Jessica Benjamin

Jessica Benjamin is best known as the author of The Bonds of Love (1988), which brought a feminist intersubjective perspective into the psychoanalytic field, and of “Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness” (2004), the basis for her recent book Beyond Doer and done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2018). This book emphasizes the importance of acknowledgment in therapeutic interaction and in relation to trauma, including collective historical trauma. In addition she is the author of Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995); and Shadow of the Other (1998). She has been one of the leaders in the relational movement in psychoanalysis since its inception. She teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis as well as at the Stephen Mitchell Relational Studies Center of which she is a co-founder. She co-directed and initiated a project for acknowledgment between Israeli and Palestinian mental health professionals during the period 2003-2011. Recently she has written a series of papers on the psychological aspects of domination and destructiveness manifest in the current social world. She is currently exploring the interconnections between affect regulation theory and recognition theory.