Intimate Violence by Blackman Julie;

Author:Blackman, Julie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC025000, Social Science/Social Work, SOC051000, Social Science/Violence in Society
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2002-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

PART 3

TREATMENT

CHAPTER SIX

COUNTERTRANSFERENCE

In order to examine the batterer’s transference needs with open minds, we must first attend to our own countertransference resistances: there are good reasons many clinicians do not want to or cannot work with batterers.1

Our current state of grappling with legitimate feminist concerns still finds us largely identifying with the perceived oppressed and villainizing the perceived oppressor, a state of affairs that is further fueled by our freestanding witch-hunting propensities, the latter of which may exist in all of us to some extent, at least as a potential. Certainly as a mass body, the propensity is strong and easily actualized in the herd or in our fear of naming and speaking aloud the herd’s injustices. So it is that I believe, as addressed in chapter 5, our preexisting societywide projective, tendencies to villify have partially co-opted the legitimate feminist-initiated fight against spouse abuse, and therein bastardized it into its utility as a container for our disavowed abusive self components. We have acquired a convenient recipient for our shadow projections in “the batterer.” A victimology approach lends itself well to this purpose, as we then systemically designate and diametrically oppose the duality of a batterer-victim pair. This leads us into hallucinatorily clear waters wherein the patient is criminalized and easily made into the villain. One is reminded again of Aichhorn’s (1948) and Eissler’s (1949) warnings and injunctions (see introduction).

This alone is a strong pitfall for the therapist, but it is potentiated by still further salient and powerful factors. There are tremendous problems working with narcissistic patients in general, of whom batterers are merely one subset, narcissistic pathology being so difficult for therapists that Freud was moved to refer to these patients’ resistances as “the stone wall of narcissism,” deeming this class of patients “unanalyzable.” Morever, to these issues may be added the specific self- and other-annihilating senses that batterers may induce in therapists who work closely with them. The yield of this redoubtable set of factors is that of a countertransference that is an amalgam of individually difficult resistances.

To do effective work with these patients requires the successful negotiation of these treacherous waters, again and again. Yet, at the same time, in one form or another, we may come across these factors in all thoroughgoing treatment cases. Just as Spotnitz’s pioneering work with schizophrenics ultimately allowed for the illumination of the ubiquity of the narcissistic defense, i.e., that it is to be found to some degree in all analyses, I wonder if identification with the aggressor may not be found to exert its presence in all analyses, in both patients and their analysts. That is, our counterresistances to being aware of our inductions to mistreat our patients, in actually abusive ways, pursuant to the defense of identification with the aggressor, may be a ubiquitous factor, one that rears its head in every analysis, made observable only to the degree that we successfully grapple with it. And, more to the point, this is a character counterresistance in therapists, who must

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