Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
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.
Shared Themes
Sexual invasion by a trusted relation goes beyond a physical injury; it is a narcissistic violation. Because these experiences occur early in the development of the child, her sense of who she is in relation to others—her world—is shattered. A core betrayal is imbedded in her memory from the onset of her interactions with her emotionally immature parents and caregivers.
When I use the term narcissistic, I refer to a formulation of self-psychologist Heinz Kohut. Kohut came up with the diagnosis Narcissistic Personality Disorder when he discovered that disturbed people in his clinical practice had problems that seemed to trace back to their self-structures (or their sense of self), which had not properly formed in the first few years of life. Almost invariably Kohut attributes the cause of such defects to be unempathic caregivers who fail to help the child achieve a cohesive self by mirroring the child’s accomplishments appropriately.31 He maintains that today’s typical patient is “Tragic Man,” child of an unempathic mother and an absent father.32 Kohut does not believe that this split, fragmented, or alienated self is an inevitable consequence of the human condition, rather, that it is a specific historical formation prevalent in the twentieth century.33 He does not critique the patriarchal familial backdrop that makes for “Tragic Humanity” but feminists who use Kohut’s work often draw out these themes.
Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller has taken self-psychological and object relations theory34—a theory which gives primacy to interpersonal relations (real and imaginary)—and applied it to children who have been abused or emotionally neglected in the home. Miller’s claim is that a child’s aim is to please her primary parent because her life depends on it “like a small plant that turns toward the sun to survive.”35 Children look to their caretakers to meet their narcissistic needs: respect, echoing, understanding, stroking, sympathy, and mirroring. These are the same needs that their parents had when they were children. If these needs were not met for them then, they will look to their own children to meet them. Miller calls this dynamic of role reversal narcissistic wounding.36 The adult’s narcissistic needs compete with the child’s and usually dominate over the age-appropriate needs of the child. In response to the demands that are placed on them, children learn to “take care of” their parents—to develop a false self or “little adult” to survive. In the case of incest, a child-victim develops a “little spouse” persona to survive. This pattern is passed from generation to generation.
Both Kohut and Miller see the therapist’s role as drawing out the troubled person’s “true self” through offering empathy and narcissistic reparations. The “true self” refers to the spontaneous aspects of one’s personality that would emerge if an environment were, more often than not, safe and affirming. The notion of one “true self” that we could reveal or conceal is a fantasy. More likely, we are a mass of social constructions in which particular situations are continually redefining who we are. We are relational beings who wish to be valued and to belong, and most of us go to various extremes to make such “mattering” feel real, depending on the degree of “not mattering” that we have experienced.
In cases of incest, even if parents are not direct sexual offenders, if they minimize, deny, or resist the knowledge of their daughter’s experience of being violated, they collude with the perpetrator in his traumatization of her. Because of this betrayal by parents, the child-victim has to develop ways of dealing with intimate physical and emotional harm and neglect.
In a paper on the “fate of bad objects,” W. R. D. Fairbairn, an object relations psychologist, addresses the question of why the child deals with bad objects (negative aspects/memories of the parents) by internalizing and then repressing them, imagining the objects good and the child bad. Fairbairn believed the potency of his answer would best be framed in religious terms, “for such terms provide the best representation for the adult mind