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Chair: Nancy Goodman (USA)
Presenters: Paula Ellman (USA), Janice Lieberman (USA), Vivian Pender (USA) and Dalia Guzik (Mexico)
Discussant: Alexandra Billinghurst (Sweden)
Reporter: Batya R. Monder
Violence against women has been part of human history and sadly continues to be a ubiquitous problem worldwide. The second part of the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP) panel at the 2017 IPA Congress in Buenos Aires took up the challenge of addressing this huge subject, offering examples of the kind of violence that is prevalent in the 21st century and efforts to combat it, while also addressing our attention to unconscious reasons for this scourge.
The panel was an outgrowth of a conference in Washington DC in March 2016 sponsored by the IPA COWAP, co-chaired by Paula L. Ellman and Nancy R. Goodman. It led to a book, entitled The Courage to Fight Violence against Women: Psychoanalytic and Multidisciplinary Perspectives (co-edited by Ellman and Goodman and published by Karnak in 2017). Several of the book's contributors were members of this panel.
Nancy Goodman referenced the 2016 conference and all its participants - psychoanalysts, activists, scholars and artists - and reflected on her wish that their work was not as relevant as it is. “Women around the world are victims of abuse, trafficked, subjugated, raped, murdered, disappeared, demeaned, not allowed to be educated.” Goodman saw the panel as a way to honor the fallen and create courage and resilience through “our collective witnessing.” Given that the panel was taking place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she noted that “Argentina knows savagery and courage,” that in this country a woman is killed every 18 hours; and grandmothers continue to honor the “disappeared,” their children and grandchildren who were