Looking Back

"Having studied Hegel in Frankfurt, in turn, I had felt a shock when reading Winnicott's (1971) "Use of an Object": when I asked my friend who had studied there with me to read it, she too spontaneously remarked, "It's just like Hegel"" (3)"if we are lucky enough to be exposed to genuinely different disciplines and traditions, we can recognize the homologue in two entirely unlike forms, sameness despite difference. Such bridging of difference, in my view, was exemplary of the way to not only deconstruct but also radically reconfigure oppositions that might otherwise lead to impasse" (3)"Manny taught me about (and later gave me an early draft of) his version of the difference between submission and surrender (Ghent, 1990), ideas that suffused what I wrote about the alienation of recognition" (3)"Their perspective included always seeing things through the double lens of what is and what potentially could be as well as the continual negotiation of reality in our alternative culture and the reality outside" (3)"My use of the idea of intersubjectivity, prior to the encounter with infancy research, was rooted in Habermas, whose book (Erkenninis und Interesse [Knowledge and Human Interests]) was eagerly awaited in Frankfurt in 1968. The book explicated the movie that took critical social theory from the Marxian idea of human beings as producers of their world to that of communicators. It was here I heard the term "the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding" for the first time and sat in seminars on socialization, communication theory, and George Herbert Mead" (5)"All of the work I encountered was done from the standpoint of the infant, as though the mother were simply the answer, the interlocking gear, in relation to the infant's endogenous structure and needs. Her existence as a separate person was somehow subtly ignored, as if the conflict with her own needs and subjectivity were a nonissue if she was good and devoted enough" (6)"Yet the issue of whether recognition was mutual did become somewhat thorny in relation to self psychology insofar as it charted empathy as a largely one-way process. Kohut's ideas of mirroring and empathy bore some resemblance to the idea of recognition, Stern and other psychoanalytic infancy researchers embraced self psychology, yet there were important differences between the two approaches" (7)"The ideas of state sharing as well as rupture and repair seem to be the place where the study of infancy and relational analysis have met. Focusing on the role of shared states, affect regulation, and joint dissociation allowed a perspective on how to use enactments and to flesh out the insight that at some level mutual knowing is both unavoidable and desirable. The view that recognition is based in the sharing of affect states, which is in turn crucial to mutual regulation, has essentially transformed the field" (9)"I came up with the not so euphonious term "identificatory love," a homoerotic love, meaning love of what is seen as or wished to be "like." This relation of mirroring, twinning, subject-to-subject desire for recognition and love of the "like subject" would differ from the oedipal love of the other (whoever it might be, same or opposite sex, whatever felt like that otherness)" (10)"Identificatory love, I think, still gives powerful meaning to the idea that being recognized in one's loving desire to be like the other is as crucial as being safely attached to the source of goodness. Rejection of that need for recognition can be withering and crippling" (11)"and so we must also sadly note that in popular culture, the heterosexual trope of male activity, female passivity is still untouched by queer theory's hits to the reigning discourse of anatomical destiny... In actuality, we psychoanalytic feminists are armed to the teeth with dangerous theory and outfitted to the nines with our explanations - we just can't get a date with mainstream media" (12)"Whereas the focus on regulation and prohibition offers insight into shame, the focus on gender as shaping powerful versions of "this is me" or "is this me?" opens up the contents of desire and longing - contents that are in some sense historically transmitted and perhaps partially alien to the self that embodies them" (12)"The language psychoanalysis invented to open up those contents originally was so organized by the oedipal binary as to be punitive, but the postoedipal world of play can still make great use of psychoanalytic language to break free of the punitive, to unlock desire produced in a world of subjects who are at least partially knowable to each other" (12)"In closing, I can only celebrate the cunning of history in bringing these more disparate and unlikely metaphorical systems into collision and conjunction at one time: Hegelian Marxism, critical social theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, infancy research, relational analysis, and yes the fiction of sadomasochism" (13)