Reparative Projects

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I think it’s fair to say that, despite having written two subsequent books, you’re known above all as the author of The Bonds of Love. ¹ So perhaps we could structure our conversation by talking about how you came to write The Bonds of Love, assuming that the main ideas are somewhat familiar to our readers, and then by talking about the evolution in your thinking in the dozen or so years since that time.

Jessica Benjamin

I started thinking about the issues that are in The Bonds of Love in the fall of 1966 after I had spent the summer finding out about the Frankfurt School and reading such books as Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization ² and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death. ³ I probably also read Freud’s Totem and Taboo ⁴ and Civilization and Its Discontents, ⁵ and I was very excited about psychoanalysis.

PLR

Where were you at the time?

JB

I was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. There was a group of people interested in the Frankfurt School who were part of the left-wing antiwar scene, which was quite heavily Marxist. It was very theoretical compared with the rest of the American left.

PLR

So you went to the University of Wisconsin?

JB

Yes. I had spent two years at Bard College, where the key influence on me was Hannah Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Bliicher, who had organized a Jaspers-oriented “Common Course.” So Bard was more of a great ideas place. Madison was a left-wing hotbed of European and American Marxism. I was always very Euro-oriented and studied with George Mosse a bit. My senior year I did mainly independent study and reading in intellectual history. I wrote a paper at that time on the idea of play in Nietzsche and Schiller. I came across it many years later and found it so incomprehensibly dense [laughs], so much in the footsteps of the Frankfurt School, that I could barely stand to read it. I felt great sympathy for Professor Mosse, who had had to put up with reading it. [laughs] At the same time, the antiwar movement was going on, and we had our first feminist group, which quickly fell apart because many women couldn’t befriend themselves with the idea that we might have issues of our own that were independent of the war. A few of us ended up reading The Second Sex. ⁶ That was a big, eye-opening moment.

PLR

The feminist group fell apart or the antiwar group fell apart?

JB

The feminist group fell apart, because most of the women felt that we were just an auxiliary, help-the-boys movement, while a few of us were already seeing down the road to where feminism was going. We wanted to go in that direction, to find some other sense of ourselves. There was a huge argument, and everybody who felt there wasn’t any independent purpose for a women’s group left; only about three of us stayed.

PLR

So it wasn’t a feminist group until that happened?

JB

That’s right. Historically speaking, it’s much more accurate to say that it was a women’s group that fell apart and became a small feminist group. As I said, we ended up reading Simone de Beauvoir. From that time, the problem of the other’s consciousness has always remained with me. ⁷ But I recall having had, at the time, the insight, which I was just able to formulate because of reading de Beauvoir, that all the binary opposites that were present in Western thought were indeed hooked up to gender. I remember thinking to myself, in that wild and wooly way of an undergraduate when you have no anchor for your thoughts and you don’t know whether they’re important or not or anybody else has ever thought them, “Wow, this must go all the way back through the history of Western philosophy and reason! There’s some kind of secret relation here. What is it about masculinity and femininity?” I remember having this inchoate but important experience and knowing that I didn’t yet have any of the tissue needed to support that flimsy bone structure. It percolated in the back of my mind for the next 20 years.

PLR

Let’s pause for a moment and backtrack even further. You went to Bard before you went to Wisconsin. Where did you grow up?

JB

I grew up in Washington, DC. I was the younger child in a family where my father had been an extremely active Communist. My mother had also been a Communist but supported the family while my father was a full-time Communist until I was born, at which time he left the party. That was really the framing and shaping experience in my family life. Another important influence was that my brother had studied political philosophy; he went to the University of Chicago as a graduate student to study with Leo Strauss. He was the person who told me, when I was picking a second language, not to bother with Spanish but that I should learn German because it would come in handy when I wanted to read philosophy later.

PLR

How much older is your brother?

JB

Almost nine years. So my family was very political and discursively active and, of course, meschugge like everybody else around, maybe even more so. I think the main thing that I experienced growing up was that we were at odds with the rest of the social world around us. There was no question of my being in any kind of comfortable relation to that social world, especially once we moved to the suburbs when I was 11. Before that we lived in an apartment project that was a hotbed of Communists who all settled there after World War II. My mother managed it and gave apartments to all these young families with children who couldn’t get apartments anywhere. Any time some fellow travelers or C.P.-types came along, they could count on getting an apartment there. So for a time when I was young, it was actually a very cohesive community. But once that dissolved, I had an extremely uncomfortable relation to my suburban peers in the 1950s and 60s. It was pretty intolerable. Although I rebelled against my family, I had an outsider position, and I always had a sense that I was not going to conform to the gender rules. Not that anyone in my family expected me to because, after all, my mother supported the family, which wasn’t that unusual for Communists. Communist families were not feminist families, but they had very strong women who didn’t comply with gender arrangements. My father began to earn money only much later.

PLR

What did your mother do?

JB

Well, she managed this apartment project. But she did a lot of things. She worked for the government before she got thrown out—left, rather, before there was going to be any problem. Many of our friends were thrown out of the government at that time. If you look at Carl Bernstein’s memoirs, you get a fairly good picture of the community I grew up in, except that his parents and many other people’s left the Party later. ⁸ The fact that my father was more critical of the Party probably also had a huge influence on me.

PLR

So he had left by the time you were born?

JB

Yes, or pretty close to it, in 1946. To be around people who were so political had a huge influence on my growing up, but at the same time I felt that they were emotionally not in tune with whatever was going on at any given moment. My path of rebellion was going to be through psychoanalysis and then through feminism because those were ways of reinstating the value of the individual person. So when I discovered psychoanalysis, and discovered it in a version where I could hook it up to things that I continued to believe politically, I was completely overjoyed.

PLR

This happened while you were still in college?

JB

Yes. It was the perfect solution to this mammoth problem I had. And then I went to Frankfurt in 1967, thinking I was just going to visit. I was supposed to study intellectual history out at Berkeley, but I realized that I couldn’t be cooped up in graduate school and have to sit in the library 40 hours a week and write research papers. That was too personally repressive for me. Also, I knew that, as a single woman, it would be difficult because I had already seen what it was like among the graduate students in Wisconsin. Joan Scott was the only woman in our circles who was a successful graduate student. Everyone else was a wife of a graduate student, and I was worried about being the only woman who was independent and ambitious. These were prefeminist times, and the women were either putting their husbands through graduate school or at most getting teaching degrees. It was a very uncomfortable situation compared with that in Germany at the time. Although many of the women in Germany later fell by the wayside, as students they were treated in a way that felt to me quite different from the American reality.

PLR

So you had been accepted at Berkeley but decided to go to Frankfurt for a year?

JB

I was in Frankfurt visiting with friends and I thought, “This is great! I can stay here and study and I won’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.” Because you could sign up for all the seminars, and you didn’t have to write papers. You read two pages of Hegel a week, so you weren’t overwhelmed with busywork the way you are in the American educational system. You did something intensively and in depth, and the rest of the time everybody sat around and argued politics, drank beer, and made the revolution, [laughs]

PLR

Did you speak German at the time?

JB

No, I didn’t speak it quite yet. I knew that the great thing was that I would learn German. That was how I sold it to Berkeley—and to my parents and everybody else. They saved my fellowship for two years, at which point I understood that I really didn’t want to do that any more.

PLR

How did you support yourself in Frankfurt?

JB

My parents helped me out, and I tutored English. Then I got involved in the children’s pedagogy movement that was very psychoanalytically inspired. At that time in Germany, there were no nursery and few kindergarten programs. Kids had no day care. The entire educational system in Germany was very authoritarian until it was transformed by the student movement. Everyone was reading these little pirated editions of experimental psychoanalytic writings from the 1920s and 1930s that we typed and mimeographed ourselves until we got copiers.

PLR

Was Aichhorn’s work influential?

JB

Yes, but not for me. I read Vera Schmidt, and Anna Freud’s report on children from Theresienstadt. ⁹ The psychoanalytic world in Germany was eventually going to be transformed by this ferment, but nobody knew it yet. At the time, it was just a student movement with antiauthoritarian children’s centers. So that’s what I became involved with, and it brought together all the different issues in my life—the value I placed on the individual in any project of social transformation, which hadn’t been emphasized in my own home. So this was a very reparative experience for me. Simply taking care of children was very reparative for me because the idea that children were important and you should spend your time with them instead of on the revolution was not a big one in my nuclear family or my extended family history.

PLR

Did you feel that enough time hadn’t been spent on you as a child?

JB

No, certainly not enough time had been spent on me as a child, [laughs] That’s a gross understatement. So I felt that this was a great way to be reparative, to stay within the political milieu that I still believed in, and to learn more about psychoanalysis. Originally, I thought I might even stay in Frankfurt. You could get a degree in social pedagogy, which was very psychoanalytically oriented, and then become a child analyst; that was what I thought I was going to do.

PLR

So you were in a degree program?

JB

Yes. I had switched out of sociology and philosophy by that time and into pedagogy. I did my Vordiplom, which is a kind of pre-Master’s degree.

PLR

Did you meet your husband there? ¹⁰

JB

No, I met Andy later. He had studied as a graduate student in Wisconsin with Mosse, but he arrived there the summer I left. Then he went to Vienna to do his research. We had exactly the same backgrounds and interests, but our paths didn’t cross until we finally met at Hampshire in 1976, when I came to teach courses on the Frankfurt School so he could go on leave. So we did ultimately meet through our German connection, but later. The thing about Frankfurt was that once again there was a problem because everybody was into Marxism and nobody was into feminism. I was part of the very early women’s movement there, which was a very difficult and conflicted experience because again the women felt that anything that they might do for themselves wouldn’t really be political. I had one extremely good friend who lived with me in this little commune, and we were constantly arguing in favor of feminism with a group of 40 to 50 women who were all violently opposed. The startling thing was that when I left in December of 1971 and they had their first meeting again in January of 1972, they all came out as feminists, especially the lesbians who had been in the closet. It was as though I had to get out of the way because they could not face me and say that for months now they’d been thinking I was right, [laughs] I happened to be in Frankfurt a few years ago for a woman’s 50th birthday party, and she came up to me and said, “I have always felt so guilty about this.” [laughs]

PLR

You sowed the seeds of feminist consciousness.

JB

I brought all the literature over from the United States and got it distributed. But I missed out on a lot of good stuff here. On the other hand, I don’t regret having been part of the German student movement. It was an unbelievably exciting experience.

PLR

And you didn’t know about Anna O. at that time?

JB

No, the great thing was finding out later that Anna O. had lived literally around the corner from me and only four or five blocks from the Kinderlaclen—the antiauthoritarian children’s center. ¹¹

PLR

Did you have any psychoanalysis in Frankfurt?

JB

Yes, I did. Actually, it was a very bad psychoanalysis with an analyst who suffered from the difficulty of obtaining training in post-Nazi Germany. He was also terribly alarmed by my feminism and became more and more defensive. I no doubt gave him a hard time, but he really had no clue about how to handle feminism and was terrified by it.

PLR

Was it conducted in English?

JB

Yes. He had been an antifascist and had good political credentials. But he had been trained by Alexander Mitscherlich, and Mitscherlich wasn’t trained by anybody, as is well known. My analyst fell out with him and was not part of the institute in Frankfurt. Institute analysts had a two-year waiting list, but he had time.

PLR

Were you thinking of yourself as a future analyst at that time?

JB

I was, but when things finished so badly I became discouraged and came back to the United States.

PLR

Why did you leave Frankfurt?

JB

I left Frankfurt because I couldn’t stand being away from the United States any more. I think it was an important act of separation and rebellion from my family to go over there in the first place, but at the same time I felt too cut off from any secure base. The whole student movement was terrifyingly cut off from the older generation. There was hardly anyone who had a connection to his or her parents. My boyfriend actually had a pretty good relationship with his mother, who was an apolitical, working-class woman. But most of the people I was surrounded by had frozen their connection to the older generation in a very frightening dissociative process. The amount of aggression being unleashed in the movement was frightening to me. There was a move toward authoritarian, Communist politics that was also very frightening. So the whole atmosphere changed. I tried very hard to create a feminist cohort that I could feel comfortable with, but I couldn’t. At the antiauthoritarian children’s center, the parents became more and more convinced that they should study Marx and forget about child-rearing, which was exactly what I was there to prevent! So I was very disillusioned.

PLR

It sounds as though you had an experience in that setting that was similar to your childhood experience in that there was a radical political ideology and a neglect of the needs of children.

JB

Well, these people were not neglectful. A lot of them were quite wonderful as parents. But they were young and they were very taken up with the idea that there was something important that they ought to do, and I felt it as a threat to our other project. Like anybody in our generation, they were already much more attuned to making a different kind of world for their children. Of course, there are always a few people who neglect their children, but by and large what I felt wasn’t that but a lack of support from them for my personal reparative project. It wasn’t theirs, because they didn’t come from political families. They were trying to make up for something else—Nazism. Our reparative projects didn’t mesh.