Psychoanalytic and Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Women in India

Violence, Safety and Survival

Paula L. Ellman, Jhuma Basak, Gertraud Schlessinger-Kipp, Paula Ellman, Jhuma Basak, Gertraud Schlessinger-Kipp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429594144
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This important book provides a bridge between psychoanalytic perspectives and socio-cultural issues to shine a spotlight on the experiences of women in India today.

Women's well-being and security has often depended upon their gender positioning while other binaries like rural-urban, class, and caste have also played a crucial role globally and especially in India. Historically, women have been subjected to various forms of oppression that include sex selective abortions, domestic violence, bride burning for dowry, and acid attacks. Threats to women's security have recently increased with progressive polarization and hardening of socio-political and cultural ideologies. This book assesses how women's lives are impacted by these social and cultural conventions and stigma, including ideas around motherhood, religion, intimacy and femininity itself, and the psychological implications these have. Topics include the seduction of religion, motherhood in contemporary times, intimacy and violence, and fundamentalist states of mind in the clinical space. While the book echoes a regional specificity, it simultaneously resonates a backdrop of global change of affairs that has its impact on ideological freedom and the concept of inclusivity in terms of gender, race, culture, and politics across the world. For this comprehensive perspective, the effort is to create a platform of authors comprising psychoanalysts, social scientists, scholars from the liberal arts discipline, as well as social activists.

In a country where women have been historically subjected to both psychological and physical oppression, this timely and original book will interest a range of scholars interested in gender, mental health and contemporary Indian society, as well as clinicians in the field.

Part I

Introduction to Women’s safety in dogmatic times

COWAP Kolkata

Gertraud Schlesinger-Kipp

This chapter brings together two different approaches to the same theme: the meaning of 'women’s safety in dogmatic times.'

First Alexandra Billinghurst, a psychoanalyst from a 'safe' country, Sweden, explores what 'dogmatic times' are. She refers to the schizoid-paranoid climate – a psychoanalytic term – which is originally developed (by Melanie Klein) to describe a normal position in the development of a child and a state into which every individual can regress in times of crisis and torment. Everything is black and white, the 'other' does not exist as an individual with their own needs and thoughts, but is fragmented into good and bad. There are no spades of shades between black and white. She then uses this position to describe group dynamics in institutions and also in society. Schizoid-paranoid climates can lead to seeing the other only as enemy, as fragmented and not human and hence can justify wars and atrocities.

Relating to gender and violence Billinghurst explains male violence against women as a breakdown of 'metaphoric thinking' and a regression to the schizoid-paranoid state where no empathy for the pain of the woman is possible. Billinghurst concludes with hopes that democratic societies are more able to retain the 'depressive position,' where care and shelter for the other, and respect, understanding, and reparation reign.

Suprya Chauduri, a female professor of English literature in India offers a different point of view in Marked Unsafe: Women, Violence and a State of Risk. This term “marked unsafe” is a creative variation of the Facebook provision “marked safe” when individuals are in disaster zones. 'Being safe actually implies that one is not safe' but alive in a disaster zones. Chauduri describes incidents in India of horrific gang rapes of young girls and women and the reactions of the feminist movement. She questions if there is a specific character of violence against women. Contained in the demand of a “male” right to sex, Chauduri explores the viewpoint in patriarchal societies that sexual pleasure only means male sexual pleasure. She criticizes the traditional Freudian view of the concept of unconscious and its emphasis on sexual desire in human motivation. “The patriarchy encodes and performs a constructed Maleness that performance requires and derives pleasure from the subordinated woman.” In that environment 'safety of women' can suggest an abusive term because the woman herself is responsible for her safety, i.e. staying at home, dressing modestly, not going out at night, etc. However the greatest danger is in the woman’s own house, and how to dress has not much to do with rape.

Chauduri supports her arguments with different statistics in India, offering the insight that India is the most unsafe country for women as poignantly portrayed by the killing of female babies. She describes the increased number of well-educated women in India enrolled in universities. Yet these universities and workplaces do not prepare women for free living and emancipated life.

Together these two papers open a wide and deep consideration from psychoanalytic and societal perspectives on violence especially in dogmatic times.

1 The paranoid-schizoid climate: When fear and anxiety rules

Alexandra Billinghurst

The following text was a contribution to a conference dealing with threats to women´s safety in society today. Psychoanalysis has been used not only to understand the individual on the couch but to understand groups, organisations, and culture as well. The current trends in society, with political movements calling for the traditional and with views of 'the other' as a threat and enemy, is a situation that causes concern and worry. To see the other as a threat, I’m sad to say, seems to grow in the COVID-19 pandemic. Where nations, rather than trying to unite in the fight against the virus, close up and find ways to blame other nations for the spread. Using psychoanalytic theory to understand the underlying dynamic is one tool we can use to find ways to bring change and to see that there is hope.

On dogma and dogmatic

The meaning of the word dogma can be described as a belief or an opinion presented as a fact. A presentation often in an authoritative way and presumably for the individual believed to be true. With other words, believing something is true, without the ability to question and reflect on that which is posited. As a psychoanalyst using psychoanalytic understanding 'dogmatic times' could in my perspective be re-named 'paranoid-schizoid times.'

In order to reflect on what we see happening in the world in general today a short description of Melanie Klein’s depressive position and the paranoid-schizoid position is in place.

Melanie Klein (1882–1960), was an Austrian-British psychoanalyst in practice in the UK between 1926–1960 who worked psychoanalytically with small children (rather revolutionary at that time) and developed Sigmund Freud’s theories using observations from her work with children. The psychological development of children is often described in phases or stages. Sigmund Freud, for example, described the psycho-sexual development, the oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages. Melanie Klein instead used the term 'positions.' In using position rather than phase she stressed the fact that the psychological development goes back and forth, not in a straight line and furthermore, that either one of us can enter the paranoid-schizoid position at any point in life.

The paranoid-schizoid position

The paranoid-schizoid position is characterized by a split inner world where the outer world and important figures are seen as either all good or all bad. The infant is not able to perceive other people as whole, with their own needs, but rather as functions. For example, when the baby is hungry and the mother feeds him, the baby perceives this as a good, satisfying object. But when hungry, and the mother is not there, the baby perceives (her) this as a 'bad object.' The main anxieties in this position, whether as a baby or later in life, are persecutory with fear of annihilation and of being attacked. This position is also characterised by omnipotence and lacking the ability of reciprocity, of understanding the other’s needs. For a person in this state of mind, others are thus part objects, that is, existing as functions for the subject. The splitting of the object is in itself not pathological during development but functions as a primitive defense against anxiety and pain and is necessary for a healthy development. It is when an adult lacks more mature defenses that splitting in an individual can be seen as pathological.

The depressive position

In this position it is possible to direct conflicting feelings towards the same object (instead of splitting the object in a good object and a bad object). The main anxieties in the depressive position (looking at a small child) are separation anxiety, fear of losing the object, and then of losing the object’s love. In this position, we have the ability to feel guilt and thereby the wish to repair. We have the ability to love the other person for their own sake not for the gratification it gives, whether as a baby or grown-up.

In the paranoid-schizoid position on the other hand, guilty feelings are reversed and felt as attacks from the person the guilty feelings would be directed towards. Rather than feeling the guilt, the other person is given the blame for the situation. A normal teenager will oscillate between those two positions; at one moment being able to take responsibility for his feelings and actions, the next blaming the world around him and especially his parents or siblings.

Let´s look at an example from ordinary life of a paranoid-schizoid perception of the world. During an interview with a man, he is asked about his girlfriend and why she is so important to him. He describes her beauty and how his business contacts are impressed with her when he brings her along. Furthermore, he talks about how she will be able to arrange nice dinner parties when he needs to represent. As the interviewer is trying to deepen the picture of her, all she gets is the surface value of the girlfriend, her looks, or her abilities to be of service to him. He is not really able to give a three-dimensional picture of his girlfriend. He is describing love and admiration but there is a lack of description of her as a person in her own right. She is seen more as a status symbol. She is idealized, but that also means that she could at any point be devalued and easily be exchanged for another.

Let me now introduce Wilfred Bion and his thoughts. He has contributed to the understanding of both group and individual phenomena.

Wilfred Bion (1897–1979) was born in India and then went to England to go to college. During the first world war, he served in the Tank Corps in France as a tank captain, an experience he refers to when speaking of containment, which is one of the most important concepts Bion gave us.

Containment

Containment is originally a military term.

A force contains another. Containment presupposes one who is containing and someone/something that is contained. An object, a thought, an idea, a feeling is placed in a containment in such a way that something happens or does not happen with that which is placed.

Containment has to do with meaning. Closely related to the concept of containment is Bion’s concept of Reverie. Bion writes that the movement between the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position is to be in a state of unconnected, in a field of pieces or fragments. The movement toward depression means that different parts are connected, often as a selected fact. A pattern takes shape. Finding the pattern’s meaning is the role of the container-contained function. To put yourself in a state of reverie is to make possible the destruction of context/connection, to not be stuck in focused thoughts, but to let the connection be destructed so that new connections can be found. Within this description lays the idea that being in the depressive position can also mean being stuck in a locked view, of not being able to have a fresh perception.

Reverie

This above description of being in a state of reverie is of the psychoanalyst in reverie. But the state of reverie is mainly referred to as belonging to the mother.

For the baby, being born without the instrument of understanding and memory, every experience could be described as a bombardment of raw sensations in the very beginning of life. From hunger pangs experienced as a painful presence rather than an absence of food, to the supposedly pleasurable feeling of the sun shining through the window, a light breeze on the skin, or sudden sounds around her. As the child has no apparatus for understanding these perceptions yet, it is the role of the mother’s (and father’s) reverie.

Parents who easily wake up to every little sound of the baby but can sleep through everything else is an example of the function of the parental reverie. A side note here. There is a study (Abraham et al., 2014) of a change in the amygdala in parents of infants. Researchers already knew that the mother’s amygdala is changed by hormones during pregnancy, but this study shows that the more the father takes care of the baby the more his amygdala is changed as well. The study also looked at homosexual parents where one was the biological father, but both fathers tended the baby. Both fathers showed the same change in the amygdala. This was a little sidetrack, but I find it very interesting in relation to reverie.

So the parent of the infant has a constant unconscious focus on the babies state. An example: a mother would suddenly be filled with a conviction and dread that something was seriously wrong and that her baby was dying. Having been filled with that emotion she would then calm herself and realize that her baby is hungry and go to pick her up and nurse her while talking to her, saying 'You are hungry, come let’s sit here, I’ll feed you.' This is an example of both reverie and containment. She had sensed distress in her baby. The mother experienced the overwhelming scary feeling of being hungry, for the baby, raw sensations, as a threat that she was dying. An important aspect here is that she was fully in that feeling and then calmed herself, understanding that the baby needed to be fed, the raw sensations were with the mother´s help transformed to something understandable. With her voice and the way she touched the baby, she transmitted that what the baby is feeling is OK. In this way lending her transformation function to the baby. With the recurring of this over time, the baby slowly builds her own transformation function. I want to point out that it is not just the calming voice and touch that is important here, but also that the baby in turn has sensed the mother´s distress, her anxiety, and then the transformation from fear to calm. This transformation gives the baby a sense that what is scary can be survived, i.e., contained.

As we grow up, we all have an established transformation function, where raw experiences can be transformed and given meaning. This function can break down, as in trauma or intense distress. But it is also the case that you can have an established function but with certain areas where the transformation is not working. If a child has a parent for whom certain feelings are very anxiety provoking or not “supposed to exist” the child will not get help in understanding those feelings in herself. In that case you wind up with a person who, when certain feelings arise, get into a state of anxiety.

The containing function is vital for us as individuals but also for a group, an organisation, or society. The containing is also intertwined between these different levels. In a group with a weak leadership the lack of containment can affect the individual’s containment in a negative way and vice versa, an individual’s ability to contain can transform the ability for the group to contain. To perceive and give meaning to what goes on inside or in the surrounding environment.

Coming back to the positions above, Bion thus developed the idea of the positions further. According to him, not only is it possible to continue oscillating between the positions but it is actually necessary and something to strive for.

According to both Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, in the paranoid-schizoid position we have a very set view. There is no space for shades between black and white. In this position people are either idealized or feared and despised. Some people remain in this position, such as in the case of personality disorders where the individual for some reason has not developed more mature defenses. But, as stated earlier, we can all be thrown into this position when, for some reason, our inner world and our sense of security is threatened.

Group and organisational dynamics

Humans are group beings. Belonging and being accepted by our group is important to the individual, and signs of being pushed out of a group leads to reactions of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A prejudiced time and its women in India
• PART I: Introduction to Women’s safety in dogmatic times: COWAP Kolkata
• PART II: Revisiting motherhood in contemporary times introduction and commentary
• PART III: Introduction to the Seduction of Religion
• PART IV: Introduction to fundamentalist states of mind in the clinical space
• PART V: Introduction for intimacy and violence
• Conclusion
• Index