Читать книгу Faith Born of Seduction - Jennifer L Manlowe - Страница 17

To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature.⁵ According to psychiatrist Judith Herman, “Three times over the past century, a particular form of psychological trauma has surfaced into public consciousness.”⁶ Taken together, they have deepened our knowledge of contemporary psychological trauma. The first to emerge was hysteria, the prototypical psychological “disorder” of women. Most of the patients who were referred to Freud by his colleagues were diagnosed as “untreatable liars.” The study of hysteria grew out of the republican, anticlerical political movement of late nineteenth-century France. The second type of trauma was combat neurosis. It began to be studied in England and the United States after the First World War and reached its peak after the Vietnam War. The last and most recent trauma to come into public awareness is domestic violence—sexual and physical abuse in the home. Its political context is the feminist movement in Western Europe and North America.⁷

Hysteria was called “the Great Neurosis” by the French neurologist and mentor to Sigmund Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot focused on the symptoms of hysteria that resembled neurological damage: motor paralyses, sensory losses, convulsions, and amnesias.⁸ By 1880 he had demonstrated that these symptoms were psychological, since they could be artificially induced and relieved through the use of hypnosis.

Competition to discover the origins of hysteria was particularly intense between two other famous neurological physicians besides Charcot: Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. By the mid-1890s Janet in France and Freud, with his collaborator Joseph Breuer, in Vienna, had each arrived at strikingly similar formulations: hysteria was a condition caused by psychological trauma. Each found that “unbearable emotional reactions to traumatic events produced an altered state of consciousness, which in turn induced hysterical symptoms.”⁹ Janet named this alteration in consciousness dissociation.¹⁰ Breuer and Freud called it double consciousness.¹¹ Perhaps a more accurate label would be divided self-construction.

By the early 1890s, Freud had treated eighteen “patients,” two-thirds of them women. He soon found similarities among this random sample, especially in relation to how they experienced puberty: “A shrinking from sexuality, which normally plays some part at puberty, is raised to a high pitch and is permanently retained.”¹² These patients remained in a state of discomfort into adulthood, “physically inadequate to meet the demands of sexuality.”¹³ Both Janet and Freud recognized that the somatic symptoms of hysteria expressed disguised representations of intensely distressing events that had been banished from memory. Breuer and Freud, in an abiding formulation, wrote that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.”¹⁴

By the mid-1890s these investigators had also discovered that hysterical symptoms could be alleviated by a singular solution: when the traumatic memories and the intense feelings that accompanied them are recovered and put into words. This individualistic method of treatment became the basis of modern psychotherapy. Janet called the technique psychological analysis, Breuer and Freud called it abreaction¹⁵ or catharsis, and Freud later called it psycho-analysis.¹⁶

By 1896, after hearing countless patients talk of sexual assault, abuse, and incest at the hands of trusted relatives, Freud was ready to present what he saw as the source of hysterical symptoms in adulthood. In his report on the eighteen case studies, entitled “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Freud made the following important claim:

I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology.¹⁷

Freud’s “momentous discovery” of the childhood origins of hysteria was met with thunderous silence by his peers, followed by a period of professional “leprosy.” He had broken a social code: the prevailing belief among the elite that incest was present only among the lower classes and that it had been conditioned out of “civilized” society. Within a year of Freud’s dramatic testimony on behalf of his patients, he retracted his hypothesis. Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called “perverted acts against children” were endemic, not only among the working class of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable middle-class and upper-class families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unfathomable, beyond credibility.¹⁸

Freud’s disclaimer was written up as “The Theory of Infant Sexuality,” a foundation of his life’s future work. His previous theory of infantile seduction was revised as a wish to be seduced by the parent, not an actual seduction. On occasion Freud would refer to his original theory as “my far-reaching blunder.”¹⁹ As for the eighteen patients, they were returned to the category of “untreatable liars.”

At the time of these investigations no social-political consciousness existed which would reveal that patriarchal power was being abused in families and was routine in the domestic sphere. Not until the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s was it recognized that “the most common post-traumatic disorders are those not of men in war but of women in civilian life.”²⁰

The most sophisticated epidemiological survey of violence against women was conducted in the early 1980s by sociologist Diana Russell. Over nine hundred women, chosen by random-sampling techniques, were interviewed in depth about their experiences of domestic violence and sexual exploitation. The results were astounding [see box].²¹ The box shows a fraction of the shocking statistics Russell and others have compiled.

In a sample of 3,187 women, 1 in 4 had been subject to a completed or an attempted rape; 84 percent of them knew their attackers; 57 percent of the incidents had occurred on dates; the average age of the victim was eighteen and a half.²²

At least one-third of all females are introduced to sex by being molested by a “trusted” family member.

At least half of all women are raped at least once in their lives.

At least half of all adult women are battered in their homes by husbands or lovers.²³ Eleven to 15 percent of married women report having been raped by their husbands.²⁴

Attacks on wives by husbands result in more injuries requiring treatment than do rapes, muggings, and automobile accidents combined; one-third of all women murdered are killed by their husbands or boyfriends.²⁵

Woman battering is a major cause of homelessness for women and their children. At least 40 percent of homeless women were abused by their partners, and left. They now face rape on the street rather than battering in the home.²⁶

Approximately 85 percent of working women are sexually harassed at their jobs.²⁷

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, a woman is beaten in the United States every fifteen seconds; at least four women are killed by their batterers each day; a rape is committed in the United States every six minutes.²⁸

Internationally the statistics are not any better. For example, in Nicaragua 44 percent of men admit to having beaten their wives. In Peru, 70 percent of all crimes reported to the police are of women beaten by their partners. In 1985, 54 percent of all murders in Austria were committed within the family, with women and children constituting 90 percent of the victims. In Papua New Guinea, 67 percent of rural women and 56 percent of urban women have been victims of wife abuse. Of 8,000 abortions performed at a clinic in Bombay, 7,999 of the fetuses were found to be female.²⁹

Similar to Freud’s theories, many psychological models of female development and female “disorders” fail to look closely at what actually happens to girls and women in the nuclear family, which is, in itself, a reflection of and preparation for what happens to women in a patriarchal society: they are often hurt, violated, derogated, and even terrorized in their own homes. They are also limited and constrained by the dictates of traditional femininity, which most religious traditions uphold.

Any psychological approach to understanding gender problems (such as eating disorders) must include not only the early years of childhood but it must also consider social and religious influences on a female’s development. An approach that fails to integrate these data and this crucial aspect of women’s experience is, at best, myopic.³⁰ A survivor’s social, theological, and familial context as well as her experience of that context are instrumental to understanding the multiple layers of meaning that shape her identity.