Abstract
As with psychotherapists, it is extremely hard for group analysts not to limit ourselves to a framework of victim-perpetrator while working with trauma. The subject of sexual violence is a tough one not only because of the enormous amount of aggression and destruction that it contains, but also (and maybe mainly) because of the fact that the victim is stripped of their dignity. In that aspect, this subject is similar to the topic of historical traumas that affect whole communities. That is why, when it comes to such traumas, uncovering the truth (not only in a psychological, but also in a historical sense) is really important, without searching for culprits and without the unnecessary glorification of suffering. Stjepanović in her article ‘The healing power of an analytical group in working through the trauma of rape’ (Stjepanović, 2020) has undertaken this difficult task with courage, and she did it exhaustively and insightfully. Despite a significant amount of patients with an experience of sexual violence that clinicians have worked with, this subject seems to be overlooked in analytical literature, with the exception of feminist or crisis intervention works. According to statistics, out of all violence types, sexual violence is the least likely to be reported to the authorities in spite of the fact that one in four women experience sexual harassment during the course of their life (World Report, 2002).
Orwid (2009) writes that every trauma, both collective and individual, go through the stage of taboo: the latency period, when pain grows and manifests itself only through symptoms. When a great loss occurs, for a long period of time pain cannot be verbalized. Even when collective traumas are shared with others (sometimes even publicly named), while those individual traumas remain hidden, all of them go through the latency period, which causes them to be pushed aside to the unconsciousness and relegated to the margins of societal consciousness as well. What is known by group analysts is also present in philosophical thought that addresses trauma and its consequences. Dominick LaCapra (1999: 4) points out that when loss transforms into absence, one deals with ‘impasse of ending melancholy, impossible mourning’, and that working through the past and losses becomes impossible. Uri Levin (2018) on an annual IGA ‘Rasztów’ conference in Warsaw, was talking (in reference to Bion’s and Odgen’s works) about the pursuit of truth, present in every human being, and the conflict between said pursuit and avoiding suffering caused by learning the truth about oneself. As an example of such conflict he recounted the story of Oedipus. It may be worth mentioning here that before Freud created the theory of Oedipus’ complex, which is central to psychoanalytical theory, he formulated the theory of trauma by describing the consequences of sexual abuse directed at children and adolescent women. However, after the publication of The Aetiology of Hysteria (1896), he gave up the aforementioned theory (Herman, 2015).
Sexual abuse causes wounds that are hard to heal, it damages the sense of security and dignity, and causes the loss of control over one’s body. It is an act of violence motivated mainly by anger and the need for dominance; sex becomes a means to an end, not the end itself. Nicholas Groth (1977) has described the following types of rape: one caused in anger (anger rape), one caused by the desire to dominate (power rape) and one caused by sadism (sadistic rape). In anger rape there is a transference of aggression onto an easily accessible, defenceless object. It is an expression of disdain, with the intention of hurting and humiliating the victim. The sudden burst of anger is a form of retaliation for being previously humiliated. When it comes to power rape, it involves exercising control over the victim without focusing on causing harm to the victim—it is usually the least violent type of rape, and serves as a compensation for the perpetrator’s feelings of inferiority. It may be linked to revenge. Sadistic rape is usually connected to particular cruelty, the victim is paralyzed by fear. This categorization may be helpful in understanding the transference and the counter-transference in the group—while Stjepanović’s group was feeling paralyzed by fear, helplessness and the absence of a sense of security, the analyst was struggling with the sense of guilt and shame. It looks like the rapes described in the work were connected to the anger of the perpetrator, and the group was helping Nina, in a counter-transferent way, in coping with the post-traumatic fear caused by the experience of lack of influence over her own body, and even her own life. At the same time, the analyst was battling Nina’s regression to her early-childhood feeling of guilt and shame, triggered by trauma. Those feelings are linked to the need for being able to impact the reality that surrounds her.
What seems to be especially valuable in Stjepanović’s work is the historical background of recent decades and the community/social trauma connected with the change of political forces and the social transformation in the former Yugoslavia. There is a certain social context of war rape (either during or after the war). It is said that it is not only an attempt to control women, but also whole communities. In this context Ockrent and Treiner (2007) write about the rapes observed during the conflict in Algeria between 1993 and 1998, in former Yugoslavia (1991–1999) and in Rwanda between the tribes of Tutsi and Hutu in 1994. Tomkiewicz (2008: 175) goes beyond that and states: ‘Thus rape, which even for Nazis was an exception, is again rediscovered as a means of warfare which aims for terrorizing the opponent. Who knows the exact number of women and girls raped in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia?’ Nina’s story made it possible to uncover what was the most shared in the group—the participants’ experience of discovering their femininity through the context of war that ended not so long ago.
Nina’s story describes her fight with the perpetrators, her trust for her family in which she grew up, and filing the case in court—she was able to fight, she was heard by her family and they believed her. But she did not feel understood. It happened not sooner than during the analytical group meeting (the symbolics of Nina moving to a new flat), which was described by Stjepanović in great detail. Perhaps it is worth mentioning though, that the episode of her mother temporarily blaming her, may have been caused by the false defensive attribution present in the collective consciousness—the thought that the victim had provoked the perpetrator reduces the sense of danger in society and offers the illusion that others are safe, that the danger had ceased to exist. In that case the further omnipotent compensation for trauma becomes strengthened by the expectations and fear that are present in the collective unconscious—in her family of origin, the social surroundings, and maybe in a sense also in the analytical group. Just like Stjepanović, I am of the opinion that Nina’s absence in the group session enabled the group to take a break, but at the same time I think it let Nina gain another perspective.
The occurrence of fears related to the body—connected with illness, hunger and death—during one of the group sessions is linked by Stjepanović to participants’ fear of the loss of good internal objects, and by that—the fear of losing one’s self. This kind of understanding of this process seems to be essential to tracking the recovery processes in the group. However, I think that it also shows that the group was in each and every session dealing with trauma, which can happen to anyone, and every trauma triggers the deepest existential fears of death and annihilation, the fear of the fact that life ends and that nobody knows the future. What was not possible to be represented in the mind, was projected onto the body. On the other hand, it can also be interpreted that the emphasis put on the body brings to mind the difficulty of battling our own body during the adolescence period, when one is extremely vulnerable to being hurt by the constant attacks on one’s ego boundaries—from biology, one’s parents, social expectations, one’s own imagination and fears. It is a time of battling one’s sexual and aggressive impulses, of creating one’s own identity, and all that adds up to one’s relationship with the authority figure(s). According to analytic thinking, coping with the authority figure is seen as a key factor to achieve maturity (Agazarian and Peters, 1981; Foulkes and Anthony, 1965). Referring to working with an authority figure, I especially like the way that Stjepanović describes the revitalization of the internal parental couple.
A small, homogeneous group, remaining in its analytical nature, enabled members to work through their traumatic experiences. Keeping in mind that according to the basic law of group dynamics (Foulkes, 1983), a group functions on a higher level than separate individuals, I was wondering why Nina decided to join an analytic group. She may have intuitively known that she had been unconsciously trapped by repetition compulsion. A group is not a court, in which she can be found not guilty, but a group is a space, where she can work through her fears and give up her omnipotent position of manic defences. Similar to Stjepanović, I think that she attended an analytical group in order not to descend into madness—her insanity revealed itself during group sessions—and to feel like a fully-fledged member of her community.
The author looks at what was happening at group sessions not only through the lens of analysis of group processes and theory, but also refers to biblical symbolism. Interesting is the reference to two important female figures—Blessed Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. However, my impression and opinion about them diverges from Stjepanović’s. In my opinion, Blessed Virgin Mary is not only a depiction of an ‘ideal’, asexual woman, but also one that had put an end to her desires—LaCapra (1999) in his work recalls Emile Durkheim’s works, for whom the key problem is establishing limits to personal desires in the interest of the collective morality. On the other hand, Mary Magdalene is a New Testament depiction of a woman who is not necessarily flaunting her (‘sinful’) sexuality, but who is an object of sexual desire, a woman full of male projections and transferences (others’ sins). That is why when Jesus said ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her’ (John 8: 1–11), none of the men throw a stone. What is more, they leave the site, and only Magdalene and Jesus remain. Additionally—and in this case I agree with Stjepanović—both Magdalene and Blessed Virgin Mary are representations of women brave enough to follow Jesus, wait for him, and be thankful. Referring back to the article, perhaps Nina’s damaged thankfulness helped her to attend the analytical group and wait for an appropriate moment to bring up her traumas. She could have been thankful for her family who, as opposed to what happened in Bojana’s case, listened to her and believed her and twice accompanied her to the courts.
Stjepanović asks an important question—why do some survivors choose to remain silent? Personally, I am not surprised that Nina remained silent for over 10 years. What is interesting, however, is that silence in the described analytical group is present only in Nina’s absence and as the silence of the inner self of the analyst. My experience has taught me that silence not deriving from resistance or a sense of guilt is often the only way to express understanding and mourning for what has been lost. Lemma (2015) writes that trauma confronts a person with unbearable losses, which one cannot simply mourn or represent in any way in one’s mind. It may be the case when silence is the best expression of that. While reading Stjepanović’s article, I remembered the story of Tamar described in the Holy Bible (2 Sam 13: 1–14). The rape of Tamar, committed by her half-brother Amnon, resonates across generations, just like a grieving process that one was not able to go through. After finding out about the rape, King David had not done anything. His silence enabled another crime to happen—Tamar’s brother, Absalom, took revenge on their half-brother Amnon. After that, Absalom was exiled, and eventually died. King David’s silence is full of pain, an unexpressed sense of guilt and anger. The analyst’s silence, described in this process, is different—it creates a space for emotional resonance and working-through. Keeping in mind Nina’s later life, it can be said that it was indeed a working group, enabling both safe regression and corrective experience (Jabłońska-Dzierża et al., 2008).
It is interesting how Stjepanović described the moment of reparation of inner objects in reference to Klein’s theory. However, in her article, developmental process, as well as regression and working-through the depressive position in the group (projection of unwanted parts onto an object, creation of primitive superego and subsequent sense of guilt) mix with the damage cause by trauma. Maybe what Stjepanović wrote (‘traumatized person unconsciously attacks their own inner testimony’) has more to do with the self being unable to integrate this experience because of their fear for life than with the sense of guilt over experiencing their desires. Early childhood sense of guilt is linked to the fear of punishment from the object (authority figure), whereas when it comes to traumas it is hard to talk about the perpetrator fulfilling the hidden desires of the victim. In this sense, trauma blocks thinking ability and the ever-present sense of guilt may be a way to try to regain a sense of control over one’s life. I also think that limiting ourselves to only theory and the search for answers to every question does not make us understand the world better, but might actually stop us from feeling. Gregorio Kohon (2015) stresses that in tragic events, something makes it impossible to complete and bring closure to the grief process. Perhaps that is why, while analysing the influence of social processes on the creation of trauma during the conference in Warsaw promoting his book, he cites the words of Ursula K. Le Guin (1990, Tehanu): ‘The evil, which cannot be repaired, must be left behind’. In my opinion, that is exactly what happened in this group’s case—Nina has left behind her own limitations and losses. She, as well as she could, went through the mourning process in the group and with the help of the group, freed herself from her maniac defences. She regained herself through the process of separation–individuation, survived and regained her trust in people.
