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

Abstract

Reviews the book, 'Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference' by Jessica Benjamin. This book is a series of essays which deal with the question of how we recognize and perform gender. There is very little to criticize in this book. While its prose is abstruse, which causes a feeling of some tension in the effort to understand it at times, this is appropriate to the subject, not only in terms of its intellectual level, but also as a counterpart to the tension between recognition and assertion that is its theme. Benjamin, along with other distinguished psychoanalysts, such as Goldner, Harris, and Young-Bruehl, is thinking at the frontiers of gender and sexual orientation. Her concept of the human dialectic between recognition and assertion is an invaluable tool in our attempts to understand human development and relationships, and her overinclusive integration of intrapsychic, intersubjective and feminist thought is a balm to the challenged role of psychoanalysis today. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)