Freud Memorial Lecture 2021

Join us for our Annual Freud Memorial Lecture with Dr Jessica Benjamin

The lecture will juxtapose the intrapsychic idea of reparation, based on understanding the unconscious anxieties of harming the love object, with the intersubjective ideas of repairing rupture and restoring recognition. That is, it aims to use and also reformulate the Kleinian idea of reparation of the internal object.

The intersubjective perspective begins with the developmental importance of rupture and repair (Tronick), which creates the experience and representation of a lawful world of secure attachment. The cornerstone of this developmental requirement occurs by the caregiver acknowledging the inevitable violations of expected patterns.  Acknowledgment of injury and misrecognition become an essential element of repair, developmentally and therapeutically. When repair is absent, the child experiences her own need for acknowledgment of pain or distress to be destructive (destabilizing) to the needed other: as in, “my needs are too much, they make mother too anxious,” and later, “they will alienate my analyst who cannot tolerate his own failure to be good.” Consequently, needing recognition of one’s own distress or of being injured now becomes conflated with injuring the other and the threat of retaliation. 

This formulation allows us to see how enactments in the analytic relationship become governed by mutual fear of harming. Fear of harming and being injured drives the doer-done to complementarity involving both partners: “only one can live.” Experience with such enactments has led me to formulate the meaning of intersubjective repair in terms of acknowledgment. The moral Third is a term to describe the position in which we step out of this complementarity and co-create the sense of a lawful world. In social as well as individual relations the moral Third allows us to modify the doer-done to complementary relation via the experience of two minds recognizing each other: “more than one can live.” This recognition is crucial in the current political environment where racism, nationalism and economic exploitation threaten us all.