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Abstract
This paper focuses on the psychology of a neglected phenomenon—that of socially accepted violence. It offers a Lacanian informed model for the understanding of those who are granted with the authority to carry out particular forms of sanctioned violence—parents in relation to their authoritative role as agents of Law in the family. The paper discusses both the rite of circumcision and the biblical story of the Akedah as paradigmatic examples of socially accepted violence and builds on them to explore potential psychological configurations that parents may assume when they are socially expected to apply violence as part of their parental role. The paper concludes by applying the model on agents of law who choose to avoid or refuse the use of sanctioned violence, and with an emphasis on the role of social discourse and social conventions in the individual's psyche.
Notes
1 Many definitions of violence can be found in the literature with no general agreement on any one of them (Bufacchi Citation2005; de-Haan Citation2008). For the purposes of this paper, we follow the definition of violence as a behavior involving physical injury to living beings.
2 An important exception is in the realm of group analysis (e.g., Kernberg Citation2003), which gives relatively more attention to collective processes than to individual subjective ones.
3 The words Brit and Milah are highly complex and heavily pregnant with meanings. Brit is “covenant” or “alliance.” It is an act that commits two or more parties to a common fate. Its use is wide and cannot be captured by a single term in English. An example of its diversity may be seen in the fact that it is also the word used as “testament” in the Hebrew for “The New Testament.” Its use in circumcision is one of its earliest Hebrew usages, probably indicating the habit of marking alliances on the bodies of the participant parties. Milah is the Hebrew for “word,” but in many explanations it is treated as a different lexical entry that refers specifically to a symbolic, genital marking of the body.
4 This paper is a part of a broader project dealing with the neglected topic of the psychologies of socially accepted violence. For our discussion on other aspects of the topic, see: Even-tzur, 2017; Even-tzur and Hadar, Citation2014, Citation2017a, Citation2017b, in press).
5 Palgi-Hacker (2008, p. 303) points out that the subjective experience of mothers, in particular, is not reflected in theory and devotes her book to extracting relevant psychoanalytic observations from existing theories. While this is not her stated object, she explicitly mentions that the subjective experience of the father is likewise insufficiently discussed in psychoanalytic writings, even when the discussion revolved around the father and fatherhood. One possible reason for such omission of psychoanalytic thinking is the focus of classical psychoanalysis on the unconscious inner world—a focus that entails devaluation of the influence of the actual parents. These entered psychoanalytic literature gradually—but even then, with little attention to their subjective experience.
6 The term “subject position” refers here to the psychological patterns through which the individuals cope with the place they occupy in the social web, including unconscious components such as identification processes and phantasy formations (Fink 1995). Referring to subject positions, we likewise use the term “psychic configuration.” The choice to apply this original term is the result of an attempt to stay in proximity to the more familiar term “structure,” which is more common in Lacanian writing. However, while “structures” refer to more stable and psychically comprehensive clinical diagnostic categories (Evans Citation1996; Fink 1995), the “configurations” discussed here are assumed to be less firm and they do not necessarily concern the whole personality.
7 The Lacanian Other, as explained by Hook (Citation2008), can be defined as the phantasmatic embodiment of Law, e.g., symbolic codes, rituals, roles, and institutions –the “rules that govern the game,” that define a given social situation. Following Lacan, both “Law” and “Other” will be written here with a capital letters, to mark the broad, symbolic sense of the terms.
8 Choosing to analyze one particular facet of parenthood rather than another is problematic, because the various facets of the parental role are intricately interrelated. However narrow, taking this perspective on parenthood, we hope to show, allows some analytic clarity and may promote our understanding of the parental role.
9 While we do not believe that parental authority should be exclusively identified with the male parent, parts of this paper focus on the role of the father, since it has served as the central backdrop against which took place, over the years, the psychoanalytic discussion of the aggressive aspect of parenthood. For similar reasons and despite similar reservations we focus on the male child, setting aside issues of female authority and identification, despite their vital importance. In our view, gender distinctions are not essential here, as evident in Lacan's reading of the Freudian desire (see footnote 10 below). For an elaborate discussion of some of these aspects, see Ogden (Citation1989). For a critical discussion of the equation of parental authority with the figure of the father, see Benjamin Citation1988 and Butler Citation2000.
10 Lacan's symbolic reading construes gender differently from Freud because for him castration applies to both boys and girls. This allows us to treat the role of the Father as separate from the concrete parent's sexual identity. Lacan's reading implies that, as far as the symbolic function is concerned, the parents' anatomy is less relevant for their gender roles than their subject positioning in relation to the paternal function and the Law (Cornell Citation1995; Mitchell and Rose Citation1983).
11 In addition to Lacan, Perelberg (Citation2013) mentions other writers who have proposed similar conceptual distinction, including Guy Rosolato, Jean-Claude Stoloff, Maurice Godelier, and Jacques Hassoun.
12 It should be noted that, while both words are spelled in the same way, they are derived from different Hebrew verb-roots.
13 In this context, see the medieval Midrashim, or exegetic homilies, quoted by Spiegel (Citation1950) concerning the “cut,” “bruise,” or “mutilation” inflicted by Abraham on Isaac. See also the poem “Heritage” by Israeli poet Haim Gouri (Citation1960), which unfolds the dire inter-generational consequences of the binding, which was engraved on the son's psyche, even though the planned slaughter was never carried out: “Isaac, as the story goes, was not / sacrificed. He lived for many years, saw / what pleasure had to offer, until his / eyesight dimmed. / But he bequeathed that hour to his / offspring. They are born with a knife in / their hearts.”
14 Lacan, by distinction from other readings of perversion (for example, those mentioned by Yakeley and Meloy Citation2012), considers it not as an abnormal deviation or a cluster of pathological symptoms, but rather as a clinical structure (one of three basic structures, alongside neurosis and psychosis), or a basic stance the subject may adopt towards the Other (Evans Citation1996; Fink 1995).
15 In light of René Girard's writing about sacrifice (Citation1972), Yael Feldman (Citation2010) notes that the substitute for the original offering may be a scapegoat—an alternate victim whose injury is socially accepted, because it is excluded from the community. Girard writes about socially accepted violence by highlighting the relationship between violence and the sacred, viewing the religious-cultural paradigm of sacrifice as a paradigm for Law and for social institutions in general. According to Girard, institutions of law serve civilization's need for a controlled and supervised discharge of powerful drives through their confinement in a vise of rules and prohibitions that are given a sacred status. Thus, for example, he demonstrates how in many communities the attendant victim is selected and qualified in keeping with a precise set of rules. He highlights the strict laws of purity by which the priests who implement ritual violence, that is, agents of Law, are bound. A key element of his quasi-mythical depiction is the notion of violence as having both destructive and benevolent aspects at the same time—and his notion that the line between these two aspects is dangerously slippery and fine (and see further in Even-tzur and Hadar, in press).
16 In the film, this effect is somewhat exaggerated because of the relatively late age at which this child undergoes circumcision (about three years old), but the same argument in a milder form may apply to circumcisions that are carried out when the infant is eight-days old, according to custom.
17 Hebrew transcription taken from the anti-circumcision website Ben Shalem (“Intact/whole Son”): www.britmila.org.il.
18 Freud's case study (Citation1909) is presented in his paper Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. His analysis suggests that the refusal on the part of Hans' father (who treated his son under Freud's supervision) to interrupt the dyadic relationship created between Hans and his mother led the child to replace him with a phobic object and develop a fear of horses. For Lacan, the father is supposed to appear as the third that severs the infant-mother dyad. It is the Law of the Father that protects the child from the dangerous state of total incestuous union with the mother. In Lacan's (1959) words, it is the “name of the Father” (Nom-du-Père), which is also the father's stern prohibition, “the ‘no’ of the Father” (Non-du-Père).
19 In Benyamini's book (Citation2011), Abraham's Laughter, he elaborates on this portrayal of Abraham as operating vis-à-vis a capricious god/a Living Father and on the sophisticated and sarcastic manipulations he employs in averting the divine decree without necessarily confronting it explicitly.