Cupid's Knife: Women's Anger and Agency in Violent Relationships

Abby Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415527866
• eBook ISBN: 9781317963769
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Much domestic violence literature has called attention to the fact that women's material needs for shelter, daycare, employment, and legal protection may render them helpless to leave toxic relationships. Yet, even with the provision of these, many women remain tightly wound in their abusers' embrace. In Cupid's Knife: Women's Anger and Agency in Violent Relationships, Abby Stein draws on the gripping narratives of physically and emotionally abused women to illuminate how splitting off their own aggression undermines women's agency, making it almost impossible for them to leave violent partners. Psychology, with its focus on 'managing' men's anger in violent relationships, has had little to offer in the way of substantive critical work with women on the identification, integration and constructive use of a range of darker emotions typically labelled as antithetical to the norms for female behaviour.

In this book, Abby Stein shows that although a number of psychological processes that contribute to the intractability of abusive relationships have been identified – such as trauma bonding and learned helplessness – their recognition has offered no clinical pathway out of the abyss. Stein suggests that our attention to other aspects of the internal world, the relational framework, and the cultural context in which both operate, may be more useful than current interventions in determining individual treatments that break the oft-cited 'cycle of violence'. More globally, Cupid's Knife: Women's Anger and Agency in Violent Relationships jumpstarts a provocative conversation about how female aggression can be repurposed as a catalyst for social change. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, criminologists, students and the lay reader with an interest in clinical treatment, interpersonal psychoanalysis, domestic violence, gender roles, dissociation and aggression.

Chapter 1

An ill-fated introduction

Anger is much more powerful and reassuring than anxiety, which is the antithesis of power.

(Harry Stack Sullivan)

Slowly, slowly I got up and went out to the shed

I grabbed a can of gasoline and I poured it around his bed

And I lit a book of matches and I threw it at his head

(From The Ballad of Francine Hughes, by Lyn Hardy and Donna Herbert)

I am a veteran in the field of violence. Over 20 years, I have worked with assaultive and homicidal men and women and the victims of their attacks. I have been around a lot of angry and aggressive people although, surprisingly, they have rarely recognized themselves as such. For perpetrators, cyclically subordinate to an incapacitating tension, rage erupts like an overdue visitor, but goes unrecognized as the instigator of unquantifiable suffering. I am just not an angry guy, wouldn’t hurt a fly, not me. For the victims of interpersonal violence, anger seems equally impossible to access. They, too, live with an overwhelming anxiety that neuters agency, their anger classically turned inward, finding expression mainly at the end of the other person’s fist. I’m not angry, not me. I just want it to stop.

For some women, like Francine Hughes, an abused wife whose cautionary tale of suppressed anger became legend with the publication of The Burning Bed (McNulty, 1977), split-off rage is conveyed in a stunning forensic finale that appeals to our sense of vigilante justice. In fantasy, we valorize such agency, but the majority of women who kill their abusers – unlike Hughes, who was acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity – do long hard time for their crimes and return to an inimical world. Of course, cases of women killing their batterers or causing them grievous injury are extremely rare. For the majority of female victims of domestic violence, aggressive feelings stay underground, where the inability to recognize, experience, process, and appropriately exercise a continuum of negative emotions has a destabilizing influence on their perception of agency in their relationships. It is my contention that abused women are enslaved as much by this narrative of passivity as they are by their partners’ suffocating control and the seeming randomness of their attacks.

Psychology, with its focus on “managing” anger in violent relationships, has had little to offer in the way of substantive critical work with women on the identification, integration and constructive use of a range of darker emotions typically labeled as antithetical to norms for female behavior. Psychoanalytic models that foreground trauma and dissociation come closer but, in shying from the political context of violence against women, miss an opportunity to link women with a constituency of empowerment. It is my hope to make the case for enlisting the tools of critical consciousness – which have already been used successfully in group work around intimate violence – for an expanded, more personally and politically mindful way of doing interpersonal psychoanalysis. First, let me tell you how I arrived at this place.

Writing about child maltreatment as a precursor to adult criminality in an earlier book, Prologue to Violence (Stein, 2007), introduced me to the quality and impact of family violence. Although my focus in that work was on the youngest victims of domestic violence, rather than their mothers, I could not help but notice the paradox of adult women who, despite the brutality of their partners, were often unable to tear themselves away from corrosive relationships. My thoughts remained as background noise until, years later, my frustration with a private client – mired in a series of destructive love affairs – both amplified and fine-tuned those reflections. My experience in helping that client navigate a path out of the abyss inspired the larger research project that informs this book.

The client, Phoebe, whose story is woven throughout the book, seemed at turns oblivious, apathetic, and, finally, curiously incapable of becoming angry – or even mildly indignant – in response to the manipulations and abuses of her lovers. She would often insist that she had “no right” to protest her treatment at their hands. Growing to know Phoebe more fully, I was surprised to encounter not only the usual set of internal obstacles to change but also an immersion in post-feminist notions of supposed gender equality that seemed to me profoundly disempowering for Phoebe, like settling for being “friends with benefits” with the men she desired romantically or “manning up” rather than complaining about physical abuse. Because of this particular layering of her defenses, over time I found it necessary to transcend the usual conversational boundaries of clinical dialogue and engage broader cultural issues surrounding men, women, violence, servitude, control, romance, desire, humiliation, power, and retribution. Watching Phoebe’s evolution toward greater agency and esteem included the unfurling and eventual integration of her dissociated rage, through techniques that expanded the usual site of psychological work into the larger landscape of gender and politics, and forced us to do psychoanalysis “with culture in mind” (Dimen, 2011).

What I was learning with Phoebe moved me to speak with other women, women who had been in even more dangerous relationships than she. I designed and received funding for a study that enabled me to spend a summer interviewing women who had been in long-term relationships characterized by verbal and emotional abuse as well as extremely serious physical violence. Embarking on the study, like most witnesses to domestic assault, I wanted to know what kept women from asserting themselves at the nascent signs of abuse: a partner’s unfounded jealousies, his controlling manner, the reckless shove across a crowded room. What kept women there, year after year, long past any hope of change? What had to happen for women to leave? Were abusive relationships that never became overtly violent different in quality or only quantity? My own informal conversations with friends and colleagues suggested that women, rather than accidentally stumbling upon them, were often drawn to men who mistreated them. Others persevered in rotten relationships for no reason that outsiders could fathom. Every psychoanalyst’s client roster has its share of women seeking help specifically because they feel abused, in some way, by romantic partners. What was the connection between these more pedestrian relational disasters and those of the women in my sample?

The scholarly work done on the subject is considerable but contradictory, owing to differences in sample size, subject characteristics, and methodology. The published clinical work is no less confusing in its kaleidoscopy, brokering almost immediately anachronistic snapshots of popular locales in the geography and history of attitudes toward women; here an hysteric, there a masochist, everywhere a post-traumatic survivor. Indeed, there is enormous difficulty in documenting the human struggles with attachment and aggression that register as timeless but whose particular expressions are indeed time and culture specific. It becomes a giant game of whack-a-mole to move among personal and collective inducements and encumbrances, private damage and shared injury.

So, in addition to acutely attending the personal stories of women, I have mined a burgeoning literature on the cultural contribution to unconscious life, particularly as it concerns refractory states of violence. These literatures are disharmonious too, at least in emphasis. The domestic abuse literature consistently underscores how the lack of access to employment, suitable housing, and daycare inhibit women’s flight. Available feminist narratives concentrate on how the dictates and practices of patriarchy set the stage for female tragedy. Social psychologists liken a battered woman’s plight to that of a hostage, foregrounding the eerily reflexive nature of her submission under extreme conditions. When I spoke to women who had emerged from situations of abuse, most did indeed exemplify some of these stereotypical attributes of victimhood. But each theoretical strike, in naming a solitary cause for female trouble, rang hollowly against the cupola of reality. The truth of what women endure and how they respond is idiosyncratic, multifaceted, and deeply paradoxical. It involves the visible world of legal procedure, psychiatric codes, busted noses, and scripted narratives that make manifest an invisible world of attachment, humiliation, love, power and sundered identity.

Cupid’s knife

Much as women clamor to discuss, dissect, and even monumentalize their stories, there is often a terrible incapacity to affectively register what has transpired in their homes or to cognize the impact of their interior world on its material counterpart and vice versa. Many of the women I interviewed reminded me of Phoebe: well put together, highly functional, all cool detachment as they reported perverse invasions of autonomy, incessant shaming, sexual debasement, corporeal blows. I quickly learned that the flatness of their affect signaled neither equanimity nor grace under pressure. Each woman’s tale was simply two tales: the one they admitted to themselves and the one they completely dissociated. Again and again, the analysis of their narratives revealed a psychic splitting between event and symbolization, between actuality and affect, between memory and knowledge. Although recent writing about repression, splitting, and dissociation suggests that “knowing” (in its most pregnant sense) is not by itself as mutative in clinical work as was once believed (Stern, 2010), telling the tale that refuses to be told is still central to psychoanalysis, qualitative psychological research, and the understanding of both love and violence.

With intimate abuse, the task of finding and naming what has happened is hard but the job of enumerating what one refused to see, hear, taste, or feel is even more arduous and important. It is these unattended viscera that most ardently concoct the practical world of pain where batterer and battered intersect. It is the yielding spot where Cupid’s knife gets stuck. In real life, a Cupid’s knife is a concealable switchblade, easily purchased in many jurisdictions. The knife’s danger lies in its retractable blade, which pops straight out the front so that the victim cannot see it coming. In the online gaming world, the Cupid’s Knife has been re-imagined as a torture device designed to cause pain to a victim whenever they think any negative thoughts about their abuser, forcing them to feel only love. Both descriptions resonate with the emotional circumstances of the women I interviewed and, more generally, epitomize the paradoxical attachments that women form in conditions of oppression.

Defensive attachments

In The Ghost Sonata, August Strindberg (1907/2004) constructs a spectral world of betrayal, filled with Gothic horrors, to represent the family, which he elsewhere has called “the home of all social evil.” Although the staple of much art and psychoanalytic theory, the apparent verisimilitude of such anti-family sentiment is easily outweighed, even in this jaded age, by the testimonials of familial love and loyalty that line bookstore shelves and social media sites. Without making a judgment about the value of such contradictory tribute, it seems commonsensical to observe that, although love and hate coexist in all relationships, it redounds to our defensive benefit to recognize the good in those to whom we are attached more than their malignity. Thus, it is common to minimize or even deny family members’ aggression toward us even as we craft (unconsciously) a defensive maneuver that obviates its impact.

Here is a greatly simplified example that captures the broad outlines of how aggression is integrated (or not) into our being: a father always demands a large bite of his young son’s ice cream despite the boy’s cries that “you are taking too much, Daddy,” to which the Daddy replies that, since he was the one who paid for the ice cream, he is entitled to the bite. When the boy is a little older, he saves his allowance to buy his own ice cream but, still, the Dad insists on his share, making the boy feel powerless and trapped. Frustrated and enraged, he sobs to his mother but her condolences are little comfort or guidance in a world dominated by the shadow of an unjust giant. By the time the boy is grown, he has developed a habit that others might find lovely: he offers those around him a taste of his food before he commences eating. By becoming its stage director, the man suavely and unconsciously masters the boyhood “trauma.” While he may or may not recall the formative incidents that triggered this latter behavior, chances are that, even in remembering, the man will not associate the antipodal phenomena directly. His own feelings will be retroactively demoted from betrayal and rage to a mildly stinging lesson about power differentials. (One wonders how similar behavior by a mother would be internalized.) Even if the man does recollect his own tearful affect when Daddy snatched the ice cream, he may only remember the father’s behavior as pushy, maybe obnoxious, but certainly not hateful or abusive. The memory may even be turned into a humorous family anecdote about a parent’s eccentricities. That is no doubt a useful turn of events but it is also fairly dissociative. (One wonders whether similar behavior by a mother might escape scrutiny in so predictable a way.)

For the most part, unless he is unusually self-reflective (or goes into a psychodynamic therapy) these two facts of his life – the precipitating trauma and the contemporary narrative defusing it – will remain peripheral and unconnected to the man’s general sense of self. This is because, as long as family members’ malevolence is relatively transitory and minimal, we grow up not too dissociative and not too prone to destructive enactments. On the other hand, if the ice cream incidents are part of a larger menu of humiliation in a boy’s life, the effects will not be so benign. Maybe the boy will grow up to grab his own son’s ice cream, repeating the trauma, or maybe he will rob ice cream trucks for a living. Or eat so much ice cream, and grow so fat, that he dies of a heart attack by 40. Depending on a large variety of contextual and temperamental variables, the boy could (whether aware or unaware of the precipitating trauma) conceivably grow up to own a frozen treat empire or kill a man whom he wrongly perceives to be coveting something he owns. My forensic experience suggests that the harsher, more chronic, and earlier the bad treatment, the greater the likelihood of a catastrophic denouement.

If we make the child in the most extreme version of the anecdote a daughter rather than a son, it is less likely that she will become either a mogul or a murderer. She may develop a touch of anorexia or a tendency toward eating others’ leftovers, because those behaviors are more culturally encrypted for women. In romance, she might seek a man who takes her stuff as if it is his right and ignores her reactive entreaties. The worse her treatment in childhood, and its reenactment in adulthood, the more dissociated she will likely become, as such states build upon one another. Both male and female are apt to master trauma through unconscious repetition (van der Kolk, 1989) and, like the boy, the incentive for the girl (or woman) to not notice what is being done, to her and by her, grows in direct proportion to its toxicity. Unlike the man, the woman will probably refrain from mastering trauma through perpetration. She will instead engage in repetitions with herself as victim. Indeed, among the women with whom I spoke, there was a wide range of toleration for mistreatment at the hands of intimate partners, with women who had been physically maltreated as children leading the pack in adult indices of experiencing abuse. Having honed dissociative defenses early on, they were adept at ignoring serious violations in adulthood.

Physically abused women may sever the tangible evidence of what they have suffered (bruises, broken bones, vaginal tears) from what the conscious acknowledgement of those traumatic experiences might activate: terror, horror, repulsion, fury. Harry Stack Sullivan (1956b) long ago identified these “uncanny” emotions as threats so overwhelming to the integrity of the self that people would sooner disengage than emotionally process them. To varying degrees, the women I interviewed most meticulously dissociated the very emotions that normally instill a sense of integrity and agency, and motivate survival behaviors in the face of threats to the self. What is perhaps women’s best defense against abuse – a righteous indignation signaling “you can’t do this to me” – was not available to either forewarn or rescue most of the women from brutal relationships.

A fair number of women saw violence as evidence of their partner’s passion; her own capitulation standing as testimony to the strength of their connection as a couple. Often a woman’s private history simply drove her to define deviance downward: derogatory treatment was tolerated because she had no prior experience of more pacific love with which to compare her current situation. On the other hand, the larger social world she inhabited did little to discourage that destructive inveterate meaning. Even though we may be reluctant to admit it, the romantic terrain in which violent relationships are rooted mimic the best and worst of our collective idealizations about love and devotion. While some women stayed mainly because of logistical concerns, others got stuck for more socio-cultural reasons, including a strong investment in performing “normal” heterosexual behavior within their families or particular community.

When working with women in very abusive relationships it is easy to treat their conditions as anomalous when, in fact, they exemplify a strand of behavior characteristic of many romantic relationships. Many couples share the idea that possessiveness and control are the hallmarks of strong chemical attractions; they believe that love is measured in decibels and the louder the shouting, the more intense the commitment. This idea is commonplace among both violent and non-violent couples but is often discounted by clinicians, who consider the pattern so dysfunctional that they may assume there is no “real” love in the abusive relationship. Treatment providers should not ignore the very genuine affection and commitment that a woman may feel toward her partner, even when her clinical presentation highlights the intensity of their problems, or when it seems to us that a dangerous situation dictates her immediate exit. In any case, interventions narrowly aimed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. An ill-fated introduction
• 2. The utility of contempt
• 3. Engendered self-states
• 4. Masochism as medium
• 5. Theater of judicial absurdity
• 6. Venus with arms
• Epilogue
• References
• Index