Family, Tragedy, Democracy, and Populism: The Exchange between Jessica Benjamin and Christopher Lasch

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, a series of critical remarks were traded between the historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch and the psychoanalyst and feminist philosopher Jessica Benjamin. Researchers describe that exchange as involving competing perceptions of psychoanalysis, but the debate also covered mismatching approaches to critical theory and, more widely, to the ideals befitting a free polity. Lasch’s appeal to the traditions of the American past faced off against Benjamin’s advocacy of a substantial social change whose fundamental step was challenging the patriarchy.1 The ideas that each of the two authors put forth are often cited for reproaching the worldview associated with the other. Supportive scholars credit Benjamin with working psychoanalysis into a feminist perspective that questions traditional gender roles and the social order based on them, an order to which Lasch seemed committed.2 On the other hand, critics of the psychoanalytic turn to which Benjamin was central echo Lasch when arguing that the resulting relational theory marginalizes personal responsibility and belittles the significance of individual conscience.3