Psychology Rearch, October 2017, Vol. 7, No. 10, 536-540
特工狂花厄运小姐
doi:10.17265/2159-5542/2017.10.003 Women Between Sacrifice and Masochism: A Psychoanalytic
Approach and an Anthropological Questioning
Houria Abdelouahed
Université Sorbonne Paris-Cité, Paris, France
Encounters with female patients who have experienced trauma linked to the anthropological conditions of women
in certain Arab countries confronts the female analyst with the phenomenon of “the uncanny” and a mass of affects,
which threaten to compromi her attitude of benevolent neutrality and the structural asymmetry of the
analytical
tting. Certain situations may provoke a n of shock or a psychic acting-out, thus confronting the analyst with
the limits of what can be analyzed. Using a clinical ca as an illustration, the author would like to reconsider the
hypothesis of penis envy and its connection with the socio-cultural bedrock.
Keywords: masochism, sacrifice, feminity, the Uncanny, penis envy, trauma, anthropology
In a hospital in the outskirts of Paris, I work with many women of Maghreb origin. Madame R., 40 years old, is one such woman: born in southern Morocco, near Agadir, she left the country when she was 14 years old to join her husband who resided and worked in France. She was a houwife, and entirely dependent on her
husband. But when this husband retired, he returned to live and re-marry in Morocco–polygamy is authorid in
Islamic law. Alone, Madame R. had no financial resources and spoke very little French.
Madame R. needed to find a job, but any arch for work was made very difficult by the fact that she could barely speak, read, or write the language of the host country. A social worker signed her up to a literacy centre which communicated to a Social Service–the psychic troubles of Madame R., who was incapable of “retaining” any words or letters in French.拉丁舞比赛
Following the advice of her social worker, Madame R. started coming to me for consultations–as the only psychologist in the ctor who spoke Arabic, I could conduct ssions of therapy in her maternal language.
From the first ssion, the patient linked her incapacity to learn with a psychic saturation which was preventing all retention. “My head is too full”, she would say. She described, in great detail, all her attempts to remember anything that she had been taught. They were all in vain. And the teaching centre responsible for her professional reinrtion was threatening her with expulsion.
I invited Madame R. to free her head of the “too full”. Therapy thus commenced, and continued for veral years.
From the start, I was struck to hear her recount events that were very far, in a moving actuality. Not only was nothing forgotten, but everything remains current in the extreme density of her speech. Fro
m ssion to ssion, she talked of a ries of traumas which punctuated and marked her life.
Houria Abdelouahed, Ph.D., lecturer, U.F.R. Études psychanalytiques (Faculty of Studies of psychoanalysis), Université
Sorbonne Paris-Cité.
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WOMEN BETWEEN SACRIFICE AND MASOCHISM 537
When she was two years old, she lost her father. He died when his wife was pregnant with a cond child.
The issue of this pregnancy was enormous. According to the Arab Muslim tradition, the woman only keeps the
property of the decead man if the posthumous child is a boy. If the widow has no son, it is the brothers of the
decead who inherit the posssions, including the hou. This mother gave birth to a girl who died very
quickly. To u Ferenczi’s expression, the baby joined “individual non-being,”1 from which it was not yet
“divided by so much bitter experience of life” (Ferenczi, 1982, p. 79). Thus the patient lost not only her father
织金洞门票
and sister, but also her mother, who fell into a deep depression and could not provide the care needed for the
psychic survival of her daughter. Madame R. was brought up by her maternal grandmother. Over many years
she would move from one houhold to another, according to the whims of the mother’s family, especially her
uncles (as the tradition dictated). When she was about 13 or 14 years old, she was married to a cousin, the son
of the uncle who had forced her and her mother out of the paternal home. She gave birth to a son, whom she
handed over, as a gesture of redemption and reparation, to her mother. This was her only child.
Accud of infertility by her husband, he repudiated his wife and then took her back, then again repudiated her. Over the years, her body was, she said, handed over for a long ries of “operations”, the first of which her
husband approved on the advice of the maternal uncle to “e what was wrong”. The first operation took place
in Morocco and was followed by others in France. The patient was not able to pinpoint the hospital or the year.
It was obvious that Madame R’s inscription as a wife was inparable from this wounding of her body, a female
body unable to bear more children. The patient did not experience her body as fragmented, but literally as
bearing a hole.
Only after a long period of therapy was she able to slowly begin unfolding the events, so she could order them, date them and place them. I came to understand the gaps in France reprented endoscopies.
Her first complaint (a woman who could not retain anything in French, not even a trace of written material, and who was threatened with expulsion by the Rehabilitation Centre) gave way to another: a woman who
body is sterile. This complaint would be followed by a questioning (which attests to a jog into movement of the
thought) of veral things: the n of this sterility when she had in fact given birth to a son; the effects of the
expulsion from the paternal home; the guilt at imagining the little sister killed, so she could have exclusive
access to maternal love; and the feeling that she had been punished for her “nasty” wishes.
She talks about how she ran away when she learned that she was going to be given to marry her cousin.
When she was found, her mother tried to make her stay with her husband: she had been sacrificed in turn
offered her own daughter as a sacrificial object. The daughter gave the mother her son–the little boy was
conceived only as a gift to the mother. In this sacrificial genealogy, the woman appears as a double: not only a
victim, but also a heroine.
The patient said that she had been the object of veral repudiations by her husband. She went from being
a wife to a fallen woman. She was repudiated and taken back veral times. “Why did I accept to live with a
man who scorned at my dignity? I became the laughing stock of the family”, she cried one day.
Complexities of Alliances
“The existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from the economic point of view.” Freud writes that if the pleasure principle dominates the psychic
1If the widow does not have a son, the inheritance belongs to the dead spou’s brothers.
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WOMEN BETWEEN SACRIFICE AND MASOCHISM
538 process, so that the latter aims to avoid unpleasure and obtain pleasure, masochism initially makes no n (Freud, 1981, p. 287).
The pleasure principle is the guardian of life. Therefore we should focus on its connections with the two types of drives, the life drives and the death drives. A portion of the latter, Freud (1981, p. 292) explains, is displaced outwards on to objects; the other part “remains inside, as a residuum of it.” This is “the erotogenic masochism proper, which on the one hand has become a component of the libido and, on the other, still has the lf as its object. This masochism would thus be evidence of, an
d a remainder from, the pha of development in which the coalescence, which is so important for life, between the death instinct and Eros took place” (p. 293). Therefore the primary erotogenic masochism is a lf-prerving mechanism par excellence becau by blocking the death drive from reaching complete satisfaction it prevents our own destruction. Only in “certain circumstances, the sadism, or instinct of destruction, which has been directed outwards, projected, can be once more introjected, turned inwards, and in this way regress to its earlier situation. If this happens, a condary masochism is produced, which is added to the original masochism” (Ibid).
Benno Ronberg distinguishes between a life-prerving masochism and a deadly masochism. If masochism is a liminal space where things are linked together, the first and permanent psychic interweaving combines the life drives with the death drive. A state of distress is not in itlf enough to create the primary erotogenic masochism but must first be “eroticized” (Ronberg, 1991, p. 79).
Becau of her mother’s depression, the patient was unable to accomplish this coalescence, and as a result, her psyche was left with a deadly masochism that had been insufficiently projected outwards.
The process of libidinal disinvestment undermines the binding of the lf-destructive drives. “The per
manence of the primary masochistic coalescence in the ego is a guarantee of the psyche’s temporality and
continuity. On the one hand, it removes the need for immediate discharge by maintaining a continuum of
excitation (…) On the contrary, in moments of inner emptiness, of a rupture that undermines fantasy life, the subject experiences a need for masochistically invested suffering (condary masochism), in order to re-establish this guardian of psychic continuity” (Chabert, 2003, p. 84).
It ems to me that the traumas that had punctuated Mrs C’s life effectively silenced this primary masochistic core.
Matters are complicated by the imbrication of the psychopathological configuration with the anthropological dimension. In this ca, the historical and social conditions in which many Arab women live.
Penis Envy and the Anthropological Context
Freud speaks of the little girl’s narcissistic humiliation: “They notice the penis of a brother or playmat
e,” he writes, “strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis” (Freud, 1969, p. 126). The little girl has en and has decided that she does not have what she wants to have. This involves a narcissistic humiliation, which is then bound with the penis envy.
In this context, the concept of penis envy acquires a specific resonance. It ems to me that penis is particularly idealized in Arab culture, becau it assumes a vital value that goes beyond a simply oedipal problem. I believe that we have not given sufficient consideration to penis envy in connection with the cultural and anthropological context of Arab Muslim culture, where “beating women” is permitted by divine decree (Adonis & Abdelouahed, 2015; Abdelouahed, 2016). The boy identifies himlf as the one who beats, and the
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WOMEN BETWEEN SACRIFICE AND MASOCHISM 539
girl as the one who is beaten. The supremacy of men over women is the subject of veral Koranic vers
which cultivate masochism, or for women, melancholy.
On the Uncanny
The sacrifice of women, punishment, disinheritance, and other cultural elements are recurrent in ssions with Arab patients. One day, a colleague told me, “When I listen to my female Arab patients, I feel like it’s just
too foreign.” I was surprid to hear my own reply, “For me, it’s only too familiar.”
This excess (too foreign/too familiar) confines the clinician’s ability to listen to what we could call “limits or liminal situations.” The are “transferential situations which take the analysis of the transferential structure
to its own limit” (Roussillon, 1991, p. 239). Pierre Fédida talked of a counter-transference marked by anxiety
and the feeling of the uncanny (Fédida, 1992, p. 169). The story that my patient told me troubled me a great
deal, becau it brought me clo to something that had always been there yet remained deeply buried. Now the
represd began to emerge from the shadows, and with a strong feeling of the uncanny. “The uncanny is that
class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud, 1985, p. 215). It
describes “everything that should remain cret, in the shadow, and which has emerged” (Freud, 1985, p. 222).
The feeling of the uncanny threatened the esntial dissymmetry of the analytical situation. Things that the
patient failed to register came up during clinical work as an attempt to prevent the transference of any
interpretation, and to render sterile any attempt at registering. This “sterility” put me in contact with the
traumas that had punctuated the patient’s life, and that René Roussillon describes as a “return of what was not长沙的大学排名
symbolid” and “threatens to destroy the space of the ssion” (Roussillon, 2000).
The Individual and the Collective
A ries of questions must be pod. If the work of analysis consists in allowing the patient to construct
her history and give meaning to the legacy of her past, how should the work proceed when the individual is so
cloly linked to the collective, when the sacrifice is not simply a family story but concerns a historical heritage?
When counter-transference becomes marked by an “excess of prence” (Duparc, 2001, p. 713), not only
becau of what the patient cannot appropriate as part of her own history, but also becau of something el
that is always there and has to do with the historical legacy of the collective. How can we work and construct驴子的图片
when we are faced with something that insists, persists, and continues to form the basis of a culture or religion,
and even of identity? How can we dissociate individual past from the collective past and psychic prent from
the actual historical prent? Although the analyst works with the unconscious, it is also a part of her work not
to negate the historical context.
Conclusion
送锦旗The symptom that originally brought my patient to our work was her inability to learn and remember–in a n, she was penetrated by other meanings. In Arabic, the word qara’a means both “to read” and the fact of
the female retaining the male substance that makes her be a mother. And the word qalam designates both the
pen and the penis.
Working with the patient became a process of elaborating something around a hole, instead of holding on to some very visible appendage, so that femininity could become a positive experience, or something that exists
yet cannot be en, instead of simply being a lack. The work involves itlf with this “crux of life” (Anzieu, All Rights Rerved.
WOMEN BETWEEN SACRIFICE AND MASOCHISM
540 2004, p. 60). This went hand in hand with the elaboration of the patient’s ability to internalize the good inner object.
We also began work on writing, which also requires an ability to bind, as well as the introduction of the phallic reprentation, without erasing the hollow as a source of germinating power. Writing refers not only to the aspects of our lives that each of us writes for him or herlf, but also to the figur
e of the Fate, which can take on a demonic form. And the patient who began by saying “it was maktûb ! (It was written!)” comes regularly to her ssions to rewrite her story.
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