Jessica Benjamin Discusses Her Work with Galit Atlas

ABSTRACT

I’m honored to be here with Jessica Benjamin, one of the most sophisticated and profound thinkers in psychoanalysis. Jessica and I started working together nearly twenty years ago, right after I moved to New York. She was one of my first supervisors. Jessica taught me analytic freedom, analytic discipline and what brilliant thinking looks like. One might say that I grew up next to her, but in so many ways she raised me. Throughout the years our relationship developed to become a deep friendship and a professional collaboration. We wrote a paper together that was published at the IJP titled The Too Muchness of Excitement: Sexuality in Light of Excess, Attachment and Affect Regulation. Different versions of that paper are chapters in my first book “The Enigma of Desire” and in Jessica’s last book “Beyond Doer and Done to.” Today I would like to talk with Jessica about her important contributions to psychoanalysis: her psychoanalytic work on intersubjectivity, early development and the mother infant-bond, her ideas of the Third, Doer and Done to and more. I would like to integrate the personal and the professional, theory and practice and look at the ways her feminist work, her philosophical thinking as well as her social activism are all organized around the theory of recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersubjective
• doer/done-to
• feminist
• gender
• recogniton
• complementarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Benjamin

Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D., is a supervising faculty at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, best known for her book The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis Feminism and the Problem of Domination and most recent Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third.

Galit Atlas

Galit Atlas, Ph.D., is on the faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and faculty at the Four Year Adult and National Training Programs at NIP. She is the author of The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015) and Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice (coauthored with Lewis Aron, Routledge, 2017). She is the editor and a contributor to When Minds Meet: The Work of Lewis Aron (Routledge, 2020). Her new book Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients and the Legacy of Trauma is being translated into 14 languages. Atlas serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and of Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Her New York Times article “A Tale of Two Twins” was the winner of a 2016 Gradiva award. Atlas is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in New York City.