REVIEW N° 03 | YEAR 2008 / 1
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ARTICLE
The violence involved in refering to certain facts, or else keeping them secret within the field of family psychoanalysis
Irma Morosini *
A secret is a form of psychic violence exercised by those who know something and hush it up over those who, in contrast, do not have access to this information. The information we are referring to is connected to the individual’s self-knowledge, as well as of knowledge regarding aspects of his family history.
Freud1 clearly pointed this out when he claimed that no generation is able to conceal from the next the significant situations it has gone through.
Information is transmitted to, and imprinted in, the developing psyche. The violence of silence is accompanied by mechanisms of denial that tend to operate as a transpersonal2 defense which, in turn, induces the repetition of that which is being silenced and which reappears in the unconscious processes that underlay the relationship between the family members. However, there is also violence involved in directly referring to certain experiences and their consequences.
The purpose of this paper is to make reference to the violence involved in openly speaking about certain facts, or else in hushing them up, within the field of consultation, i.e. when from the very beginning, the patient claims he agrees to family therapy only if the therapist agrees, in turn, to not to speak about certain aspects of the life of the patient. There is an “untouchable” area to which they will never allude.
The family member who makes this request is alluding to a pact of silence that goes back to the time when the events that have been silenced took place. However, the paradox relies on the fact that, on telling the therapist about this secret, the patient is also telling about the existence of certain facts that must remain excluded from any possibility of analysis. The therapist is thus involved in a pact, the implications of which cannot yet be fully known.
This situation involves different kinds of violence:
- The violence of what the individuals have experienced which cannot be put into words but nevertheless persists as memory.
- The violence of meaning, as certain actions from the past seem to have altered the individual’s self-image. What aspects of him/her have become vulnerable?
- The violence of the secret that must be kept and the violence of the pact that is imposed upon the therapist by one of the members of the family, as a precondition to the work of psychotherapy.
Each of the former in turn, opens up new queries regarding the following:
- How can the therapist work with a family whose members have become ill because certain important facts have been silenced (while at the same time the repetition of these become manifest in their symptoms) if the therapist himself is also asked to keep silent as the first condition to make historisation possible?
- How can the therapist warn his patients about repetition, which is enacted in each new generation, if repetition is anchored in the therapeutic process itself?
- How can the therapist disclose the family’s fantasies and myths? Should we not consider the request that we be part of a pact of silence as a new passage to action?
- What is the position of the therapist within the psychic space of the patient? Is he an “accomplice”, or rather a hostage who, on bowing to the demands of the patient, becomes trapped because he has agreed to not address certain things, the implications of which cannot yet be fully known?
- What will be the meaning of this pact of silence within the therapeutic process, a pact that is known and accepted only by some of the members of the family? Could it be, perhaps, what makes the therapeutic relationship possible?
These questions could help us reflect upon the meaning, as well as the consequences (for the patients and the therapist), of openly speaking about certain facts, or else of hushing them up. To do so, we take violence as a starting point.
I shall now illustrate these ideas with a clinical example3 :
María brought her adolescent daughter for consultation due to a persistent pain in the bones of the mandible, which continued despite the fact that the girl was on medication. In fact, the daughter was not the only one affected: one of her brothers had suffered cancer of the mandibles, which required surgery on four different occasions as he rejected the bone implant.
The girl was referred to a therapist by three different doctors: her GP, her rheumatologist and her dentist.
During the interviews with the girl, and while she was drawing her family genogram, certain details turned up that required further analysis, as we realized that certain situations had been repeating themselves throughout four generations.
When I decided to call the rest of the family to work together (something to which the girl had agreed), the mother asked for a private interview, where she consented to family therapy (the parents and their three children).
However, she warned me that there were certain aspects of her life and that of her husband that were only known to themselves and to which they had swore they would never allude. [In fact, husband and wife had in their youth, during the seventies, belonged to a left-wing revolutionary political organisation].
Thus, María was warning me that certain experiences could not be “touched”, as it were. Their children knew nothing about them, as husband and wife had decided, before their birth, that these episodes of the past would be a jealously guarded secret. This secret was part of conjugal loyalty.
Danger, do not trespass
This request involved me (the therapist) in a situation where there was little margin for choice: either I agreed and tried to work with what was possible, or else any possibility of moving that which was operating on the body of the daughter due to a deficit in the symbolic process would have to be cancelled there and then. In fact, I had already seen in other cases of psycho-somatic conditions which did not respond to medication that the common factor was the transgenerational transmission of traumatic experiences, where the patient was the hostage of a history to which he had no conscious access.
We could say that the request made by María involved giving up a symbolic process in order to have access to another.
The purpose of the therapeutic process would be to understand that which had emerged “in code” as it were, in the body of the designated patient, as in my view, if certain secrets could be divulged within the family, certain repetitive elements would have the possibility of being reviewed without necessarily openly alluding to the “forbidden past”. For this reason I decided to agree to María’s request for secrecy, but I nevertheless clarified that there might come a time when, on working on some aspects of the family history, I would need to have some interviews with her and her husband.
However, I wondered if this could be the repetition of other relationships that had been “sealed with pacts”, as it were.
In any case, the family therapeutic process lasted for three years, during which certain violent traumatic situations were revealed (i.e. during the Spanish Civil War their male ancestors had been taken prisoners and murdered and the surviving women had been raped and forced into exile). These situations, which had been transmitted from generation to generation without any psychic working through, had attacked one of the children (who had suffered physical illness and whose life had been at risk) and was now affecting the daughter.
The children, who belonged to the fourth generation, could then have access to the family history. Their parents told them about it and they, in turn, were able to listen, to enquire, to make connections and to understand things they had taken responsibility for, so that they could “rearrange”, as it were, what they had inherited from their family in a way less painful for them.
After three years of family therapy we put an end to treatment. The therapeutic purposes had been achieved and it was precisely this positive result what led me to reconsider the beginning of this treatment and its circumstances.
What would have happened if, within the therapeutic work with the family, those aspects of the history of the parents which I had agreed to not address at the beginning had emerged?
I wondered if it was as vital for me to help the daughter as it was for the mother, despite the fact that she was the one who had set conditions for our work notwithstanding the illnesses suffered by her children. In addition, if I had refused to keep silent about certain facts, would not the mother have felt that, in consequence, she would need to distort these same facts?
And if this had been the case, would it not have been another way of concealing the secret, a “camouflage”, as it were, which was, in addition, an indicator of intolerance within the transferencecountertransference relationship?
Can there not be “truths” that cannot be said, because they would force an individual to face intolerable aspects of himself?
In her book, Rachel Rosenblum4 , writes: “A person can die because certain things were never said, or else because they were “wrongly said” or “wrongly heard”, or “wrongly received” (…) However, writing about oneself could also bring the individual too close to childhood traumas, end in the public disclosure of the hatred felt for other victims, reactivate feelings of shame and of guilt …”
Coming back to the clinical case
María had warned me that there were certain circumstances in her life to which she would not refer.
In my opinion, María was still honouring a pledge made to the group she had once belonged, a pledge to keep silent about certain things then and forever. This was the condition demanded both to her and her partner in order to be accepted, to belong to the group, as silence was the essence of their political activities.
Indeed, during these political activities and when certain situations became dangerous, the members of the group pretended they did not know each other in order to avoid cracking under interrogation and “telling”. Although María did not say this explicitly, I had a feeling that she had been searching for a sense of belonging, which was paid with her commitment to carry out certain actions and keep silent about them.
I think that those actions, which were demanded of María and her husband, faced them with repudiated and unthinkable aspects of themselves. Was the need to “belong” worth it?
In addition, there was certain mystique surrounding this revolutionary group but, was there any difference between this mystique and that of the other group, that of their opponents? Is it not the same type of violence? I believe this is an interesting point to consider.
In my opinion, it was not pride in their convictions what had led María and her husband to conceal their past, rather, they were haunted by feelings of guilt and shame because they felt that there was no difference between what they revolutionaries did and what their enemies did. Putting this into words, and admitting it would have been a catastrophe, which was avoided by the pact of silence that assured them of reciprocal protection.
Therefore, if any information “leaked out” both María and her husband would have run the risk of having to face those unacknowledged aspects of themselves.
In this sense, María had warned me there was something “dark” that could not be “touched” and in my opinion agreeing to this was therapeutic, because it meant accepting their needs. There were many things that could be analyzed, but María and her husband nevertheless knew there was an aspect in their lives which was far from satisfactory: the feeling that they had been part of that which they had opposed was very painful, and, in addition, was the way in which the transgenerational trauma was repeated. Therefore they tried to survive with these two aspects of themselves at war. However, there was always the fear that their children would find out about this traumatic space-time in their lives. This became even more complicated when they were able to understand, by virtue of the therapeutic work, that the unconscious transmission nevertheless had taken place.
During the sessions with the family María’s daughter referred to her dreams, and even drew pictures of them: there were always things behind bars, all her dreams were in fact “behind bars”. Could these have been the bars behind which her mother had been held prisoner and tortured? Or were these bars, perhaps, those of other clandestine prisons, where María had not precisely been a prisoner, quite the contrary? The return of certain affects involved unbearable, unthinkable violence and grief for the parents and emerged as pure unconscious contents in the dream processes of the daughter. In fact, my hypothesis was that the girl dreamt about what her parents had kept secret.
María had also avoided making reference to her sufferings while she was held prisoner, but emphasized she never cracked under interrogation, as if she wanted to highlight the virtues of silence. She was then able to tell her children about this kind of silence, as if it was different from another silence, a non-chosen silence.
The silence of pride is different from the silence of shame. María had told her children that, thanks to her silence, her husband (back then her boyfriend) “had managed to escape”. To hush meant not to denounce others to her captors. However, the pact of silence between María and her husband was what supported their relationship. If they referred to the past, that would be a testimony of the horror, a horror they had contributed to create. What was at stake then was if María and her husband would bear to go on living once others, including their children, knew what they had been capable of doing.
What kind of loneliness was haunting this couple? Where did this loneliness full of deaths (which apparently required to be expressed in the same violent codes suffered by their ancestors during the Spanish Civil War) come from? Where did exile, the unknown places where hostility reappeared come from? Did having power necessarily involve belonging to the most violent group? And what was being vindicated by this?
The parents’ active participation in violent political activities had contributed to create their identity at a certain time in their lives. However, precisely this was the aspect of their lives they had decided to conceal from everyone, including themselves.
Situations equivalent to these were worked through during the family sessions by means of role-playing, which included the representation of dreams. Thanks to these clinical activities many associations emerged, by virtue of which certain affective situations, which were similar to those we would not allude to, could be analysed. The dreams of the daughter had penetrated into the crypt of her parents.
Now that some time has elapsed since this therapeutic process ended, I would like to share with my colleagues some of the reflections that this experience has awakened in me:
- Perhaps my willingness to not address certain issues could be considered as a way of helping the parents be less hard on themselves, in order to reduce internal feelings of persecution.
- Perhaps, on respecting this pact of conjugal alliance, I became a dependable figure who could help them analyse other aspects of the family history, connected to age-old secrets, which were probably similar to the forbidden traumatic situations.
- And finally, perhaps the fact that both the therapist and the parents had belonged to the younger generation during the seventies in Argentina facilitated the construction of an adequate setting in which certain circumstances could be understood. In contrast, it might also have worked as an obstacle to the approach of certain issues.
I believe that these questions and reflections might help us approach the issue of both addressing certain circumstances directly, or else keeping silent about them. In fact these are forms of violence and in addition, are part of the process of the cure. Sometimes, speaking about something means living but at other times it puts the individual on the threshold of death. For us therapist, being able to tell the difference between them is interesting as well as difficult.
Bibliografía
Eiguer A. (1998) : Clinique psychanalytique du couple, Dunod, Paris. 1998.
Freud, S. (1913): Totem y Tabú. En Obras Completas. Tomo XIII. Pp. 142 a 148. AE. Buenos Aires.1994.
Granjon, E. (1990): Les voix du silence. Revue de Psychothérapie Psychanalitique de Groupe.15. pp 79 – 96.
Kaës, R. (1989): El pacto denegativo en los conjuntos transubjetivos.
En Missenard y col.: Lo Negativo. Figuras y modalidades. AE. Buenos Aires. 1991.
Losso, R.; Buceta, C.; Horvat, P.; Leive, S.; Morosini, I.; Packciarz, A.; Schapiro, O. (2008): Violencia de estado y violencia revolucionaria en la Argentina. Transmisión transgeneracional del trauma migratorio. Consecuencias en la clínica. (Presentación al 3º Congreso Internacional de Psicoanálisis de Familia y Pareja. Barcelona. 2008).
Morosini, I. (2008): El cuerpo como escenario de la dramática transubjetiva. En Revista “Psicoanálisis & Intersubjetividad” nº 3. (www.intersubjetividad.com.ar) Buenos Aires. 2008.
Nicolò, A. M. (1995): La Folie a deux: hipótesis – modelo de un funcionamiento Interpersonal. Revista “Psicoanálisis & Intersubjetividad” nº 1. (www.intersubjetividad.com.ar) Buenos Aires. 2007.
Rosemblum, R. (1998): Mourir de dire. Bulletin de la Societé Psychanalytique de Paris. Août. 1998.
Ruffiot, A. (1981): Le groupe – familla en analyse. L’ appareil psychique familial.en La thérapie familiale psychanalytique du couple. Dunod. Paris. 1984.
* Lic., Univ. Buenos Aires.
- Freud, S (1913): Tótem and Taboo, in Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. Pp. 142 a 148. AE. Bs As .1994.
- Nicolò, A. M. (1995): La Folie a deux: hipótesis – modelo de un funcionamiento Interpersonal. Revista “Psicoanálisis &
- Intersubjetividad” nº 1. (www.intersubjetividad.com.ar) Buenos Aires. 2007.With this clinical case I have approached the issue of traumatic trans-generational transmission and psychosomatic conditions in my paper “El cuerpo como escenario de la dramática transubjetiva”. This subject is reintroduced in the paper presented in this Congress by the Research Team on Families and Couples from the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, coordinated by Dr. R. Losso and of which I am a member. The paper in question is called “Violencia de estado y Violencia revolucionaria y sus consecuencias en la clínica”.
- Rosemblum, R. (1998): Mourir de dire. Bulletin de la Societé Psychanalytique de Paris. Août. 1998.