Janice Haaken

Presenting the past : psychoanalysis and the sociology of misremembering

Ms A and the problem of misremembering memorys context memory, culture, and the self trauma and the memory wars toward an intersubjective science of memory.

Collateral Damage: An Analysis of the Achievements and Unintended Consequences of Batterer Intervention Programs and Discourse

This paper reviews and critiques two prevailing program models for batterer intervention in order to highlight both their valuable achievements and attendant costs and consequences. We analyze these batterer intervention program models at 3 levels. First, we describe the historical development and basic program components of the intervention models. Second, we trace differences in the models to their grounding in different psychological assumptions and theories about behavior change, masculinity, and violence. Third, differences between the models are mapped onto contrasting approaches to the regulation of human deviance in the criminal justice and mental health systems. Based on this analysis, we conclude that further attention to structural and contextual factors, such as class, race, economic stress, and substance abuse in explanations of domestic violence is needed, together with alternative approaches to collaboration between victim advocates and batterer intervention providers.

A critical analysis of the co-dependence construct.

Co-dependence is a diagnostic term that has gained increasing usage in clinical and self-help settings. While it is used to encompass a broad range of clinical phenomena, it generally refers to an identity, particularly common among women, based on caretaking and excessive responsibility for others. This paper explores the clinical implications of the co-dependence construct from both social-psychological and psychodynamic perspectives.

Going Underground: Conflicting Perspectives on Domestic Violence Shelter Practices

Feminism and the battered womens movement led to the creation of spaces of refuge for women experiencing domestic violence. The current practice of concealing the location of shelters has been questioned by many women of color, however, and some groups have created open shelters in their own communities. Beginning with a historical analysis of womens refuge, this article presents a study of practices of shelters in the United States based on interviews of directors or staff of state domestic violence coalitions. The multiple meanings of confidential location are explored, including tensions that emerge in mapping the boundary between shelter and the broader community. The concept of border tensions is introduced to identify key areas of conflict and the multiple meanings of shelter as social symbolic space. The article concludes that the concealing of shelters, while vital in some respects, has also been costly for the movement, and particularly for women of color.

Moving images: Psychoanalytically informed visual methods in documenting the lives of women migrants and asylum seekers

While feminist arts-based projects have gained legitimacy, theory guiding the use of visual images in field research has lagged. Drawing on psychoanalytic-feminist theory and participatory action research methods, the article presents a study carried out with women refugee and asylum seekers that focuses on their experiences in seeking a place of safety in the United Kingdom. The aim was to produce through photography and videography a collective account of asylum as a daily process. In discussing the study, the authors provide a psychoanalytic framework for working through ethical, political, and methodological dilemmas in the use of visual imagery in feminist research.

Pathology as "personal growth": a participant-observation study of lifespring training.

This paper presents an overview of a Lifespring Basic Training workshop from a psychoanalytic perspective. Basing our conclusions on a participant-observation study, we argue that the impact of the training was essentially pathological. First, in the early period of the training, ego functions were systematically undermined and regression was promoted. Second, the ideational or interpretive framework of the training was based upon regressive modes of reasoning. Third, the structure and content of the training tended to stimulate early narcissistic conflicts and defenses, which accounted for the elation and sense of heightened well-being achieved by many participants.

War stories: Discursive strategies in framing military sexual trauma

As part of preproduction research for a documentary film on mental health practices in the United States military, this field note takes up findings related to discursive strategies deployed by the US Department of Defense and Veterans Administration programs in preventing and treating military sexual trauma. In the analysis of dozens of training manuals and interviews with therapists working in Sexual Assault Prevention teams through the Army National Guard and the VA, the analogy of military sexual assault and incest emerged as a recurring motif. The authors pursue the question of whether the analogy is progressive or regressive from the perspective of women service members. The authors situate their arguments in a line of analysis pursued in the earlier work of Haaken that explains how real accounts of abuse acquire social symbolic loadings over time in ways that are open to both conservative and progressive interpretations.

“Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape”: The Seductions of Theory

S ocial movements overturn old taboos, but sometimes they reappear in new forms. For Carine Mardorossian, a taboo has worked its way back into the folds of feminism precisely in that area where the second wave seemed to have made some of its boldest political gains: rape politics. While rape politics and prevention are now part of most women’s studies curricula, Mardorossian points out that the only significant retheorizing of rape over the past ten years has been taken up by postmodernists. This lacuna within feminist studies is not the result of having worked through the various theoretical problems attendant to rape politics, she suggests, but rather signifies an area of prohibition within the movement. Before responding to specific issues raised in the article, I will start with a brief summary of what I understand to be Mardorossian’s main line of argument. First and foremost, she sets out to expose feminist cultural theory as the unwitting ally of forces hostile to feminism because it shifts the locus of inquiry from the external realm of male violence to the internal world of female subjectivity and language. In large part, her quarrel is with feminist postmodernism, with rape politics serving as the case example of the withering effects of this analytical gaze. She casts the cool cultural theory of postmodernism against the hot politics of the antirape movement, with the embers of the latter at risk of burning out if attended solely by the dispassionate ranks of the former. Mardorossian does not call for a return to some foundational body of truth carved out by second-wave feminism, nor does she suggest that there is an underlying, unmediated “experience” of female victimization

Anticultural Culture: Lifespring's Ideology and Its Roots in Humanistic Psychology

Based on participant-observation in a LIFE SPRING training, we argue that this manifestation of the human potential movement uses various techniques and cultural values to convince training participants that culture has no power over them. This tendency to deny the impact of culture is rooted in our cultural history, with its most recent ard powerful advocate being humanistic psychology.

THE SIEGFRIED BERNFELD CONFERENCE: UNCOVERING THE PSYCHOANALYTIC POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS

In his historical account of the psychoanalytic movement, Russell Jacoby (1983) laments the loss of the radical psychoanalytic tradition. It was a tradition shattered by the rise of Nazism in Europe and the trauma of emigrating to a country that was hostile toward European radical ideas. Coming to America brought a certain amnesia about the past for those Central European psychoanalysts whose vision of psychoanalysis was intertwined with radical political commitments. The horrifying realities left behind made them grateful for the haven they had found in America, but it was a haven that demanded silence about the past. As Jacoby has argued, the price of this retreat into the safer and narrower world of affluent clinical practice was to shed their political radicalism, to relinquish subversive ideas that threatened to be maladaptive in the New World. For a significant number of European psychoanalytic practitioners, however, the critical tradition of psychoanalysis is not dead. In this paper, I describe a recent conference I attended in Frankfurt, Germany that was organized by the Siegfried Bernfeld group, a group of left-wing German psychoanalysts who draw inspiration from the radical psychoanalytic tradition. The conference, attended by approximately 250 psychoanalytic clinicians from various European countries, was based on a unifying interest in the critical potential of psychoanalysis and its social emancipatory role within contemporary society. Participants were individual practitioners, as well as members of psychoanalytic societies. Some sought allies in forming new organizations independent of the established psychoanalytic societies. Others felt that there was a necessary tension between their association with these institutes and their need for separate socialization experiences based on common politica] and intellectual interests.