Loosening the Bonds: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of the Group

Abstract

This article reflects on Jessica Benjamin's important first book, The Bonds of Love (1988 Benjamin , J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination . New York , NY : Pantheon Books. [Google Scholar]), considering one of its greatest contributions to be the cultural shift it helped inaugurate in the psychoanalytic understanding of gender and its ethos of reworking and historicizing core psychoanalytic concepts. In this spirit, and following Benjamin's reference to Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921 Freud , S. ( 1921 ). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego . Standard Edition , 18 . London , UK : Hogarth Press , pp. 65 – 144 . [Google Scholar]), it offers a reconceptualization of the Oedipus, adding to it the psychoanalytic idea of the group. Using groups to theorize gender allows greater flexibility and a more nuanced description of the intersection of the social with subjectivity than do more traditional readings that rely on individual accounts of identification.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.