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Relational and intersubjective developments · Chapter 36
Benjamin, Chodorow, Harris and Dimen: recognition, gender and the terms of subjectivity
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Chapter contents
- Why this is theory, not an optional social addendum
- Chodorow: social organization and personal meaning
- Benjamin: another mind that does not belong to me
- Thirdness is not a third person who decides
- An original room today: who gets to define the session?
- Harris and Dimen: gender does not arrive fully assembled
- What remains disputed
- Source and reading notes
Why this is theory, not an optional social addendum
Feminist and relational psychoanalytic writers challenged not only statements about women but the models of subjectivity underlying them. Who is treated as a desiring subject and who as the object that supports another’s development? How do dependency, autonomy and gender become organized? Nancy Chodorow brought psychoanalytic developmental thinking into conversation with the social organization of parenting. Jessica Benjamin examined domination, recognition and the problem of acknowledging another subject. Adrienne Harris and Muriel Dimen further complicated fixed accounts of gender and sexuality. [205] [167] [207] [206]
In plain English: a theory of growing up can quietly assume that one person gets to become independent while another remains the supporting character. These writers made that assumption part of the theory to be questioned.
Chodorow: social organization and personal meaning
Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering examined how gendered caregiving arrangements can reproduce psychological and social patterns. Her later work emphasizes the personal, affective construction of meaning rather than treating a cultural category as a complete explanation of an individual. Her importance lies in connecting intrapsychic experience with social reproduction while also attending to singularity. [205]
A therapist consequently should not assume that a woman’s wish for professional recognition means the same thing across patients, or that a man’s dependency inevitably expresses one developmental failure. Gendered expectations can matter deeply without supplying the answer in advance.
Benjamin: another mind that does not belong to me
Mutual recognition involves acknowledging the other as a subject with a separate center of experience, while retaining one’s own subjectivity. Recognition can break down into a doer–done-to configuration in which one person seems to be the active agent and the other merely the one acted upon. Positions can reverse without the underlying opposition changing. [167]
In plain English: we can swap who wins and still remain trapped in a relationship where only one person’s experience is allowed to count.
This is not the claim that all conflicts are symmetrical. A person subjected to abuse is not equally responsible because the theory describes a relational pattern. Mutual influence must not erase differences in power or responsibility.
Thirdness is not a third person who decides
Benjamin’s thirdness concerns the possibility of a shared orientation or process that is not simply one person’s domination. It can involve acknowledging breakdown and finding a way to hold two subjectivities. It differs from Britton’s third position and Ogden’s analytic third, even though the concepts can be fruitfully compared. [167] [80]
In plain English: we can care about what is happening between us without either of us having to surrender the fact that our experience is real.
An original room today: who gets to define the session?
Mara says the therapist’s interpretation felt controlling. The therapist thinks it was tentative and initially wants to explain the wording.
Therapist: “I am noticing an urge to prove I did not mean it that way. That would leave little room for what it was like for you.”
Mara: “I do not need you to say every interpretation is wrong.”
Therapist: “Then perhaps we can keep both the possibility that the idea has value and the fact that how I offered it made you feel defined.”
They examine the actual words. Mara says the problem was that the therapist linked three events before she could comment. They agree to slow that process. The clinician has not abandoned judgment or asked for forgiveness. A shared way of examining the work becomes possible.
This scene illustrates recognition only if Mara’s account can genuinely alter the conversation. Repeating a formula about two perspectives while retaining all interpretive authority is not a meaningful change.
Harris and Dimen: gender does not arrive fully assembled
Harris’s soft assembly account brings developmental and nonlinear thinking to gender. Multiple influences organize experience in context rather than producing a fixed, universal script. Dimen’s writing keeps sexuality, ambivalence, power and contradiction available rather than resolving them through a normative account of proper development. Virginia Goldner’s work adds important examinations of gender, violence and the ethics of couple treatment. [207] [206] [234]
A contemporary clinician can therefore ask how gender is lived without requiring a stereotyped narrative of femininity, masculinity or identity. This does not mean bodily experience is irrelevant or that all meanings are arbitrary. It means an identity category cannot do the work of listening.
What remains disputed
Recognition-oriented theory can be criticized for making an ethical ideal too central to accounts of unconscious conflict or for underestimating aggression. Conversely, intrapsychic accounts can fail to examine how domination enters theory itself. These are substantive disagreements. The task is not to crown the latest account as correct but to understand what each permits and obscures.
Study task: explain how acknowledging a patient’s experience differs from agreeing with every inference. Then compare the three “thirds” named above. A useful explanation should say what each term organizes, not simply translate all of them as connection.
Source and reading notes
Independent educational synthesis. Fictional conversations illustrate reasoning. Review scopes describe the material consulted; they do not certify all clinical claims.
The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (opens in a new tab)
Review scope recorded
See the pathway review note for the exact material consulted.
Identity and available publisher-description-and-contents checked. Full book/article not read unless explicitly stated. Publication dates identify this edition, not automatically the first publication. Clinical scenes are original educational synthesis.
Recorded check: 2026-10-16. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: checked at stated scope
publisher-description-and-contents: Identity and available publisher-description-and-contents checked. Full book/article not read unless explicitly stated. Publication dates identify this edition, not automatically the first publication. Clinical scenes are original educational synthesis.
checked at stated scope · Recorded date: 2026-10-16
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Further reading for psychodynamic history, theory and practice.
Access depends on the destination; saving a link does not unlock paid material.
Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (opens in a new tab)
Publisher description checked
Publisher, catalog, or organizer description reviewed. The work itself was not read, watched, or heard.
Publisher description and bibliographic details checked; this research pass did not review the full book.
Recorded check: 2026-10-14. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: carried forward
description: Publisher description and bibliographic details checked; this research pass did not review the full book.
carried-forward from earlier Learn library; not a new full-text review
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Develops mutual recognition, breakdown, acknowledgment, and thirdness in relational psychoanalysis.
contemporary theory, clinical formulation
Purchase or library
Gender as Soft Assembly (opens in a new tab)
Review scope recorded
See the pathway review note for the exact material consulted.
Identity and available publisher-description-and-contents checked. Full book/article not read unless explicitly stated. Publication dates identify this edition, not automatically the first publication. Clinical scenes are original educational synthesis.
Recorded check: 2026-10-16. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: checked at stated scope
publisher-description-and-contents: Identity and available publisher-description-and-contents checked. Full book/article not read unless explicitly stated. Publication dates identify this edition, not automatically the first publication. Clinical scenes are original educational synthesis.
checked at stated scope · Recorded date: 2026-10-16
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Further reading for psychodynamic history, theory and practice.
Access depends on the destination; saving a link does not unlock paid material.
Sexuality, Intimacy, Power: Classic Edition (opens in a new tab)
Review scope recorded
See the pathway review note for the exact material consulted.
Identity and available publisher-description checked. Full book/article not read unless explicitly stated. Publication dates identify this edition, not automatically the first publication. Clinical scenes are original educational synthesis.
Recorded check: 2026-10-16. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: checked at stated scope
publisher-description: Identity and available publisher-description checked. Full book/article not read unless explicitly stated. Publication dates identify this edition, not automatically the first publication. Clinical scenes are original educational synthesis.
checked at stated scope · Recorded date: 2026-10-16
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Further reading for psychodynamic history, theory and practice.
Access depends on the destination; saving a link does not unlock paid material.
Ron Britton (opens in a new tab)
Review scope recorded
See the pathway review note for the exact material consulted.
Belief, knowledge, imagination and triangular space. Theoretical developmental claims remain attributed.
Recorded check: 2026-10-15. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: carried forward
authored-institutional-conceptual-essay: Belief, knowledge, imagination and triangular space. Theoretical developmental claims remain attributed.
carried-forward; not independently rechecked in finishing pass · Recorded date: 2026-10-15
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Further reading for psychodynamic history, theory and practice.
Access depends on the destination; saving a link does not unlock paid material.
Toward a critical relational theory of gender (opens in a new tab)
Abstract checked
Abstract or official summary reviewed. Full paper not appraised.
Primary paper abstract read; author challenges unitary gender-identity ideals. No claim that gender fluidity is a compulsory treatment goal.
Recorded check: 2026-10-16. Source used for this record (opens in a new tab)
Pathway source review: checked at stated scope
abstract: Primary paper abstract read; author challenges unitary gender-identity ideals. No claim that gender fluidity is a compulsory treatment goal.
checked at stated scope · Recorded date: 2026-10-16
Scope concerns what was consulted; it is not approval of every claim or author endorsement.
Further reading for psychodynamic history, theory and practice.
Access depends on the destination; saving a link does not unlock paid material.