  Taking what she calls an eclectic approach, and eschewing methodological orthodoxy with regard to Freudian metapsychology and the theory of the instincts, Benjamin establishes her project on the basis of a two person relational perspective, with the other as a separate independent subject. Rather than an undifferentiated unity governing early infantile life in the pre-Oedipal period, which would make of the infant merely a “monadic energy system” (Benjamin 1988, 17), she maintains that a genuine duality and relationality exists from the start and that the process of growth entails development within relationships rather than a development of them. The infant, she postulates, is a fundamentally active and social creature, reaching out to the world and expressing a desire for recognition. The knots of identity are formed via the interplay of this desire with the response of another who variously affirms or defies the child. Benjamin claims that this emphasis on sociality and intersubjectivity is not intended to disregard the intrapsychic elements of subject formation, and in fact she argues for “the interaction between the psyche and social life” (Benjamin 1988, 5). She holds that the inner and the outer are not competitive but complementary theoretical perspectives. Nonetheless, she does want to situate identity generally, and gendered identity more specifically, within the purview of the subject's multiple and ambiguous social identifications.