person account of self-assertion has in positively and creatively reckoning with the world of other selves, creaturely beings and things that lie outside the self. Yet, the solution cannot lie in requiring the self to internalize the normative force of society in such a way that it gives up the possibility of creative living in favour of compliance for, as Winnicott suggests, this is to choose death rather than life. As Jessica Benjamin insists, self-assertion is utterly central to living one’s life as a free being or self, but how it is experienced is entirely different depending on whether it is a one- or two-person conception of freedom that is at work. If it is the one-person conception that frames our practical understanding of freedom, then freedom becomes confused with the life-denying and destructive dynamics of domination. If the two-person conception is available, the self has the opportunity to discover the joys and vicissitudes of self-assertion in a subject-to-subject relationship, where there is an inevitable clash of wills but also an intersubjective process within which to negotiate an ongoing relationship of co-existence as well as to enjoy the creative possibilities of mutual recognition.

Benjamin’s two-person approach to the principle of subjective freedom offers intersubjectivity as the distinctive sociality of freedom. In this approach, the tension between self-assertion and mutuality, between one will and another, is internal to the intersubjective practice of freedom. A two-person conception of freedom enables a both/and understanding of the relationship between creativity and limit, self and other, freedom and law, autonomy and dependency.

Finally, since on the two-person approach freedom and sociality are co-constitutive, it becomes possible to investigate how intersubjectivity can function as a generative environment for the acquisition of the capacity to be and act as a free subject or self. I have highlighted in this connection how Benjamin develops Winnicott’s idea of one subject providing a facilitating environment for another. Benjamin’s suggestion that here we find a remodelling of the ideas of authority and law so that they become internal to the world of a society shaped by the principle of subjective freedom is an important provocation to further work.