The title of the Spanish film, Te Doy Mis Ojos (I Give You My Eyes), stresses the loving aspect of the marriage of Pilar and Antonio. The English title, Take My Eyes, emphasizes the masochistic giving-herself-up-to-be-devoured component of the frightened, victimized wife.
How is it that two people who love each other dearly, who loan each other their bodies piece by piece in passionate lovemaking, can arrive at an irreconcilable, unbearably painful parting of the ways? We watch Pilar fighting to save both her body and soul from Antonio's violent outbursts, and Antonio's valiant attempts to gain control of himself. Despite his serious efforts to overcome his rages, he is incapable of keeping his temper under control in order to save his marriage to the woman he both needs and loves. However, the best efforts of a group therapist can no more contain Antonio's jealous rage than a silken net can contain an injured bull. His terror at being abandoned brings about the very thing he most fears.
Several recent films (e.g., Volver) lead us to believe that marital abuse is more accepted as the norm by both men and women in Spain than in the United States. In a featurette after the DVD film, director Iciar Bollain tells us that two million Spanish women are victims of domestic violence and that each week a woman dies at the hands of her partner.
In our own country, a recent study conducted by the Seattle-based Group Health Cooperative's Center for Health Studies, 44 percent of the women reported having experienced at least one incident of physical, psychological, or sexual intimate partner violence during their lifetime. Can women avoid entering into such a relationship? The film makes clear that the answer is all too often “No,” for, like Pilar, they have been caught in a malignant riptide set in motion by the abuse and victimization that had existed in their childhood homes. What does a woman need in order to be able to get out of such a relationship? Take My Eyes chronicles one woman's escape from servitude into a life of her own.
We enter the film at a crisis. Pilar is leaving in the middle of the night with her son Juan to seek refuge at her sister's. As she looks down and sees that she is still wearing her bedroom slippers, she collapses in tears on her sister's shoulder, recognizing the depth of her despair and the seriousness of her plight.
How it is that she has sunk to this calamitous state? In the love scenes we see the starry-eyed young woman who fell in love with the handsome Antonio who offered her a way out of her abusive family. Her mouth is open like a baby bird eager to be fed. In giving all the pieces of herself to him, she is fed. Antonio not only wants her nose, her ears, her mouth, her eyes, he wants all of her; he wants to eat her up, and she is in need of being eaten. (How reminiscent of Bertram Lewin's oral triad: the wish to eat, to be eaten, and to go to sleep.)
But there was another side to Antonio: a jealous insecure self who took out on Pilar what he had obviously wanted to do to those who had once deprived him of his feelings of self-worth and autonomy. Pilar stayed in the marriage, despite multiple broken bones and bruises, because she knew no other way of life. We watch her gradually gaining the courage to leave him, when her efforts to help him change are fruitless.
Shy Pilar is welcomed by her sister's friends at the museum where she works. In the camaraderie of the women and their more jaundiced view of men's behavior, the sparkle begins to return to her eyes, and she withdraws from Antonio. However, he is persistent in his pursuit and she is drawn back to him.
Several interchanges with her mother are instructive. Her mother is insensitive to her feelings of despair. Having been victimized herself, she counsels her daughter to accept her fate. “No woman is better off alone.” Pilar's epiphany occurs in the cemetery where her mother is visiting her husband's grave. The mother says the one thing she feels guilty about is not visiting her brother when he was dying because her husband did not want her to go.
Pilar confronts her: “Is that all you feel guilty about? What about staying with him all those years, being a martyr?”
Mother: “I did it for you girls.”
Pilar: “You did it for yourself!”
I believe it is at this point that Pilar recognizes that she, too, is being a martyr like her mother.
Pilar comes to life in her love of the paintings and in her presentations to the tourists as a beginner docent at the museum. Antonio finds this intolerable. The woman who once sparkled for him is now sparkling for others. His jealousy escalates. When she prepares to go to Madrid to interview for a job, he panics and explodes. He pulls off her clothes and shoves her out the window onto the balcony for all the neighbors to see. He chokes her until she slumps to the floor
When she finally goes to the police, she whispers, “The injuries are inside. He has broken everything. Everything.” She tells her sister, “I can't go back to him…. I don't know who I am.”
Barbara Young, M.D., graduated from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1945 and from the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society in 1953. At the age of 90, she practices part-time in Baltimore. Her second profession is that of a photographer.
But what effect did their turbulent marriage have on their son? Already Juan has the large apprehensive eyes and solemn facial expression of his father. Though he is obviously dearly loved by his mother, Juan is already torn in his loyalty. What defenses will he build up with which to meet life? Will he become an abuser too, or will he become the victim? Or will he close himself up in a shell so that he remains invulnerable to hurt?
Pilar reminds me of a number of women who have come to my office for help. They are strong. As small children, they must have been loved and helped to establish a fundamental sense of security, but they were soon caught up in the tension between their abusive parents. They searched for a way to survive and save themselves from being destroyed by playing a role in the family dynamics that met their parents' needs. These little girls were given no support or encouragement in the development of their autonomous selves. They became competent women, but women who adapted in a masochistic way to their husbands. In therapy, they gradually learned that they as individuals had rights. One woman told me in her last session that what she had gained most from her treatment was the sense of being a whole person for the first time in her life.
My own patients' accomplishments give me hope for our hypothetical Antonio. If he could survive the inevitable depression and avoid suicide after Pilar's departure, and continue to build on the relationship he had established with the therapeutic group, perhaps he too could overcome his feelings of helplessness and humiliation, and gain control of his murderous hands.
Cruelty and sadism have been the focus of psychoanalytic study. The psychoanalyst Henri Parens, survivor of a concentration camp, has done a study of aggression. In 1970, Parens and his team met with 10 socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers and their 16 infants twice a week for seven years, observing the patterns of aggression and helping the mothers deal with the children's behavior. Out of this study, he classified four different kinds of aggression. The first two, the child's attempt to master himself and his environment and the urge to obtain food, are both essential for survival and development. But Parens believes the second two, displeasure-related such as temper tantrums or rage reactions and pleasure-related aggression such as teasing and taunting, are not inborn but are activated by emotional pain. The amount of this hostile aggression that children display is largely influenced by how their parents treat them. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse by parents triggers hostile aggression. Parens says, “It is amazing how many parents do not realize that their children have feelings.” The team has followed these children ever since. None of them has gotten into trouble with the law; one has become a psychologist and one an engineer.