What's Love Got to Do with It? Sexuality, Shame, and the Use of the Other

Abstract

This article examines Jessica Benjamin's path-blazing feminist work on domination/submission as the foundation for later studies on sexuality and emphasizes intersubjectivity both as a philosophical model and as a clinical concept. The problem of dependency in the mother-infant relationship, the terrors and desires of the mother-baby relationship, and the intersubjective aspects of sexuality as they appear in the clinical work are discussed. The article suggests that the mother's body plays a fundamental role in the discovery of oneself and of the other and particularly in the development of the capacity for love.

Notes

¹From a letter from Freud to Jung, in which Freud states that “the therapy (psychoanalysis) is actually a cure through love” (as cited in Loewald, 1960, p. 255).

²Excerpt from “Houses (Plural); Love (Singular)” from OPEN CLOSED OPEN: Poems by Yehuda Amichai, translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. Copyright © by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.