Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static "things" or in dynamic, unfolding rela...

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Manifesto for a relational sociology

In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.

Methodology of the oppressed

Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept of a co-created or shared intersubjective thirdness helps to elucidate the breakdown into the twoness of complementarity in impasses and enactments and suggests how recognition is restored through surrender.

Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness.

Mothering and motherhood are the subjects of a rapidly expanding body of literature. Considered in this decade review are two predominant streams in this work. One is the theorizing of mothering and motherhood and the other is the empirical study of the mothering experience. Conceptual developments have been propelled particularly by feminist scholarship, including the increasing attention to race and ethnic diversity and practices. The conceptualizations of the ideology of intensive mothering and of maternal practice are among the significant contributions. Study of mothering has focused attention on a wide array of specific topics and relationships among variables, including issues of maternal well-being, maternal satisfaction and distress, and employment.

Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship

Why do people submit to authority and even derive pleasure from the power 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 they continue to recapitulate the positions of master and slave? In "the Bonds of Love" the author makes use of feminist criticism and reinterpretations of psychoanalytic theory to consider anew the problem of domination, of individual development, gender difference and authority. In her questioning of gender polarities, in which woman is object to the male subject, she argues for a change which she describes as both "modest and utopian" - in disentangling the bonds of love, we seek a mutual recognition of equal subjects which would lead to both personal and social transformation.

The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination

The bonds of love

From the perspectives of developmental psychoanalysis, this book makes a case for what the author calls gender heterodoxy, an original view of the similarities and differences between the sexes. In the process, she illuminates aspects of love, sexuality, aggression and pornography.

Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference

An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D. This article formulates an object relations perspective based on the complementarity of intrapsychic and intersubjective aspects of self-development. Object relations theories, even those interested in intersubjectivity, have not followed up on Winnicott's (1971) crucial distinction between the subjectively conceived object and the objectively perceived, outside other. With few exceptions, notably Stern (1985), theorists have overlooked the core element of intersubjectivity, which is mutual recognition. The development of the capacity for mutual recognition can be conceived as a separate trajectory from the internationalization of object relations. The subject gradually becomes able to recognize the other person's subjectivity, developing the capacity for attunement and tolerance of difference. To elaborate on this process, the article discusses differentiation in the first 2 years of life. It suggests that Mahler's rapprochement period can be reinterpretated as a struggle for recognition in which the outcome is not simply object constancy, but the beginning ability to recognize another person's subjectivity. The differentiation process consists not merely of separation, but the continual breakdown and repair of mutuality in the psyche's stance toward the outside. Accepting the inevitability of breakdown and reconstruction of the outside other allows considerable room for the role of intrapsychic fantasy and aggression, which might otherwise be neglected in relational theories of the self. We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would ... become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling ... that he had an equivalent center of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (Eliot, 1871/1965, p. 243) ————————————— Requests for reprints should be sent to Jessica Benjamin, PhD, 228 West 22nd Street, New York, New York 10011.

Jessica Benjamin

Papers

The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination

Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness.

The bonds of love

Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference

An outline of intersubjectivity : the development of recognition