Recognition in the Room: Subjectivity, Rupture and Repair
Most clinicians know the moment. A client who has been working well suddenly says, "You don't understand," or goes quiet, or begins to comply a little too smoothly. Our training pulls us toward technique — reflect, validate, check the formulation. But something else may be happening. The client may be testing whether we are actually here, as a separate person, capable of surviving them.
Jessica Benjamin's paper Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity (1995) offers an unusually useful way to think about these moments in trauma work. It rests on two ideas: that we need to be recognised as subjects, and that the breakdown and repair of that recognition is not a failure of the therapy but a large part of the work itself.
What We Mean by Subjectivity
Subjectivity is the felt experience of being a centre of one's own life. Not simply having thoughts and feelings, but the sense that they are mine — that they arise from somewhere inside me, that they hold together across time, and that they are worth something. William James (1890) described this as an inner stream with an "I–me" duality: we are partly the knower and partly the known.
This is precisely what complex trauma damages. Clients describe watching themselves from a distance, not knowing what they feel until someone else names it, or scanning our faces to work out what response is required. Robert Meares (2000) and the Conversational Model tradition distinguish between a mode of experience in which life simply happens to me — in which I am the object of other people's actions — and a fuller sense of self as origin and author. Survivors of chronic relational trauma often live almost entirely in the first position. Their inner life has been shaped by other people's realities.
Recognition and the Other as Subject
Intersubjectivity has been described simply as the sharing of subjective states between two or more people (Scheff et al., 2006). Benjamin sharpens this. Her claim is that the other must be recognised as a separate subject in their own right if I am to fully experience my own subjectivity in their presence. Recognition between persons is, for Benjamin, essentially mutual — yet she is careful to add that the capacity to recognise another is a developmental achievement, only unevenly realised in any of us. That gradient matters clinically, and we will return to it.
She then asks a question worth sitting with: how is the meeting of two subjects different from the meeting of a subject and an object? Object relations theory, she argues, took us only so far — it gave us the internal representation of the other, the object in my mind, rather than the other as an equivalent centre of experience. Her critique of self psychology is sharper still: in Kohut's account the self is always the recipient of empathy and never its giver, so the other's independent inner life never quite comes into view. George Eliot's phrase, which Benjamin uses as her epigraph, captures the shift she is after: coming to feel, not merely to reflect, that the other person has an "equivalent centre of self."
Destruction, Survival and Repair
Benjamin's second move is where the clinical value lies. Drawing on Winnicott's (1969) paper on the use of an object, she argues that aggression is not merely a reaction to the encounter with reality; it is what creates the experience of externality. From an intersubjective standpoint, some clash of wills is inherent in any relationship between two subjects. We inevitably negate the other in fantasy. What matters is what happens next.
If the other survives the destruction — in Benjamin's words, without retaliating or withdrawing — they come into view as real, existing outside my mental control. This is not a grim concession to reality; Benjamin describes the discovery as a form of love. If the other does not survive, the aggression has nowhere to go. Benjamin describes the drama shifting inward, into a world of internal objects, so that experience becomes almost exclusively intrapsychic. Clinically, in survivors of chronic relational trauma, this is where we see it harden into self-blame, contempt and hypervigilance.
Two cautions from Benjamin herself are worth holding here. First, she does not treat internalisation as pathology. Fantasy and internal elaboration are, in her account, the ordinary substratum of mental life and the source of creativity; the problem is a loss of balance between the intrapsychic and the intersubjective, not the presence of an inner world. Second, she describes what happens when recognition breaks down under the strain of difference. The self insists on its own way, refuses to recognise the other, begins to coerce — and then experiences the other's refusal as a reversal: you are coercing me. She calls these complementary structures, later rendered as "doer and done-to" (Benjamin, 2004). When such reversals are not balanced by mutual activity, they become entrenched and the relationship becomes a struggle for power. This concept turns out to be the most useful in the whole paper for thinking about betrayal and coercive control.
All of this reframes something clinicians often experience as failure. Ruptures — to use the term Safran and Muran (2000) gave the field — are not evidence that the alliance is broken or that we have mishandled the case. Benjamin draws on infant research (Beebe & Lachmann, 1994; Tronick, 1989) showing that early relatedness is characterised not by continuous harmony but by continuous disruption and repair. Breakdown is normal. What is therapeutic is the restoration.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Your subjectivity is an instrument, not a contaminant. A client cannot test a technique. They can only test a person. This does not mean disclosure; it means being sufficiently present that our separateness registers.
Be real enough to survive, but not so insistently real that you foreclose the play. Benjamin's brief clinical remarks describe the good hour as a momentary balance in which the therapist is experienced both as the client's inner material and as a recognising other — a transitional space in which our otherness can be ignored as well as acknowledged. In Conversational Model terms, this is the therapist staying inside the client's minute particulars rather than reaching prematurely for the interpretive stance (Hobson, 1985; Meares, 2000). Survival is not the same as insisting on being seen.
Surviving means neither retaliating nor disappearing. Retaliation in therapy is rarely overt. It looks like a well-timed interpretation that lands as a correction, a subtle defensiveness about the treatment plan, a note of impatience. Withdrawal is quieter still: becoming very technical, very warm, very flat, or reaching for a referral. Both tell the client that their protest was too much for us.
Watch for the markers of failed recognition. The Conversational Model gives us a vocabulary for what remains when subjectivity has had nowhere safe to appear (Hobson, 1985; Meares, 2000): compliance; "I don't know what I feel"; a life told as a chronicle of events with no inner thread rather than as a narrative; constant monitoring of our expression. These are not resistance.
Treat repair as the intervention. Naming the rupture, owning our part in it without asking the client to manage our feelings, and staying in contact through the discomfort does more than any reformulation. Benjamin (2009) later made this explicit: the therapist's acknowledgement of failure is what restores the shared, facilitating space. It demonstrates that a relationship can hold two realities at once.
Applying the Model Where Reality Is Not Shared
Rupture and repair build trust only when both people are operating in the same reality. Benjamin's own logic makes this clear. Survival can only do its work if the other is genuinely outside and real — a usable other, in Winnicott's sense. Where one party systematically conceals or distorts reality, as in betrayal contexts and coercive control, there is no such other to be discovered. Cycles of breakdown and apparent repair do not accumulate trust; they accumulate self-doubt. The relationship settles into the entrenched complementarity Benjamin describes, in which one person's attempts at recognition are received as coercion and returned as reversal.
I see this frequently in betrayal trauma work. The betrayed partner often has the greater capacity for reflection, and they keep extending recognition into a relationship where their own perception is denied. Over time, the self reorganises around self-blame: if I could just understand him better, this would make sense. Applying the destruction–survival sequence formulaically here — encouraging the client to tolerate more breakdown, to recognise the other more fully — would compound the injury. But this is not a limit on Benjamin's model so much as one of its consequences. Recognition presupposes self-assertion; without a self that can assert its own perception there is no self to be recognised (Benjamin, 1988; Yeatman, 2015). The clinical task, then, is not to grow this client's capacity to recognise the other. It is to restore their trust in their own perception first, so a subject is present who can be recognised at all.
Closing
Recognition is not a technique to be added to a treatment plan. It is the medium in which everything else becomes possible. When we can tolerate being negated, tested and found wanting — and still be there the following week — we offer many clients something they have not previously had: a person who is real enough to be destroyed, and who survives.
Further Reading
Beebe, B., & Lachmann, F. M. (1994). Representation and internalization in infancy: Three principles of salience. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 11(2), 127–165.
Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. Pantheon.
Benjamin, J. (1995). Recognition and destruction: An outline of intersubjectivity. In Like subjects, love objects: Essays on recognition and sexual difference (pp. 27–48). Yale University Press. (Original work published 1990)
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2004.tb00151.x
Benjamin, J. (2009). A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship (the shared third). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90(3), 441–450.
Hobson, R. F. (1985). Forms of feeling: The heart of psychotherapy. Tavistock. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). Henry Holt.
Meares, R. (2000). Intimacy and alienation: Memory, trauma and personal being. Routledge.
Safran, J. D., & Muran, J. C. (2000). Negotiating the therapeutic alliance: A relational treatment guide. Guilford Press.
Scheff, T. J., Phillips, B. S., & Kincaid, H. (2006). Goffman unbound! A new paradigm for social science. Paradigm.
Tronick, E. Z. (1989). Emotions and emotional communication in infants. American Psychologist, 44(2), 112–119.
Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 50, 711–716.
Yeatman, A. (2015). A two-person conception of freedom: The significance of Jessica Benjamin's idea of intersubjectivity. Journal of Classical Sociology, 15(1), 3–23. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1468795X14567283
AI Acknowledgement: Artificial intelligence tools were used in the preparation of this article to assist with structuring, editing and refining the text. All clinical reasoning, interpretation and professional opinion are the author's own, and the final content has been reviewed and approved by the author.
About The Author
Rebecca Higgins is the Clinical Director of The Radiant Group, a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Psychotherapist, EMDR Consultant and Clinical Supervisor with more than 16 years of experience working with complex trauma, attachment injuries, betrayal trauma and addictive disorders.
Through her clinical practice, research, supervision, teaching and Clinical Insights series, Rebecca translates contemporary research into practical, evidence-informed approaches to trauma recovery, with a focus on restoring emotional regulation, identity, relationships and a coherent sense of self.
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