This is a lightly edited version of a presentation I gave in October to of 2018 as part of a panel at the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE) conference, “The Role of Silence in Real-Life Situations of Intimate Partner Violence.”
In this presentation, I explore the role of silence in real-life experiences of intimate partner violence through the lens of Freud’s 1914 paper “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.” Drawing from my doctoral research and interviews with women in recovery, I examine how silence can function as both a form of resistance and a barrier to intervention.
Using the Bluebeard fairy tale as a symbolic framework, I consider how dynamics like forgetting, dissociation, and repetition play a factor in maintaining abusive relationships, and how the process of remembering can support recovery. I also reflect on the clinical implications for therapists working with survivors, including trauma responses, countertransference, and the risks of unaddressed silence in treatment.
This talk invites everyone to think critically about remaining silent, when to “knock,” and when to choose to open the door.
You can read my doctoral dissertation for free on Proquest here.
The Role of Silence in Real-Life Situations of Intimate Partner Violence
Today I would like to engage you in an exploration of the interplay between intimate partner violence and silence from the conceptual framework of Freud’s 1914 essay, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.” In case you are more familiar with the term “domestic violence,” intimate partner violence is the term now used to refer to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, including threats of violence, by a current or past relational partner. Throughout this presentation, I invite you to contemplate the following two questions for clinical practice with individuals affected by intimate partner violence: 1) how might silence manifest as a form of resistance, and 2) how might the process of remembering facilitate recovery?
I would like to begin with an experience shared by a woman in recovery from an abusive relationship. A woman described a situation in which she knew her abusive boyfriend’s family overheard him harming her. She said,
[the event] was supposed to be so fun and then we’re in this room and he pinned me on the bed and was just screaming and choking me, just screaming at me like he hated me, you know, and I just don’t remember those things. And his [family member] would just knock on the door [as if to tell us “hey, you gotta stop”] and we wouldn’t say anything. Like it was so private… even though everybody knew. Like everybody (emphasis on everybody) knew … but nothing ever happened
Aside from knocking on the door, his relatives did not intervene or ask about what had happened as if nothing disturbing had occurred. The abuse continued within their relationship.
During this presentation I will draw from material that was previously published in my doctoral dissertation research entitled “Woman and Predator: Intimate Partner Violence at Home and in ‘Bluebeard.’” To provide a little background on the context in which this material was gathered, I will briefly explain my dissertation research. I interviewed four adult women between the ages of 27 to 60 who had previously been in a relationship characterized by intimate partner violence and had not been in an abusive relationship for at least two years. The interviews focused on sociocultural and systemic factors, the progression of the abusive relationship, the development of insight into the true nature of the relationship, and the process of separation. After completing the interviews, each woman independently read “Bluebeard.” They then answered a reflection questionnaire that was designed to elicit their interpretation of the fairy tale. I will quote directly from some of their responses throughout this presentation.
“Bluebeard” is a fairy tale first published in 1697 about a naïve young woman who marries a wealthy man with a suspicious history—he has been married several times and nobody knows what had become of his wives (Perrault, trans. 2009). After the wedding, he presents her with the keys to his castle and tells her that she can explore his castle and all of his treasures, but he forbids her to enter one specific room. Once he is gone, she has to decide whether to yield to her curiosity and risk his rage by opening the room or stay in her role as the compliant, naïve new bride. She eventually opens the door and discovers that the room contains the dismembered bodies of his previous wives. In horror she drops the room’s key onto the bloody floor. After closing and locking the door, she begins to wash the key to hide the sign of what she had done. But no matter how much she washes the key, it will not come clean. It is through this bloody key that Bluebeard realizes her transgression when he returns to his castle. Right before he kills her, her brothers arrive and kill him. She survives. The reader is left to wonder about entrapment, curiosity, agency, boundaries, and intrusion. I wanted to introduce the background to Bluebeard’s forbidden room since it inspired this research. There seems to be a symbolic parallel between Bluebeard’s forbidden room and the private spaces in which intimate partner violence occurs.
Like Bluebeard, the women described perceiving their abusive ex-boyfriends as more experienced and socially powerful (Hornung, 2018). They described these men as being a few years older, more physically attractive, street-wise, and/or more popular. These men were also risky. They were rumored to have problems with ex-girlfriends, use or sell drugs, or have difficulty staying in school or keeping jobs. Instead of blaming their ex-boyfriends for their dishonesty or predatory behavior, the women typically focused on their own naiveté or how they overlooked red flags. For example, one woman compared herself to Bluebeard’s wife and how she knew his previous wives had disappeared, but was “won over by charm and the promise of a good life. She completely ignored the fact that she could maybe disappear too. I can identify with this because I did the exact same thing in my relationship” (Hornung, 2018, p. 184).
The powerful and charismatic bad boy character usually seems to present with a combination of deception and seduction. Much like a gothic romance, one has to wonder what is so attractive about a man cloaked in mystery, and why a woman might be drawn into a relationship where sinister repetition is possible. Forgetting and deception may play important roles in the development of a romantic relationship characterized by intimate partner violence. The way the women described ignoring red flags gave me the impression that there was some unconscious dimension to this process. I was left wondering if what happened on an intrapsychic level was a form of dissociative denial that resulted in forgetting or turning away from what they intuitively were aware of. Intuition, which can be described as an innate capacity for perception, allows us to somehow know about “the violence we steered clear of, or, too often, the violence we elected not to steer clear of” (de Becker, 2010, p. 13). It is interesting to consider if there may be a relationship between silencing one’s intuition and being vulnerable to violence.
I’d like to return to the scene described in the beginning in order to explore the dialectic between communication and silencing. Imagine a young woman and her boyfriend in an enclosed private space, a bedroom, with his family socializing nearby. Inside the room he is pinning her down, choking her, and screaming at her. Outside of the room one of his family members overhears something, comes to the door, and without saying anything, just knocks. The knock is abrupt and silencing—it’s a cue to stop but there is no subsequent follow-through. We don’t even know if the knock stopped the violence in the moment, or if it just caused him to quiet down. What kept that family member from opening the door or asking what was going on? It is interesting that the knock satisfies his or her need to intervene. Afterwards, the woman shared that nobody—herself and her ex-boyfriend included—said anything, and that everyone acted as if nothing had happened.
This scene seems to speak to the role of silence and psychic avoidance or forgetting in the perpetuation of intimate partner violence. While it is possible that the boyfriend’s family may have been complicit or negligent in not taking more action to address the abuse, I wonder if their ability to process what was happening affected their ability to intervene. Research by medical professionals like Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has shown that when individuals recall a traumatic event, neural activity in Broca’s area, which is the language center of the brain, is markedly decreased. The experience of trauma could literally be silencing. When individuals are in a state of hyperarousal due to trauma, they can have difficulty concentrating, processing, and integrating information. This can lead to unknowing repetition. If the trauma has not been worked through, dynamics like intrusion, aggression, and mistrust may continue to play out in interpersonal relationships and in the transference relationship. Activities that calm the nervous system, like deep breathing, grounding, and progressive muscle relaxation, can help the patient and the therapist manage their physiological stress and prevent dissociation while working with trauma.
In Freud’s (1914) essay he describes two distinct types of forgetting, one that pertains to experiences of the external world and one that relates to primarily internal, psychical processes. He explains that forgetting scenes or experiences “nearly always reduces itself to shutting them off” but that forgetting internal acts is different because “it particularly often happens that something is ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because it was never at any time noticed—was never conscious” (p.148-149). Freud’s conceptualization of forgetting seems to apply to the phenomena of naiveté, partial knowledge, or dissociative denial. When we forget instead of remember, we may become distanced from our insight and intuition.
The dynamic of forgetting may occur within the person being abused as well as within their larger family system and immediate community. Avoidance of intimate partner violence could even manifest in mental health settings. One woman explained how during a stage of separation from her abusive boyfriend, she finally went to seek help through therapy. In her first session she was not given the opportunity to talk about the abuse. She explained:
The only time I talked to anyone was after the first time that we tried to separate and I did it very hesitantly. I didn’t know what the [therapy] process was like so I had no idea you do an intake first and you don’t even talk to someone. So after I left that session I was like “that was weird.” They were telling me to write it all down but I hadn’t even talked to someone about it for a year, so why am I going to write it down. It was really scary for me to like really put it out there, so I didn’t go back.”
She clarified her expectations:
I thought you’d immediately get to talk to someone, and that’s what I wanted, I just wanted to get it all out. They’re like no you’re going to come back in weeks and in the meantime just write it all down, and I didn’t feel comfortable doing that.” (p.135)
She did not return to therapy, but she did return to her abusive boyfriend. The violence escalated until she finally left him and severed all contact.
When I heard her story, I wondered if both intrapsychic and interpersonal silencing were barriers to her receiving treatment. A therapist might think that a woman who has left an abusive partner is no longer in a high risk situation and that she could wait a few weeks before starting regular therapy sessions. That is not necessarily the case. In some situations, a woman is actually at higher risk of harm right after leaving an abusive partner. A study by Campbell and other researchers (2003) suggested that if a woman leaves a controlling, abusive male partner with whom she has been living for a new partner, she is at a higher risk for being killed by him (Campbell et al., 2003)” (p.216-217).
In addition to concerns about safety, another dynamic that complicates therapeutic work is the repetition of the separation/return cycle. A woman may make on average three to six attempts to leave before finally achieving separation from an abusive partner (Sheffer Lindgren & Renck, 2008, p. 122). Therapists working with individuals caught in the separation/return cycle could experience intense countertransference reactions like fear, frustration, dread, and the urge to rescue. Intrusion, aggression, mistrust, and other dynamics associated with unresolved trauma may play out in the transference relationship. Individuals with unresolved trauma may enter into the clinical relationship as “not another person who is a partner in this enterprise, but as a person who is either totally submitted to the physician or the psychiatrist or who needs to protect himself against potential victimization” (Korn, 2001, para. 29). The ability to work through challenging countertransference may also be complicated by frequent exposure to disturbing content in session. Compassion fatigue is “secondary or vicarious trauma” that “compromises clinicians in their ability to care for patients because of symptoms that parallel posttraumatic stress disorder” (Gallagher, 2013, p. 266). In layman’s terms, a therapist may feel depressed, stressed or on edge, numb, detached, unsafe, separated from his or her body, or out of touch with reality.
I’d like to return again to the image of knocking on a door because it can also speak to the transference relationship. Imagine that the patient is inside the room, alone with the problem that is bringing them to therapy. This problem wants to stay concealed. Right outside the door stands the therapist. The therapist might knock—intervening just enough to satisfy his or her professional obligation—while still keeping the problem at a distance. The therapist knows the patient is there, but doesn’t take the risk of saying what needs to be said. Following the therapist’s lead, the patient may stay silent. If left unaddressed, this silence could result in premature termination of treatment.
Freud discusses how the process of analysis and working through resistance are key for breaking the pattern of acting out. He explains how “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (p.150). This compulsive repetition, “which now replaces the impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his doctor [the transference relationship] but also in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time” can be understood as the patient’s “way of remembering” (p.150). He cautions that the more severe a patient’s resistance is to treatment, the more intensely he or she will act out as a defense against remembering. He describes a case example of this defense in action, saying that a patient with an “eventful life-history” and “a long story of illness” responded to questions of “what occurs to his mind” with silence, and declared that “nothing occurs to him” (p.150). Freud interprets this silence as “a resistance against remembering anything” (p.150).
Freud discusses the doctor’s struggle to contain the patient’s urge to repeatedly act out his symptoms. He explains that the patient’s “illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality; which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived” (p.152). Freud suggests that the fundamental rule of analysis is that the patient must work through his resistance and the urge to act out, that is, that analysis is the work of remembering (p.155).
The theme of remembering or not remembering did manifest frequently in the women’s interviews. One woman described how after being in therapy and spending time with a supportive female relative she gradually realized the problems in the relationship. She said,
Little by little I started realizing, ‘oh my God, this is really messed up’ and I broke up with him. I didn’t right away break up with him, but I told him “there’s some stuff going on in my family so I need to focus on my family right now and then we’ll talk in like three months and see how it goes.”
A short time later he returned and tried to convince her to let him back into her life. He was persistent and persuasive. Eventually she spent time with him, which proved to be dangerous. On one occasion he sexually assaulted her, then a while later, he raped her. That night she described having a transformative moment: “And, that was the same night that I [pause] kind of like [pause] came to the light in a way. I asked God for help. And that was the night that I stopped drinking. That was the last night.” After that night, she moved to a different relative’s home so he couldn’t find her. She described how he continued to contact her and she eventually agreed to meet up with him for coffee. In recalling her conversation with him, she realized that she still couldn’t see the relationship clearly:
I told him I was sorry for leaving, for just cutting our relationship off, and I didn’t, I couldn’t connect the dots. I didn’t realize that it really should have been me confronting him, but I didn’t realize until way later, until after a lot of therapy and a lot of personal inventory in a way.
Another woman reflected on how she has a hard time remembering events from this period in her life. She remembers anger. She said: “I just feel like the more I know, the more I can help. And like there’s so much anger, there was (emphasis on was) so much anger. I don’t know if it’s there now, um—(pause)—it is dark.” She joked about wanting to remember, “Do you want to get it back?” and laughed.
As Freud cautioned, the tendency to forget and the compulsion to repeat are forceful dynamics of resistance. Dr. Christine Lewis explains that people in recovery from trauma may unconsciously keep something a secret, thereby staying in a state of incomplete knowing. She notes that unmentalizable material “lives in implicit memory and again often presents in images, dreams, etc.” She suggests that “going into the terrifying, dissociated room or knowing the abuse is both an intrapsychic and interpersonal process,” that is affected by internal figures that “shame and blame and silence the woman” as well as by cultural and social factors that encourage silence. Although painful, this process can be rewarding. Reconciliation can result in transformation, creativity, and growth towards individuation.
I’d like to conclude by returning to my initial question of how the process of remembering may facilitate recovery. As practitioners, we have an opportunity to affect our patients, our colleagues, and the field of mental health. When we develop our own awareness and become more familiar with our resistance, we can be more attuned to how we respond to intimate partner violence with our patients and in our larger communities. We have to decide when to remain silent, when to knock, and when to open the door. Therapy presents us with the opportunity to work through what is often avoided. As Freud explained:
One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis. (p.155)
References
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de Becker, Gavin. The gift of fear: Survival signals that protect us from violence [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
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