Jessica Benjamin

Jessica Benjamin is a supervising faculty member of the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies where she is a founder and board member.  She has been part of the relational psychoanalytic movement from its inception, and is known for her integration of clinical psychoanalytic and development theory with social thought, particularly feminist theory. She is the author of  The Bonds of Love (1988); Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995); and Shadow of the Other (1998).  Her new book  Beyond Doer and done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third has just been published by Routledge.  From 2004-2010 she initiated and directed  “The Acknowledgement Project” together with Dr. Eyad el Sarraj of Gaza involving Israeli and Palestinian mental health practitioners and international dialogue leaders.  She participated in editing and narrating the video film (movingbeyondviolence.org)  on the Israeli-Palestinian Combatants for Peace, an organization committed to opposing the Occupation and creating cooperation non-violently to establish conditions for peace. Her article on Eyad Sarraj’s ideas, “Non-Violence as the recognition of all suffering”  appeared in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society last year.  In 2015 she was awarded the Hans Kilian prize for meta-humanistic studies in Bochum, Germany.