The Growth of Desire in Intersubjective Space

ABSTRACT

Contrasting the work of French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto with that of American Relational theorist Jessica Benjamin yields significant shared sensibilities, notably regarding what was in Dolto’s context a radical assertion of the small child as subject who needed to be considered as such, and the role of the parent’s relating and communications in nurturing both subjectivity and agentic desire. However, Benjamin’s writing makes clear not only that the parent’s subjectivity is central to the child’s affective experience, but the waysthe child’s subjectivity takes shape in response to the mix of attunement, rupture, acknowledgment and repair. This makes parenting both riskier and more intimate; children can experience recognition that is inherently mutual, but are also more vulnerable to parental failures of both responsiveness and self-regulation. Relational perspectives are also considered regarding conscious and unconscious parental transmissions as they influence the development of a child’s desire.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Although Benjamin (2009) does emphasize that when these two registers are out of sync, with words outpacing affective resonance, this creates a simulacrum of thirdness, a process frequently at work during therapeutic impasse or rupture. In a convergence, for Dolto, language encompasses not only the verbal but the nonverbal, as well as “affects, turmoil [and] the internal and external perceptions that make up interpsychic [sic] life” (Hall, 2009, p. 323).

² Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing (2016) may be read as an illustration of what Apprey is theorizing.

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Notes on contributors

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay, Ph.D., is a founding board member and Co-Director of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia, and is also on the faculty of the Mitchell Relational Studies Center, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) and Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP) in New York. She is co-editor, with David Mark, of Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis (2023, Routledge). She is in practice in Philadelphia and New York.