Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 of the situation as it presents itself to the child.”³⁷

      It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil. A sinner in a world ruled by God may be bad: but there is always a certain sense of security to be derived from the fact that the world around is good—”God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world!”: and in any case there is always hope for redemption.³⁸

      When Fairbairn was asked, “But could not the child simply reject the bad objects?” he answered, “No, for however bad the parents may appear to be, the child cannot do without them; the child “is ‘possessed’ by them, as if by evil spirits.”³⁹ This claim is demonstrated in the experiences of Stephanie (one of the survivors I interviewed who was raped by her grandfather and ignored by her parents). Stephanie claims that her abuser inseminated her with evil through incest: “It has always been my firm conviction that you were not born sinful, that somebody had to plant a seed of sin deep inside of you.”

      Fairbairn sees the task of therapy as one of releasing bad objects from the unconscious. For him, the psychotherapist is the true successor to the exorcist. “[The therapist’s] business is not to pronounce the forgiveness of sins, but to cast out devils.”⁴⁰ One among my many aims in this project is to help the reader see that adaptive coping behaviors emerge for the survivor of incest largely to repress the post-traumatic terror—which often feels as real as the atrocious abuse events themselves. A further traumatic sense is due to the terror of betrayal—having no social (outer) acknowledgment of or protection from such a horror. Such adaptive behaviors—as multiple personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, creating a false-self, self-injury, binging, starving, or binge-purging—are often adaptive aspects of surviving a traumatic childhood. Too often the aftereffects and the survivor of incest herself are quickly labeled pathological. Such easy dismissal is tantamount to denying her the integrity of her survival skills and the devastating impact of her incest history.

      Early Onset of Abuse

      Seven of the nine women interviewed suffered their first sexual violation in the first five years of life. Two remember being in diapers when they were first violated. An early onset of sexual trauma is one shared theme.

       “In your memory, when did the abuse start?”

      Stephanie remembered being abused at age three. She claims, “It’s my first memory ever.” She was left at her maternal grandparents on the weekends:

      At night my (maternal) grandfather would come in and I would see his face with eyes glazed over, looking at me. His eyes are a particularly terrifying memory to me. This weird smile. He’d then hold a pillow over my face and would touch me with his hand and genitals, and my sister says she’s had weird dreams of remembering him doing that to me in the same way, that she witnessed it.

      Threats of violence may always be present even if violence is not exercised. Feeling terrorized, Stephanie spoke of feeling “so alone.” Stephanie’s sister, twenty years later, confirmed Stephanie’s experience of incest in the family right after being raped by a stranger—the family abuse memories burst into her consciousness.

      Haddock grew up in a family where incest was the way her parents, grandparents, and relatives related to the children. The vehicle for the incest was a religious cult. This cult group performed ritual abuse and held religious ceremonies⁴¹ that usually involved sadistic violence against children and animals. Every adult relative of Haddock’s belonged to this cult and participated in sadistic incestuous abuse.

      I remember Aunt Maude was masturbating me for sure at 18 months. I don’t know—if she’s the only memory I have, I just remember her long red fingers inserting themselves inside my little kid vagina. I have no memories of anal abuse, although I was given enemas before the ceremony ... apparently it was part of their technique to arouse the child so the damage was minimal. Uncle Tom was first. I mean, he—he just shoved it in . . . and there’s blood all over the place and I’m gone. And then behind Uncle Tom, hidden from my view was my dad, and he’s masturbating and he comes up and performs oral sex, and there’s blood all over his mouth, and his eyes are like in Mars. He has no—it’s like I’m not even a person. Then he puts his penis inside me, and then he thrusts—but he pulls out and ejaculates on the floor. And then—that’s the end of the memory. There is blood all over these guys. I only saw my dad excited like that once—once more in my life, it was Aunt Maude’s funeral when he was looking at my six-year-old cousin Mike. So I believe dad’s a pedophile, pure, plain, and simple.

      Emotional numbness, sometimes referred to as emotional anesthesia or an “arrest in the development of affect,” characterizes the most severely traumatized children. In the worst case, the child may become psychologically dead and psychically closed off. Haddock speaks of being gone in reference to how she coped with the horror of her abuse. She then repressed these threatening feelings in childhood because there was no other way to survive them. There was no place for her to be validated in them. She split-off a range of feelings to cope and did not even “know” СКАЧАТЬ