A community of psychoanalysts, scholars and activists focused on the issue of Finding Courage to Fight Violence Against Women at the IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis Conference held in Washington, D.C., March 4-5. The conference was co-sponsored by the Contemporary Freudian Society, the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.
In recent years there has been a surge in awareness of the many arenas in which violence against women occurs. In this conference, psychoanalysts showed how violence can be seen, known and represented on the world stage and in psychoanalytic treatment. Throughout, there was an interweaving of psychoanalytic thinking and how it can be utilized to understand traumatic violence. Scholars and psychoanalysts from Argentina, Mexico, Peru, the United Kingdom and the United States addressed this serious problem along with depictions of violence against women in film, art, drama and poetry. Diverse perspectives and multiple modalities brought the topic to life demonstrating the courage to fight violence as it plays out globally and in the unconscious.
Presentations on sex trafficking, sexual assaults on college campuses, forced genital mutilation of young girls, and the rampant rape of incarcerated women brought necessary attention to problem areas. Psychoanalytic insight and understanding facilitated the containment of horrors. Discussions of witnessing and the ways that processing trauma makes for courage and resilience accompanied graphic presentations of interviews with victims of sex trafficking, femicide in Mexico, asylum-seekers and refugees, all victims of violence against women.
Psychoanalysis and community interventions came together in a project in the Yucatan Peninsula. A psychoanalyst works with young professionals traumatized through their interventions with adolescent female victims of rape and childhood marriage. An instance of the process of healing by symbolizing trauma was demonstrated by community interventions in post-conflict countries through sewing circles. Here women victims weave story cloths bringing narrative and symbolization to processing unnamed trauma.
Presentations of how images represent violence against women in classical and contemporary paintings and sculpture, and the power of women in pre-Colombian Andean ceramics allowed for powerful sensory experiences. Filmmakers, poets and a playwright's musical docudrama provided further artistic exploration of demonstrating courage to represent, know and fight violence against women. The Hunting Ground is a film in which two women who created a movement to fight sexual violence on campuses were interviewed. As they made trauma of rape speakable and offered their witnessing of other victims, their activism formed into an effective national NGO. Identifications with the perpetrators were broken through containment and alliances. In another film, Nina Quebrada, an adolescent girl is betrayed by her boyfriend, imprisoned in a brothel, and comes close to being defeated in shame and helplessness. Transforming shame into courage, she breaks out and reunites with her family in reparation and return. Psychoanalytic understanding of ruptured object relations and repair is dramatically demonstrated.
Paula Ellman, Myra Sklarew, Nancy Goodman, Andrea Pino, Annie Clark, Joy Kassett, Donald Campbell and Brenda Smith.
Psychoanalysts presented clinical papers on the ruthless rage of a man in treatment and the powerful maternal imago in the analysis of a woman by a woman, both connected to fears of the all-powerful early mother. Psychoanalysts considered the place of unconscious fantasy in both perpetrator and victim while keeping close the work of activists who demonstrate strength by conquering fear to bring change and make a difference. This conference, with its immense creativity, brought together both internal psychic realities with harsh external realities. The conference organizers wanted psychoanalysis to meet the traumas of violence in scholarship, activism and the arts and to highlight the courage it takes to face the horror of violence.
In addition to the two authors, the Conference Planning Committee was composed of Margarita Cereijido, Robin Dean, Justine Kalas-Reeves, Joy Kassett, Lizbeth Moses and Carla Neely.
Story Cloth of Common Threads “This is hard to say in words”
The IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP) is grateful to the conference participants: Cecile Bassen, Alexandra Billinghurst, Raquel Berman, Donald Campbell, Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, Rachel Cohen, Paula L. Ellman, Hope Ferdowsian, Louis Goodman, Nancy R. Goodman, Gertraud Schlesinger-Kipp, Moises Lemlij, Janice Lieberman, Gail Humphries Mardirosian, Maureen Meyer, E. Ethelbert Miller, Vivian Pender, Rosine Perelberg, Jack Rasmussen, Arlene Kramer Richards, Diana Romero, Katalin Roth, Myra Sklarew, Brenda Smith and Peter Starr.