Gender violence and shame. The visible and the invisible, from the clinical to the social systems

Abstract

The traumatic experience of violence is, in its nature, unspeakable. It causes

in the victim a deep wound in identity, changes in the dynamics of psychic

investments producing a failure of the ability to symbolize, thus breaking

the rules that characterize the usual development of thought. Some

affections related to the body prevail, above all the shame which expresses

itself in characteristics which reinforce the element of trauma. The loss of a

capacity to represent and symbolize is not only a psychic dynamic, but it

also reproduces itself in the social systems, shaping that zone of “silent

concealment”, that drives the phenomenon of gender violence. The

psychoanalytical reflection on the relationship between guilt and shame

seems to be a priority in dealing with and at the same time highlighting the

risk of victim blaming intended in terms of the unconscious defensive

dynamics expressed by the social systems. We will consider the importance

in the therapeutic intervention of the work of reconstruction and

historicization, to be able to reactivate representation which allows the

integration and the chance to distinguish the imaginary plane of the

traumatic event from the real one. The psychoanalytical approach to the

groups provides an interpretative model to articulate the psychic and the

social space.