Bearing the culture to witness

Bearing the cultural to engage in a process of witnessing

To be published in Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2013

Katie Gentile, Ph.D.Associate Professor Director of Gender StudiesJohn Jay College of Criminal Justice524 W. 59th StreetNew York, NY [email protected]

RUNNING HEAD: Bearing the cultural

mailto:[email protected]

Bearing the Cultural

KEY WORDS: witnessing, recognition, sexual abuse; race; feminist and cultural theory

ABSTRACT

Witnessing has origins in ideas of testimony functioning to

(re)unite the cultural, political and personal. However

recent psychoanalytic translations of witnessing do not

always make these links to the cultural and political nor do

they explore their impact on subjectivities. Integrating

psychoanalytic theories of witnessing with those from

cultural studies, this paper will describe a clinical case

about incest involving the treatment of a young Latina

patient by a white therapist. As will be discussed, most

psychoanalytic theories of witnessing dissociate cultural

technologies of power from the dyad, finding empathy through

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triangulation – containing and splitting off the violence

into the perpetrator. But these technologies of power

include not just the original act of violence but also the

process of representing that experience linguistically, the

ways the symbolic renders certain experiences abject. Even

embodied experience, assumed to “keep the score” after

trauma, only emerges through power, relying on cultural

systems for legibility. Lastly, the culpability of the

analyst witness, the ways in which the analyst may come into

being based on “othering” the patient’s cultural group

and/or other dynamics of power, are also not well theorized.

Weaving in and out of a clinical case, I will consider the

importance of linking the cultural and psychological within

processes of witnessing and how this linking necessarily

impacts our tools of analysis, forms of engagement and thus,

our subjectivities.

PSYCHOANALYTIC WITNESSING

Many have observed the ways in which linear narrative,

chronological time, and capacities for reflection can be

obliterated in the face of trauma (Feldman & Laub, 1992;

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Laub & Auerhahn, 1993; van der Kolk, 1994; Grand, 2002,

2003; Gentile, 2007, 2011). We know trauma and violence can

jeopardize our capacities to create the time and space

necessary for reflection and representation of experience.

We may “retreat into a dissociation of fixed representation

– a virtual world of fantasies” (Campbell, 2006, p. 143),

resulting in a dependence upon pre-made cultural narratives

that can be swallowed whole to make meaning of experience

(Oliver, 2004; Gentile, 2007, 2011). Here the precariousness

of subjectivity that presents opportunities for innovative

re-creation, is instead experienced as torturous,

persecutory, re-traumatizing, and intolerable. There can be

little capacity to play with meaning, and instead there is a

strong desire/need to arrest it as “belief to be affirmed at

all costs” (Reeves, 2011, p. 384).

Theories about witnessing have gained therapeutic

traction for those analysts attempting to engage patients

within these collapsed spaces of meaning making. Witnessing

by definition implies space and this space has been

identified as creating the conditions for a “live” or “moral

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third” (Feldman & Laub, 1992; Benjamin, 2009; Boulanger,

2012) and recognition (Benjamin, 1995, 2009). The “live

third” is described as functioning like Winnicott’s (1971)

transitional space, as a “presence that exists between the

experience and it’s meaning, between the real and the

symbolic, and through whom life gestates and into whom

futures are born” (Gerson, 2009, p. 1342). Most authors

writing about witnessing within psychoanalysis discuss it as

a way of entering another’s subjectivity, a deep form of

recognition, a way of conceptualizing the use of a third

space as perspective.

Psychoanalytic witnessing is akin to being an

eyewitness to suffering with the addition of an “an act of

imagination” (Boulanger, 2012) that enables one to move

empathically close to the survivor. As Boulanger, referring

to Kelly Oliver (2001) writes, this act involves “suspending

one’s own subjectivity and entering the cowering, dark inner

world of a survivor” (p. 321). But this is not a merging

experience as Ullman (2006) and Poland (2000) remind us, it

depends upon the clinician’s recognition of their own

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otherness, and ability to stand near but not become

enveloped by the intolerable event. The clinician must be

close enough to touch and experience it but experience it as

the analyst.

Reis (2009) rightly points out that much of witnessing

within psychoanalysis has focused on the goal of translating

affective and bodily experience into symbolic language.

Indeed, Ullman (2006) referring to Margalit (2002) describes

moral witnessing as a form of testimony, where the witness

reports on and documents “a reality of human suffering

inflicted by evil policies” (p. 183). Witnessing together

with the survivor/patient constructs a symbolic testimony of

the “missing story” (Ullman, p. 193). Similarly Grand (2002)

references Caruth’s (1995) ideas that the witness must

“listen to an impossibility” through the “hope and futility

of empathic mutuality” (p. 961) and provide meaning making

by linking words to embodied experiences that had previously

obliterated linguistic containment. Using words to hold not

interpret (ala Winnicott, as Grand refers) is a central form

of witnessing. Bernstein (2003) describes the analyst

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becoming positioned within the repetitive relational

structure of the traumatic, allowing oneself to become a

substituted signifier, to function as part of a scaffolded

step toward using linguistic signifiers to contain and

express experience. Here, too, the body and mind of the

analyst are used through a form of witnessing with a goal of

linguistic containment.

Reis (2009) focusing on embodied experiences, does not

describe a reification of the symbolic within the process of

witnessing. Referring to infant research on presymbolic

rhythmic episodic memory systems, he describes traumatic

experience emerging within relational spaces of absence.

(Based on this case study I would add to these, spaces of

intolerable density.) Indeed, for him the idea of witnessing

is not to translate trauma into symbolic form but to live it

with the patient. This often involves a re-living of some

past affective memory of the analyst’s that resonates in the

moment (Reis, 2009).

As useful as these approaches to witnessing are, they

all suffer from an assumption that is made about neutrality

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and a failure to consider or link to the presence of

cultural based systems of power. For instance, there is an

assumption that the area of the symbolic is a culturally

neutral space, and there is no examination of how linguistic

forms of meaning making themselves can function to victim-

blame and be re-traumatizating. Similarly, there is a

reification of embodied experience as somehow pure, beyond

representation, therefore assumed to lie outside of cultural

systems of meaning making. This is a problem not simply

because bodies only come to be experienceable through forms

of interpellation that render them culturally intelligible,

but that they form and function through rituals of habitus

(Bourdieu, 1978), cultural practices around embodiment that

are conscious and unconscious. So even unconscious embodied

experiences are shaped by cultural power. Lastly, the

culpability of the analyst witness and attendant dynamics of

power are also not well theorized. Psychoanalytic notions of

witnessing have so far failed to capture and articulate

these and other complexities of power, which, being central

to trauma and violence, are also key to witnessing.

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Witnessing has origins in women of color’s ideas of

testimony functioning to (re)unite the cultural, political

and personal/psychology (Beverley, 1992; Smith & Watson,

1998). However recent psychoanalytic translations of

witnessing do not always make these links to the cultural

and political nor do they explore their impact on

subjectivities. Weaving in and out of a clinical case, I

will consider the importance of linking the cultural and

psychological within processes of witnessing and how this

linking necessarily impacts our tools of analysis, forms of

engagement and thus, our subjectivities.

VASIALYS

Vasialys is anxious. She tells me she is scared about

visiting her boyfriend of 2 years because the apartment

complex he lives in has had a peeping tom. Her boyfriend can

work late and she imagines herself alone in the apartment

being watched without her knowledge or worse perhaps, that

she will see him stalking her. That moment of predatory

recognition terrifies her. I had not seen her express this

level of visual affect before in our sessions. We discuss

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the anxiety, her fears and terror, but absent from our

verbal discussion is any association to her childhood,

filled with her father’s violence against her mother and

her. After getting through some of the anxiety of the

moment, I lightly throw out something to consider: Perhaps

this situation reminded her of something?

At this point I had seen Vasialys for two and a half

years once a week. She was a 23 year old Latina college

student who lived with her family – her mother, father, 2

younger teenage brothers and an 8 year old sister. An older

brother had moved out. She had medium length hair pulled

back in a ponytail – always. The rest of her uniform was

limited to jeans and a t-shirt with the addition of a

sweater in the winter. She said this presentation helped her

avoid attention, particularly male attention on the streets.

Vasialys initially came to see me because her father had

been in jail for 8 months for driving with a suspended

license and was about to be released. She said her family

had been happy while he was gone. Her father regularly beat

up her mother so badly the eldest brother would call the

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cops. But her brother had recently moved out, leaving her

now responsible for calling the police on her father and

saving her mother’s life.

As complicated as this situation sounds, it was made

more so by her relationship with her parents. She had only

anger and contempt for her mother, who dropped everything to

protect her brothers from endless crises of their own

making, while acting like a jealous friend to Vasialys. As

if she were an envious older sister, Vasialys’ mother did

not acknowledge her achievements and she devised excuses to

renege on promises of a Quinceañera (a sweet 15 party) and

throwing Vasialys a high school graduation party. She bought

all of Vasialys’ clothes, including her underwear, in her

own size, not Vasialys’. Vasialys was the only one in her

family to have graduated high school, let alone to attend

college. This jealous merging stood in contrast to her

complicated relationship with her father. He was the only

one in her family who expressed interest in her. He thought

her education was important. He was proud of her and said

it. He was also the one who raped her at night when she was

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between 6-10 years old. It stopped only when ACS had been

called by her school. She thought she might have told a

counselor, but she couldn’t remember. They came to the

apartment door, asked if she had been “sexually abused.” In

her memory, her father was either standing next to her or in

the same room. She said “no.” He never did it to her again.

She blamed herself for not saying “yes.” She had only

mentioned this abuse during our sessions in passing as if it

had ceased to impact her.

That was the verbal narrative. As is common when

interacting with survivors of childhood violence in

particular, there was also a concurrent but distinctly

separate, dissociated mode of communication during sessions.

This exclusively embodied dialogue existed seemingly

disconnected from the words being spoken. I would feel the

bottom of the room to begin to drop out and the only thing

suspending us above a dangerous abyss was our uninterrupted

gaze. The desperate need to hold eye contact was challenged

by a sudden overwhelming need to close my eyes, surrender my

consciousness as if under anesthesia. I was not experiencing

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the “induced blankness, boredom, mental absentia” Grand

(2002, p. 963) has written of, nor the fogginess Harris and

Gold (2001) observed. While others writing of trauma have

discussed non-bodies and erasure of bodies (Grand, 2003),

here I could not escape a heavily dense embodiment. I would

feel an invisible force lying on my body; a pressure on my

chest and lap such that each breath was an effort. I

wondered what it would be like were I to give in and

surrender to “it” but I couldn’t. I could not trust we would

be ok if I did. I tried to throw off this deadness by asking

how she was feeling, what was going on for her, watching her

body closely, looking for shifts in posture, belly,

anything, and asking how her body felt. She sits completely

still as if tied down. But she did not appear to be

distressed. I verbally identified a dead feeling that would

pervade the room and she would nod in agreement, relating it

to the deadness in her home that developed as an antidote to

her father’s violent rages. Talking about it did not stop

it.

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So during this session about the peeping tom, I threw

out a verbal lure to her past, not expecting her to speak

about it. As I prepared for another invisible assault she

said, “yes, I guess the feeling is familiar.” She began

describing actions in a low flat tone I had become accustom

to when she described her father’s violence. Without delay

she began describing how her father would appear at night in

her room. It wasn’t predictable. She would just be awoken by

the “feeling of his fingers in my vagina.” He would make her

touch him (code for making her touch and fondle his penis).

Sometimes he would make her “give him oral sex.” She

remained as quiet as possible, usually pretending she was

asleep, playing dead. There were no words spoken, there was

no sound. There was only the feeling of a heavy body on top

of her and her seemingly following its lead by moving a

disembodied hand or mouth on his nonverbal command. This

would all occur in the room she shared with her brothers, a

fact which served to make her feel extremely guilty. They

were in beds right next to her. She thinks just needed to

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utter a sound, anything and her brothers would have woken up

and rescued her. She assumes they were actually sleeping.

The absence of words in these interactions with her

father made any experience of agency murky to her. She

thinks it was more work to stay quiet, so in her mind, she

must have been complicit and she feels guilty she let it

happen. Validating her experience by using her language was

necessary to maintain a connection. This was the first time

in over 2 years she had ever discussed these experiences and

it was important to not challenge the psychological

stability and control she held over her own processes of

meaning making. This control over representing Vasialys’

experience was central given her inability to control access

to her body and to other aspects of her life. Plus she still

lived with her father who was still violent toward her

mother. To identify him as a perpetrator responsible for his

violence threatened not just her identity and her sense of

control in her memories but also her sense of day-to-day

safety. But listening to her take the fall for her own

sexual assaults was excruciating on multiple levels. As a

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clinical specializing in trauma, I had heard numerous

stories of sexual assault and rape and as the research

continues to indicate (Kahn, et. al., 2003, p. 240) the

victims I saw engaged in mental gymnastics in order to hold

the responsibility for the incidents. Of course this

spurious form of agency is reinforced by the culture, media,

law enforcement and the criminal justice system that each

send a consistently ambivalent message that perhaps the

behaviors of female victims of male sexual violence somehow

caused or contributed to it.

I squirmed at her relational position also because I felt to

agree, even tacitly, would be to be pulled into a

culpability from which I would not emerge whole. I could

feel my heels digging in with each phrase she uttered that

gave her responsibility, even as I knew she was finding

agency in it. Witnessing her narration was also tough

because it challenged my own hard won version of my

experiences that had some close similarities to hers, that I

had come to believe could not have been my fault nor in my

control. Here witnessing was complicated as different spaces

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of culture, politics, and the clinical collided with

different times – hers and my respective childhoods and

their contexts. But psychoanalytic witnessing, as it has

been discussed so far, does not always have room for all of

these varied positions.

THE SYMBOLIC AND CULTURAL NEUTRALITY

Although language can provide containment and

expression, it comes with costs as there are layers of

potential re-traumatization involved in speaking ones

experience verbally. First, because words temporally link

experiences of the past with those of the present, to speak

ones history of violence entails re-creating and re-

experiencing it on multiple levels of consciousness (like a

series of simultaneous embodied echoes) (Loewald, 1980;

Gentile, 2007). Linguistic containment leaves “remnants”

(Frosh, 2012, p. 247) of experience left unsaid,

unspeakable, awaiting expression elsewhere. While many

authors discussed above have described well working with the

unspeakable, we need to acknowledge that this classification

itself is based on cultural forms of oppression and power.

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Perception is a cultural production and “[p]ower operates

the channels of transmission for what you hear and don’t

hear” (Orr, 2006, p. 10), what you can and cannot see, feel

and experience, what can be witnessed and spoken. For

example, women’s experiences of men’s violence typically

remain abject – beyond signification, trapped in the

embodied relational space (Alcoff & Gray, 1993; Gentile,

2007). As Vasialys told me, she did not have a verbal

language to describe what had happened. But this lack of

verbal capacity was not only based in a complex biophysical

and psychological response to trauma, it was because the

symbolic itself is a political and cultural structure that

does not allow for the containment, acknowledgement and

recognition of such experiences. This lack then folds back

to compromise the biophysical/psychological. It was her

anxieties about nighttime, being in her bed, and falling

asleep that functioned as her primary memory. But these

experiences that are trapped within the body are also those

most often deemed illegitimate or unbelievable (Rice, 1996),

a false memory (Harris, (1996). Thus cultural systems in

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addition to psychological processes define what remains

beyond recognition and the spaces within which experiences

are said to emerge (bodies vs. minds/relational spaces vs.

verbal containment) also impact the value and believability

of it.

Additionally, given the collapsed spaces of meaning

making in trauma, survivors are positioned to be more

dependent upon ready-made, commodified forms of culturally

created sentiment within which to create and contain

experience (Oliver, 2001; Gentile, 2011, in press). As

Vasialys’ narrative demonstrates, survivors of sexual

violence may find comfort in narratives constructed through

a linear cause and effect, but most of these are structured

around victim blaming and perpetrator lack of accountability

(Gentile, 2007). As Bergson (1913/2001). observes, linear

causality reinforces the collapse of capacities for

reflection because the ability to hold the optimal tension

between past, present and future becomes severely limited.

So cultural forms of meaning making themselves can reinforce

dissociative processes.

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To complicate things further, speaking from the

cultural margins can disrupt the center of power, but doing

so also functions to re-inscribe the marginalized identity

and position of the speaker, such that she becomes visible

only through her confession which is highly problematic

(Anzaldúa, 1987; Bhabha, 1994; Kaplan, et. al., 1999).

Because the symbolic is shaped by and for the experiences of

the dominant culture, subaltern communities are “constituted

by melancholia,” an “ungrievable loss” that by definition

cannot be contained, captured or even recognized within the

dominant discourse (Crociani-Windland & Hoggett, 2012, p.

165). Discussing Franz Fanon, Oliver (2003) writes:

The struggle to liberate psychic space from

colonization hinges on the black man's ability to make

meaning for himself. He doesn't want recognition from

the white colonists, an impossible recognition, rather

he wants to recognize himself. It is precisely the

sense of arriving too late to create one's own meaning

that makes the colonization of psychic space so

effective (Oliver, quoted in Ingram, 2008, p. 47).

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Oliver articulates well the dilemma of creating meaning

through cultural technologies that are designed to deny

agency and subjectivity to certain people. Here meaning

making is relational but its relationality is based in

“othering,” consolidating legitimacy and value in certain

experiences and bodies based on the denial of meaningfulness

and capacities of meaning making to others. Although

Gerson’s and other psychoanalytic ideas of witnessing (see

Poland, 2000; Grand, 2003; Ullman, 2006; Boulanger, 2012)

are inherently relational, they are not social/cultural in

terms of exploring the ways in which technologies of

cultural power shape the very bases of engagement and

symbolic discourse into which witnessing is attempting to

translate nonlinguistic traumatic memory. As Oliver (2004)

rightly observes, in order to witness the contradictory

effects of oppression and trauma we need a theory of the

unconscious “that operates between the psyche and the

social, through which the very terms of psychoanalysis are

transformed into social concepts” (p. xiv).

SOME RESPONSE-ABILITIES OF THE WITNESSING ANALYST

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Another realm of witnessing that needs to be informed

by the social is the role of the analyst. Analysts writing

about witnessing often use the term “evil,” locating it

squarely in the “other,” a third party, not-me, not-you, but

“them” (Poland, 2000: Grand, 2002, 2003; Boulanger, 2012).

This can function to triangulate, pulling the patient close

not through similar experiences of survival and not

necessarily through empathy but through a presumed proximity

to evil and goodness such that we-together are not-them.

This triangulation also functions to collapse not expand or

create space, including that of aggression or/and badness of

the patient and analyst. Poland (2000) does observe his

patient does not want him to be supportive, acting as if he

is separated from the evil that was done to her but he does

not elaborate on this potential culpability. Ullman (2006)

reflects on her experiences as an Israeli with Palestinians,

acknowledging she was witnessing from an uncomfortable

position of power. She describes being tempted to use

charity as a ploy to assuage her guilt in being associated

with the oppressor. As she describes, bearing witness means

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restoring dignity (Ullman, p. 187) but although she refers

to some of the complicated dynamics potentially interrupting

this restoration of dignity, she does not examine how it

would impact her own position and subjectivity.

Frosh (2011) deconstructs some power dynamics within

the analytic space when he critiques of the idea of

recognition in psychoanalytic witnessing. He claims

recognition is written as the responsibility of the “other,”

the victim, to present an identity in a way that is

comprehensible to the analyst. Clearly this is particularly

burdensome if one is a member of an oppressed and culturally

marginalized group. According to Frosh, this dispersed

responsibility for recognition and witnessing threatens to

obscure power differentials. Instead, he claims that “if one

truly feels the injury done to oneself, one cannot do it to

others, except if these others are defined as non human, as

not suffering in the same way, as not amenable to the

imaginative link that makes our suffering generalisable” (p.

241). So Frosh, foreshadowing Boulanger (2012), sees

witnessing emerging from a leap of imagination, but for him

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this leap involves deconstructing the practice of “othering”

in order to replace the action of oppression with the stance

of similarity. Unfortunately this does not address the

practice of oppressing the identified non-human or the role

of oppressing in the formation of subjectivity. Although a

focus of Frosh’s critique, Benjamin (2009) also highlights

the position of the analyst. She builds upon her initial

exploration of recognition examining not only the ways in

which the analyst can fall short due to the limits of

recognition, but that the analyst can actually cause harm.

In these cases, recognition can emerge as the analyst takes

responsibility for having caused pain.

While both Benjamin and Frosh focus more on the work

and position of the analyst in witnessing, they too, do not

fully articulate and integrate the social with the clinical

in terms of recognition. Even though they both describe

recognition as a complex relational process, neither

adequately describes the additional workings of cultural

power and the degrees to which such an analysis requires a

deconstruction of the analyst’s subjectivity.

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Witnessing involves “an obligation…to respond in a way

that opens up rather than closes off the possibility of

response by others” (Oliver, 2001, p. 201). This space

creating “response-ability” involves not just acknowledging

our own potential guilt or/and passive or not so passive

participation in violence or inflicting pain. We have to

acknowledge that our coming into being rests upon a

foundation of denying subjectivity to the “other.” Thus, it

is not just guilt and shame the analyst must cultivate,

endure, and work through. The witnessing analyst must engage in a

process of remaking her/his own subjectivity. Neither participant can come out

intact nor can our tools of analysis, meaning making or engagement.

Witnessing that integrates the social/cultural with the

clinical/psychological functions to counteract the cultural

forces of privilege (class-, race/ethnicity-, sexuality-,

gender-based, etc.) and neoliberalism (Layton, 2010) that

work to rip them apart. It is this Bionian attack on linking

that collapses the generative third space of witnessing

because it squeezes out the cultural, instilling

traumatically repetitive forms of engagement that may

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promise to, but can never fully witness the impact of

oppression. Building on those who have observed the ways

racial oppression can shape transferences in clinical work

(e.g. Leary, 1994; Ainslie & Brabeck, 2003; Altman, 2003;

Moss, 2003; Straker, 2004; and Suchet, 2004), witnessing can

only occur as one acknowledges and reflexively analyzes the

very bases of clinical engagement, including how our

subjectivites and identities emerge, as products of culture,

created through technologies of power and oppression.

SOME CLINICAL DILEMMAS WITH WITNESSING

But how do we proceed when the technologies of power

shaping and constituting relational subjectivities operate

at every level of interaction, including that of language,

meaning-making, cultural discourse, and embodiment, the very

foundations of psychoanalysis itself?

Given the previous discussion of witnessing, it appears

the act of Vasialys speaking out as a Latina survivor of

sexual violence can function to reify the racist tendency in

the culture to render the image of women of color invisible

or negatively spectacular. As described above, victim

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blaming is a common response to rape, but for Latinas, this

victim-blaming becomes additionally loaded because speaking

out requires using the discourse of a dominant culture that

denigrates Latinas and their sexuality, reifying white

women’s purity (Anzaldúa, 1987). So her culpability as a

blamed victim becomes doubled. And as she reifies her own

marginality as both a victimized woman and a Latina, she

does so through the act of implicating a Latino – her father

– in yet another violent crime, when the dominant culture

already casts Latinos primarily as criminals. To top it off,

she does in a relationship with me, a white clinician. In

other words, each moment I feel close to her as a victim,

feel empathy, that empathy is deeply textured with

colonization, racism, and classism. What I experience as

supportive empathy then, forces Vasialys to experience an

ambivalence as I become a Fairbairnian tantalizing object,

offering care, empathy, and simultaneously a violent form of

interpolation within the same analytic holding environment.

While ambivalent connections are common with children abused

by their caregivers, here the ambivalence is not just about

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her past experiences with her identified abuser but also her

pasts and presents with her cultural oppressors, of which I

am one. So here ambivalence needs to be understood as

emerging not just relationally as a re-enactment, but as an

on-going affective experience of cultural oppression. As

Oliver (2004) observed of shame, the oppressed group often

carries the intolerable affect for the culture and here that

affect is ambivalence. As described previously, one common

impact of trauma is to render the experience of ambivalence

torturous. So within this clinical work, torturous

ambivalence is not just about potential contact but that the

nature of psychoanalytic engagement itself re-inscribes

dynamics of colonization onto Vasialys and her father and

family. Additionally, my hands as a caring therapist are

tied: acknowledging the potential ambivalence might feel

unbearable to her, but not acknowledging it would feel down

right sadistic to me and require more dissociation from her.

Another worn relational groove my empathy could flow

within would require us to re-enact the well-honed game of

the white woman swooping in to save the “other,” momentarily

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providing a salve for the discomfort of white liberal guilt

and the uncomfortable experience of privilege hoisted upon

me through the interaction. By empathically recognizing

Vasialys’ experience and pain I am spatially pulling her

toward me, somewhat based on our supposedly common

experiences of being female victims of male violence,

creating the evil, triangulated third party. But even if I

want to do so, within this action resides a complex history

of white women’s racism against women of color and the

tendencies of white feminism to conceptualize and prioritize

issues that primarily impact white women while ignoring or

denigrating those that impact women of color. This is

similar in intention to Ullman’s (2006) dance with charity

however this is not about an overt action but a stance of

relating, a position of engagement where I identify (with)

Vasialys’ experiences of sexual violence primarily and not

her experiences of racism and classism including those

between us. Enacting that prioritization, our connection

would require Vasialys to choose to identify as a woman

first against her Latino father, as if her culture could be

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put aside as she aligned with me. On some level to allow

herself to be constituted within this moment of relating

also forces her to sacrifice her culture. (She already

sacrificed her mother tongue by going to an English speaking

therapist). This technique of colonization would have to lay

silent, hovering in the air we breathed. We would both have

to feel on some level, the ways in which my recognition was

also a sign that Vasialys had ‘arrived too late’ to create

her own meaning, even as I tried to maintain space for hers

to emerge.

Were we to not struggle to find a way to articulate the

very real continuous racist and classist violence of

privilege in bodies and words, our relationship would have

to re-enact on some level the myth that the violence in her

life emanated from her Latino cultural heritage, while the

white, clinical world could emerge evacuated both of its

violence and thus, of its accountability, even as it would

also become the safe space of her healing. As a dyad we

could hold and act out the affective memory of a long

history of ongoing cultural violence, and the shame for the

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culture (Oliver, 2004) could be held by Vasialys, enabling

the perpetuation of oppression and lack of perpetrator

accountability, including my own. Again, my empathy and

recognition, the basis of our therapeutic engagement, also functions to re-

inscribe cultural intersections of identity and privilege.

EMBODIED WITNESSING

As Vasialys spoke I was overcome, not with invisible

pressure, but with sadness - a profound overwhelming sadness

that filled me to the point of bursting. I deal regularly

with cases of violence, some much more chilling and horrific

so the fact that I had such a response to Vasialys in this

moment was a surprise to me. As she spoke I felt like I was

in the room with her and I could feel the heavy pressure,

the fingers inside me, and the unspeakable dread of

helplessness to stop it. She spoke with no affect,

completely flat like a musical dirge playing the same dead

note repeatedly in a perfectly unremarkable but sustained

rhythm. Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable need to cry. It

was as if someone filled me like a balloon with so much

sadness it began leaking from my eyes, my nose and my mouth.

31


In 3 years I had never seen her cry or lose composure and

there I was feeling completely out of control. I blurted

out, “this is so sad. I am just so sad that he did this to

you.”

She stared at me with a combination of shock and

curiosity. Then she shifted her facial expression as if

weighing the merits of what I said. “Really? You’re sad for

me?” She described feeling numb. As I inquired about this

“numb” feeling, she continued to remark on the idea of

feeling sad. She saw how it would be a sad situation if it

were someone else, but said it felt strange to think someone

would feel it was sad for her. “You know,” she said, “I

wanted my mother to believe me. I wanted her to feel sad for

me.” She describes telling her mother about the abuse while

it was happening and that her mother did not believe her.

This despite the fact that her mother’s own much younger

sister had been sexually abused by him too, when her parents

were first married. Her mother also did not believe her

sister when she told her. “No one has ever cried for me.”

“What is it like?”

32


“It’s kind of nice. I used to cry a lot when I was

alone in the shower where I wouldn’t be heard. I hated it so

much. And it was so unpredictable, usually when he was drunk

but not always. I never knew when to expect him. I never

knew what I would have to do. I would just awake while he

was doing it. I just couldn’t talk. I don’t know why. I

couldn’t talk. I couldn’t say something. I couldn’t just say

“no.” I just felt like there was no way out.”

“You couldn’t say ‘no,’” I echo hoping she might hear

where she rests the responsibility for her abuse. She looks

at me confused. Perhaps this remark, posed so emphatically

by me, pushed her against a wall, trapping her again but in

a different way. I refer to a psychology class I know she is

taking at her college. She has shared that her professor is

Latino and that he has mentioned his children, including a

daughter. She has discussed the warmth she imagines he shows

to his children. I ask if she ever wonders about him and his

relationship to his daughter, whether she thinks he has had

sex with her. She doesn’t flinch at the question, instead

weighing it seriously, as if it is unremarkable. “Yes” she

33


says thoughtfully, “and I don’t think he has.” Together we

come up with the observation/meaning that maybe many fathers

just somehow know, without their daughters having to tell

them, that they shouldn’t have sex with their children.

One could question my motivation in leaving her

feelings of being trapped and focusing instead on her

experience of responsibility and even bringing in a third

party – her professor. As a psychology student Vasialys was

familiar with the ideas of transference but she was clear I

was neither her mother nor her father. I was a “neutral”

parent/mentor. While the parental transference was neutered

for safety (rendering me supposedly neither the abusive

father or the merging mother), the mentor function was

decidedly a representative of the dominant, white public

sphere – she studied psychology and I am a psychologist.

Because no one in her family had attended college, I became

a quasi advisor at times, helping her develop study skills

and find externships. But this mentor role could also be

used to buffer the deadness with movement – her academic

life had a trajectory, a future. In these moments Vasialys

34


and I could discuss and reflect on some ways we co-created

meaning. We could discuss how our assumed differences in

ethnicity, social class and privilege impacted our various

ways of engaging with each other and how we saw the world.

But these discussions felt intellectual, hyper rational and

dissociated from our nonverbal, embodied transference of

murky merging and abusive invasion. In this area of

relating, we rigidly re-enacted her abuse at the hands of

her father and mother. Here we also functioned as one, with

me containing and metabolizing her dread, hopelessness,

deadness and sadness, enabling her to maintain a

disembodied, rational numbness.

Given these options for relating, in this clinical

moment I chose to flee from any hint of merging with

feelings of being trapped, dead or hopeless. We had just

experienced not only a new level of intimacy, but also of

vulnerability. Instead of staying close to her past

experience of being trapped, and risking feeling trapped

myself with her in the moment, I attempted to create space

through a gendered and raced form of triangulation – pulling

35


in a father figure, her professor. Because he was not just

any “father,” but a Latino psychologist, he could function

as a bridge (Anzaldúa, 1987) in the moment for both of us,

enabling a form of empathy that held, not split off, some of

my culpability as a perpetrator.

Narrative shifts in meaning making reflect shifts in

relational states and have multiple functions, one of which

is to create affect regulation and a sense of agency

(Gentile, 2006; 2007). As Vasialys begins speaking she uses

such shifts to take her out of the position of victim to

provide a sense of agency and subjectivity by claiming

responsibility and the control to stop the abuse. She shifts

from being the helpless, passive object of abuse to being

the omniscient narrator watching the action from outside of

it. She knows she could have stopped him. With this

statement buffering her memory, she can gain agency by

imagining what if she would say “no” or just utter a sound,

then her brothers would awake because they were asleep. This

is an important point because it is unclear to her or to me

whether they might have been awake scared and confused too.

36


Perhaps they sacrificed her to save themselves. By making it

clear to both of us, that all she needed to do was utter a

sound she has them act in solidarity against the father. So

she gains psychological, temporal and spatial distance, she

has a voice, her brothers take her side, as her father

recoils, found out.

This sense of having a reciprocal relationship with the

environment is important. Trauma, in this case rape, was

directed at Vasialys’ sense of herself as an agent at her

very subjectivity (Oliver, 2001, p. 186). As Vasialys says,

“there was no way out.” So as she is representing her

experience with me, she eeks out agency and subjectivity

enabling her to have a “way out” by saying yes, she pretended

she was asleep, she knew she was not really trapped because she

could have uttered a sound resulting in her brothers stopping the

abuse. She gave him oral sex or touched him without him having

to utter a word. She knew what he wanted her to do. So even

as she is telling me the story, re-experiencing it on

multiple levels, she is tempering her contact with her

hopelessness and vulnerability by creating a sense of agency

37


through a notion that she had a choice: she could have

spoken up. Her father did not hold all the power and

control. She could have said "no."

But this form of agency creates a conundrum for any

sense of witnessing. Having Vasialys re-inscribe herself as

a helpless victim would further erode her agency and

subjectivity. On the other hand, reflecting her “choice”

meant contributing to her self-blame and “downgrading” her

experiences of violence, which is disempowering as well.

Maintaining this spurious construction of causation and

agency also puts her in danger of future violence and abuse,

as she does not create the capacity to identify risk and

danger.

In Vasialys’ case, these narrative shifts may also have

reflected what was, after this session, an emerging capacity

to contain complicated experiences and ambivalence. For

instance her re-telling of these events and other stories

about her father’s violence began to have space in them for

interpretations, as she would sprinkle moments of

uncertainty onto what had been an immovable story: did her

38


mother provoke him or was he unreasonably violent? Is he a

sad man who was only revived by Vasialys' aliveness? Was

this resuscitation her responsibility? If she wasn’t

responsible, then why did he do it? Could he be bad and

still be the parent who, at times, saw her?

The temporal motion of the narration taken as a whole

reflects her struggle to re-remember-re-live in new ways to

expand her forms of meaning making. And after this session

these rigid positions of helpless victim or controlling

abuser began to shift and she developed the capacity to hold

in one thought, the idea that whether or not she could have

uttered a sound, whether or not he was sad, he should not

have raped and abused her. She had agency but not sole

authorship of what occurred (Oliver, 2004). Her agency did

not lessen his accountability.

A BEARING WITNESS

Oliver (2001) describes witnessing as being an

eyewitness to an incident and bearing witness to something

“that can’t be seen” (p. 197). Here temporality is doubled

(at least) as one witnesses multiple pasts along side

39


multiple presents. But the work takes form in the “bearing”

of the non-representational that includes finding ways to

hold onto the understanding that the technologies of

representation themselves can be organizing, stabilizing

while reproducing violence. And while clinical interactions

could be, might be, and undoubtedly are on different levels

experienced as repetitions of rape, these repetitions are

layered with other forms of racial, ethnic and class

colonization. For Vasialys to relationally experience

agency, I had to find a way to keep present within the room,

some form of acknowledgement that her position as an

“othered object” within the culture enabled me to maintain

mine, as a “subject,” even as we were both objectified and

“othered” through male violence. This occurred to some

extent, by keeping it in mind, literally on my part and by

regularly asking questions or making observations that I

hoped could be “used” (Winnicott, 1971) by us together, so

that as a dyad we could find a way to safely enter a realm

of not quite being sure about things. My goal was to try to

voice our cultural subjectivities and their attendant

40


relationships to power in order to help create a space where

she could “respond” (Oliver, 2001), speak about and

experience her ambivalence that was emergent and mired in

these cultural layers of signification. For instance, “What

is it like for you to hear me, a white woman, say these

words to you about your family? It doesn't feel good for me

to talk about your father in these terms. What’s it like for

you?” “I do hear you saying how he supports you, how much

his attention has both hurt you and helped you have the

courage to go out into the world, to college. But I also

hear you telling me he keeps making some pretty dangerous

mistakes. That must be confusing, it confuses me. Sometimes

I just don’t know how I am supposed to feel about him.” And

occasionally she would nod, say, “yea, I don’t want you to

think he’s just a criminal.” This protection of her father

had to be held and respected by me and understood to be not

only her own need to titrate contact with the devastation of

what he did to her, her identifications with him, her need

to keep him somewhat as the good father, but also her need

to protect him from me as an analyst and a privileged member

41


of the culture who might treat him as a criminalized

“other.” Although I wanted to scream “but he raped you,”

this would criminalize him and while part of her wanted him

arrested, her ambivalence included her fears of having a

white person judge him again. Basically I had to respect and

help her articulate her dilemma that whether she identified

with her father, her mother or me, she would be identifying

with the aggressor on multiple levels.

As we worked to hold all these contradictions she began

expressing complicated feelings and signs of a new found

agency: “yea, it is hard to remember his violence isn’t

about his culture even though sometimes I feel like it is.”

Here seeing agency as an assemblage (Deleuze, 1995; Bennett,

2010), meant working hard not to interpret or pressure her

even within my own mind, to keep open to how her very

connection to me necessitated her to create a split with her

family and culture, and helping to unpack these and other

ways in which power and privilege circulated in our

relationship. Attempting to recognize and experience

intersectional identities means our clinical theories of

42


interaction become incredibly messy, complicated, constantly

in motion, and alive. However I know I only caught the tip

of the iceberg of these interactions.

AN INCONCLUSIVE CONCLUSION

Ahmed (2010) observes “to be near to suffering does not

necessarily bring suffering near” (p. 72) so we need to open

to a “consciousness of the violence and power…concealed

under the languages of civility and love” (p. 86). This is

perhaps the key to psychoanalytic witnessing. A clinical

dyad can re-enact, re-live trauma out of conscious awareness

as it is represented through the movement of bodies, affects

and the spaces between, with the understanding that both

parties (and their respective cultural and personal

histories and presents) shape the action. But the process

opens to witnessing only when we can engage with these

interactions as potential ethical moments of deconstruction

that “remind us of the ungraspable otherness that remains

beyond our reach and yet in the deepest sense also

constitutes who we are, the otherness in relation to which

we are both indebted and unable to know the full extent of

43


our accountability” (Cornell, 2010, p. 105). In order to

“reinsert subjectivity into a situation designed to destroy

it” (Oliver, 2001, p. 186), we must proceed with the

understanding that the only tools available are those that

emerged from and created the violent situation to begin

with, thus forcing us to engage in a continual, excruciating

and enlivening process of re-examining the very systems

through which we gain intelligibility.

Given this conundrum, I have to hold tight to Cornell’s

(2010) idea that relationally acknowledging that there was

no existing representational space in which Vasialys could

make herself heard itself became a form of listening,

caring, recognizing and healing. This process of

acknowledgement involved the unplanned and to be honest,

quite unpleasant experience of being taken over and

immobilized for years, then inexplicably filled with tears.

But by coaxing me to be there with her, Vasialys found her

way out.

44


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Bearing the culture to witness

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