MINDinMIND Legacy Interview with Jessica Benjamin

• 2-hour live MINDinMIND Legacy Interview
• Recording access
• 2-hour CPD/CE certificate
• Opportunity to join the live audience and submit questions through Zoom
• Selected readings and resources drawn from Jessica Benjamin’s work
• A Routledge discount code for The Bonds of Love and Beyond Doer and Done To

Jessica Benjamin, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, a feminist theorist and one of the defining figures in relational psychoanalysis. She is Clinical Associate Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and a co-founder, board member and faculty member of The Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. She was founding editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and co-founded the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

Her work brings together psychoanalysis, developmental research, feminism, philosophy and social theory, while remaining rooted in clinical practice.

Growing up in a radical family in post-war Washington DC, Jessica became preoccupied early with a question that has remained central to her thinking: how is it that people accept being dominated, submit to authority and join mass movements such as fascism that lead to their own harm?

Alongside her psychoanalytic training, Jessica undertook postdoctoral research in infant development at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, working with Beatrice Beebe on mother-infant interaction and attachment. This research gave developmental form to another question at the heart of her work: how does a child learn to meet another mind?

Jessica’s point is not simply that mothers have needs of their own. The mother is herself a subject, with her own mind, feelings, wishes and point of view. As the child encounters her as a separate person, the child begins to learn what it means to recognise another person as a subject.

In her landmark 1988 book The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, Jessica placed feminism and recognition at the centre of psychoanalytic thinking. At its heart was a question that still runs through her work: how can we recognise another person as a subject in their own right, with a mind and agency of their own, while remaining a subject ourselves?

For Jessica, this question is inseparable from sexuality. The Bonds of Love asked why submission and domination can be exciting rather than simply imposed, and why desire so readily takes the shape of the inequalities we object to.

Jessica also writes about identificatory love: the child’s wish to be like the idealised parent who seems so powerful, and to be recognised by that parent as capable of the same agency. Within the gender arrangements Jessica was analysing, boys were more readily granted this recognition than girls. Where it is refused, a person may struggle to experience themselves as the author of their own desire. What was refused early can still be recognised later, in treatment and in a culture that grants girls the same agency it grants boys.

Jessica developed these questions further in Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference and Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. In 2018, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity, and the Third brought together her mature thinking on mutual recognition, thirdness, therapeutic impasse, acknowledgement and repair.

These questions of recognition and separate subjectivity also run through Jessica’s understanding of the therapeutic relationship. She developed a distinctively relational account of the Third as a shared space co-created by patient and therapist. Breakdowns of the Third are expected in relational analysis, part of how a patient enacts or shows where repair is needed. Therapists often feel caught in the ensuing doer/done-to dynamic. Jessica has shown how acknowledgement is key to re-forming the Third.

The political question with which Jessica began has never disappeared from her work. She has told us that the question of why people submit to domination has become urgent for her again. Her later writing on acknowledgement, witnessing and collective trauma asks what happens when recognising another group’s suffering feels like denying your own, a bind she calls “only one can live”.

Jessica founded and co-directed the Acknowledgment Project, which brought Israeli and Palestinian mental health professionals and community activists together in dialogue. Her work has taken recognition theory into collective and political life through her writing on collective trauma, dehumanisation, witnessing, implication, non-violence and political violence.

Her honours include the American Psychological Association Division 39 Scientific Award for Outstanding Scholarship, the Hans Loewald Award and the Hans Kilian Award for lifetime achievement in the psychoanalytically informed study of history, culture and society. She delivered the Sigmund Freud Memorial Lecture in Vienna in 2008.

Across all of this work runs a persistent question: how can two subjects meet without one having to dominate, submit to or erase the other?

After more than four decades of clinical work, teaching and writing, Jessica will look back with Jane on how her ideas developed, what changed through practice, where she feels she has been misunderstood and what still matters most to her now.

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay, PhD, EdM, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in practice in Philadelphia and New York, and a longstanding interpreter of Jessica Benjamin’s work.

Jessica chose Rachel because of her particular understanding of the feminist, developmental and social strands of Jessica’s thinking. Rachel will help explore Jessica’s relationship to Winnicott, her rethinking of maternal subjectivity, and how recognition moves from the earliest mother-infant relationship into the consulting room and social world.

Rachel is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Mitchell Relational Studies Center. She is a founding board member and Emeritus Director of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia, where she remains on the faculty. She also teaches and supervises at NIP and ICP-NY and is an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.

Her paper Where Objects Were, Subjects Now May Be: The Work of Jessica Benjamin and Reimagining Maternal Subjectivity in Transitional Space examines one of Jessica’s central feminist interventions. The mother is not simply the object who facilitates the infant’s development, but another person with a mind and perspective of her own. By bringing this into the relationship, she makes it possible for the child to experience the meeting of two minds and a relationship of subject to subject.

Rachel is also co-editor, with David Mark, of Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis. The book examines implication: how we acknowledge our involvement in harmful relational and social patterns without reducing responsibility to simple divisions of innocence and blame.

Christopher Walling

Christopher Walling, PsyD, MBA, is a clinical psychologist, board-certified psychoanalyst, researcher and educator whose work brings relational psychoanalysis into dialogue with embodiment, affect regulation and contemporary developmental science.

Jessica chose Chris to bring her work into conversation with contemporary thinking on embodiment, affect regulation and interpersonal neurobiology. He will explore what mutual recognition, doer and done-to, rupture and the Third look like when we attend not only to interpretation and meaning, but to bodily states, affect regulation and the largely non-conscious processes unfolding between therapist and patient.

Chris is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Research Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

His work spans relational psychoanalysis, somatic psychotherapy, trauma, affect regulation and interoception. In 2026 he received the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Ernst and Gertrude Ticho Memorial Award. His lecture, Toward an Embodied Psychoanalysis, explored how affect regulation, bodily awareness and relational attunement can deepen psychoanalytic thinking about transference, countertransference and repair.

Together, Rachel and Chris bring complementary perspectives: Rachel traces the feminist, developmental and social roots of Jessica’s thinking; Chris asks how that thinking speaks to embodiment, affect regulation and contemporary clinical practice.

“It was an exceptionally well-managed interview with a giant of our field. Such an engaging, interesting and poignant interview: down to earth, richly educational with an impressive lightness of touch.”

Dr Thomas Harris, Clinical Psychologist & Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Attendee of the Otto Kernberg Legacy Interview

“I have really enjoyed this series and wish I had been given this kind of information when I started training. I feel they will continue to support me in my work.”

Neil
Purchaser of the Peter Blake Child Psychotherapy Training Series

“I would like to thank you for a beautiful interview and experience in honoring Jon Allen. I found your interview style warm, inviting, with real depth in knowing your honoree.”

Cynthia Mulder, Psychoanalyst
Attendee of the Jon Allen Legacy Interview

This Legacy Interview will be of particular interest to:

• Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts interested in what happens when the therapeutic relationship becomes stuck in patterns of power, submission, blame or helplessness
• Relational, psychodynamic and psychoanalytic clinicians interested in mutual recognition, intersubjectivity and the Third
• Therapists working with enactment, therapeutic impasse, rupture and repair, and with their own participation in treatment
• Child, parent-infant and adult psychotherapists interested in early relationships, affect regulation and maternal subjectivity
• Practitioners interested in feminism, gender, sexuality and the history of psychoanalytic thinking about women
• Clinicians thinking about how to retain mutuality within the necessary asymmetry of psychotherapy
• Therapists working with trauma, dissociation, shame, aggression and relations of power
• Clinicians interested in how social and political realities enter psychic life, and in acknowledgement, implication, witnessing and how relationships survive harm
• Supervisors, educators and trainees wanting to understand the development of relational psychoanalysis from one of the thinkers who helped create it
• Anyone who has read The Bonds of Love, Beyond Doer and Done To or Jessica’s other work and wants to hear her reflect on where she stands now