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In her new book, Neither Victim Nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat challenges current notions of “victim” and “survivor” by suggesting that, unfortunately, even the use of these terms supports victimization by obscuring agency in persons thus designated. A philosopher and also a clinician, Nissim-Sabat brings both areas of expertise to bear, contextualizing her criticism by linking the capitalist economy with a moral economy that lends itself to victim-blaming. In contrast, she contends, we should be focusing more explicitly on the social and psychosocial conditions in which victim/oppressor dynamics arise.
To counteract pervasive victim-blaming, Nissim-Sabat proposes a “radical philosophy” that would integrate a more complex understanding of psychosocial development. In this way, she suggests, we might be able to create social structures that promote the type of maturity that encourages reflection over reflexive acting out. First exploring ways in which Western views of gender can be seen as a function of our moral economy, Nissim-Sabat then endorses a transcendental model, drawn from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, that moves beyond the simplistic dichotomizations of gender roles and possibilities and beyond postmodern relativism as well.
To contextualize her argument, Nissim-Sabat provides a critique of Freud's asymmetric views of gender. She suggests that this asymmetry creates contradictory claims. She notes that Juliet Mitchell's critique of Freud is anchored in the recognition that “ideological structures resist change and extinction precisely because they are dynamically inscribed in the unconscious” (p. 23). For Nissim-Sabat the problematics of gender in Freud can be linked to his fundamental conceptualization of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. She points to the dichotomization in Freud's thought of a masculinity linked with science and renunciation, which entails conscious use of reason, versus