Interpretive categories, implicit representations and resistance against violence in relationships. A male-oriented gender interpretation
10.4081/rp.2023.756
Il confronto con la violenza nelle relazioni di intimità richiede categorie interpretative e approcci in grado di misurarsi con la complessità del fenomeno e la pervasività della cultura che ne è all’origine. Una riflessione critica sulla costruzione sociale della mascolinità può evitare una neutralizzazione della violenza o la sua naturalizzazione: due aspetti della più generale tendenza a espungerla dalla nostra ‘normalità’. Un’analisi del discorso pubblico sulla violenza mostra come anche gli interventi istituzionali di contrasto e le narrazioni mediatiche, pur condannando comportamenti abusanti e violenti, riproducano e veicolino rappresentazioni stereotipate che sono il substrato su cui questi crescono. In questo contesto è necessaria una riflessione sulla responsabilità sociale della riflessione psicoanalitica come ‘sapere esperto’ a cui la società ricorre per interpretare conflitti e contraddizioni la cui vulgata propone spesso modelli basati sulla complementarietà tra funzioni attribuite ai due sessi, irrigidendo le esperienze, i conflitti e le percezioni del cambiamento.
application/pdf
2037-7851
756
1
it
Stefano Ciccone
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Ricerca Psicoanalitica
norma
Categorie interpretative, rappresentazioni implicite e resistenze di fronte alla violenza nelle relazioni. Una lettura di genere situata al maschile
Text.Serial.Journal
https://www.pagepress.org/socialsciences/rp
34
FOCUS: LA VIOLENZA NEI RAPPORTI: LA RELAZIONE CHE S-PIEGA
2023-05-15
2023-01-03
2023-04-30
2023-05-15
Ricerca Psicoanal
Stefano Ciccone
2023/05/15
10.4081/rp.2023.756
Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” - Associazione Maschile Plurale, Rome
2037-7851
1
norma
it
Zoja, L. (2000). Il gesto di Ettore. Preistoria, storia, attualità e scomparsa del padre. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino.
Categorie interpretative, rappresentazioni implicite e resistenze di fronte alla violenza nelle relazioni. Una lettura di genere situata al maschile
https://www.pagepress.org/socialsciences/rp/article/download/756/750
34
                                   Ricerca Psicoanalitica | pISSN 1827-4625 | Year XXXIV, n. 1, 2023
                                                                             doi:10.4081/rp.2023.756


                FOCUS: VIOLENCE IN RELATIONSHIPS: THE RELATIONSHIP THAT EXPLAINS



Interpretive categories, implicit representations
and resistance against violence in relationships.
A male-oriented gender interpretation

Stefano Ciccone*




                                                                   ly
                                                             on
ABSTRACT. – Confrontation with violence in intimate relationships requires interpretive
categories and approaches that can be measured against the complexity of the phenomenon

                                                 e
and the pervasiveness of the culture that it stems from. A critical reflection on the social
                                              us
construct of masculinity can prevent the neutralization of violence or its naturalization: two
aspects of the more general tendency to remove it from our ‘normality’. An analysis of the
public discourse on violence shows that even institutional interventions of contrast and media
                                           al

narratives, while condemning abusive and violent behavior, reproduce and convey
                                      ci


stereotypical representations that are the substrate on which they grow. In this context, there
                                  er



is a need for reflection on the social responsibility of psychoanalytic thinking as ‘expert
knowledge’, which society turns to in order to interpret conflicts and contradictions whose
                             m




vulgate often proposes models based on complementarity between functions attributed to the
                     om




two sexes, stiffening experiences, conflicts and perceptions of change.

Key words: social construct of masculinity; violence in intimate relationships; naturalization;
                 -c




norm.
          on
      N




    I am going to try to discuss male violence against women from a situ-
ated point of view: that of the heterosexual white male, which corresponds
to the norm and to a position of material and symbolic privilege. Donna
Haraway (1995), speaking of situated knowledge, invites us to declare our
point of view, our experience and partiality from which we start, rather
than succumb to the temptation of seeking a neutral authority that is
abstract, disembodied and that is therefore based on having nothing at
stake. My reflection as a man therefore starts, first and foremost, from
acknowledging how much gender-based violence invites me to participate
in this conversation.


   *Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” - Associazione Maschile Plurale, Roma, Italia.
E-mail: ciccone@uniroma2.it
46                              Stefano Ciccone



    Public discourse on the phenomenon of gender-based violence often
wrongly conflicts radicality and complexity, as if explaining the complexity
of the dynamics that produce violence could reduce the radicality of our
condemnation.
    Indignation towards violence and the urgent need to condemn it, often
run the risk of falling into the trap of simplifications that, when viewed
more carefully, are contradictory and paradoxically complicit in the culture
that justifies, marginalizes or even nourishes violence.
    The description of the perpetrators of violence as monsters, the invo-
cation of increasingly severe punishments, the stigmatization of violence
as something incompatible with love, while trying to express an under-
standable and acceptable social condemnation, end up removing the con-
tiguity of violence with the forms of shared relationships, they represent




                                                           ly
it as a mere result of deviance to be removed from a society and a culture




                                                      on
that has nothing to do with it. The representation of violence as an emer-
gency feeds public alarm, but does not promote a new awareness and

                                               e
assumption of social responsibility: on the contrary, it strengthens the illu-
                                            us
sory representation of the phenomenon as a disease that is foreign to our
normality, and it feeds the delegation to the instruments of repression or
                                         al

management of deviance.
                                     ci


    In this meeting, we chose to put the relationship at the center and chose
                                 er



to (also) seek an explanation for violence. Putting the relationship at the
                             m




center may appear to be a gesture that avoids the sharpness of a conviction,
almost assuming that the two subjects share the responsibility for fueling
                       om




the relational dynamics that generated the violence. Incorporating violence
into the dynamics of that particular relationship can be a way of not ques-
                   -c




tioning our own relationships.
              on




    It is a slippery slope, especially if it is a man who is traversing it:
how can I deal with violence in relationships by recognizing the asym-
          N




metry of responsibility without reducing women to victims by removing
their subjectivity? And how can we avoid removing the more comprehen-
sive social responsibility? Recognizing that violence is part of our rela-
tions must lead us not to ‘normalize’ violence but, on the contrary, to
calling into question the norm that structures models and roles in rela-
tionships.
    Tamar Pitch, a law theorist with a feminist approach, openly addresses
this issue by observing how the emphasis on public alarm associated with
violence and its securitarian use reduces women to victims, who are passive
and innocent, reducing the complexity of the relationship. Starting with the
criticism from women’s associations to a ruling of the Supreme Court of
Appeal that did not recognize the aggravating circumstances in the convic-
tion of a woman raped by two men after she had been drinking, because the
alcohol had been taken voluntarily, Pitch notes:
  Interpretive categories, implicit representations and resistance against violence in relationships 47



     The lengthy debate on the change in the law against sexual violence (1979-
     2006) had highlighted the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of producing leg-
     islations that reflect women’s life experiences and inner experiences without
     compromising guarantees for the defendants. Moreover, she also highlighted the
     risks of reducing women (all women) to weak vulnerable victims (the woman in
     the contested sentence, for example, are we sure she didn’t drink a little too
     much of her own volition? To deny it is to deny her every subjectivity, not to
     accuse her of deserving the subsequent rape!) (Pitch, 2018).

    All the public discourse on violence is focused on women who are vic-
tims, and it gives us, even if just iconographically, the image of weak
women, incapable of defending themselves in need of protection. This con-
firms an imaginary of female minority that is not neutral and without con-
sequences.




                                                                      ly
    This representation is also supported by a public use of psychoanalytic




                                                               on
knowledge which, by simplifying and shifting from the psychic to the
social context, produces an ideological operation of naturalization of gen-

                                                   e
der roles and attitudes. The female relegated to the pole of affectivity, cor-
                                                us
poreality and the male holder of the norm able to regulate these dimen-
sions and to access subjectivity by emancipating themselves from the
                                             al

fusionality associated with these. The reference to expert knowledge
                                         ci


serves as an appeal to a ‘scientific’ and objective point of view that gives
                                    er



authority to interpretations of the conflicts experienced by society. It is
significant in this regard that we generally refer to ‘Psychoanalysis’ and
                               m




not to a specific approach and interpretative perspective that is part of a
                      om




plural and conflicting context in the field of psychoanalytic knowledge.
The expert, the psychoanalyst, presents himself as the authority able to
                 -c




put order to the confused change in relationships and identities, and to
          on




offer a reassuring response to a society without certainty in the re-elabo-
ration of gender roles.
      N




     ‘The intervention of the father on the scene of maternal love [is] a fracturing
     intervention intended to produce a suspension of the mutual cannibalism of
     child and mother, to break the continuity of their bodies and to invoke a vital
     horizon beyond their mutual abandonment.
     If the first period of Oedipus is the time of incestuous undifferentiation, the sec-
     ond period is the time of the traumatic appearance of the father’s word. This
     word is traumatic in a beneficial sense because it awakens the child-mother cou-
     ple from incestuous sleep.
     The father’s word intervenes with two distinct warnings. The first addressed to
     the mother: you cannot devour your fruit!
     The second addressed to the child: you cannot go back to where you came
     from!’ (Recalcati, 2011, pg. 69)

   The reference to functions, to archetypal roles, shows its non-neutral
connotation with regard to power relations and the hierarchical order
between the sexes, even in many interesting and stimulating reflections:
48                                     Stefano Ciccone



     ‘Unlike the mother, who gives birth to the child in an obvious way, the male, in
     order to understand that he too participated in the generation, and thus become a
     father, first needed a certain capacity for reasoning […] not only did culture give
     us the father, but perhaps the appearance of the father (certainly together with
     other developments, for example technological innovations) gave us culture: the
     definitive exit from the primordial state, from the animal condition.[…]
     The Father – the institution of a paternity – intervenes infinitely later in the life
     of humanity. It implies a glare of reflection and a principle of civilization.
     Perhaps – and we will talk about this – this is the principle of civilization’ (Zoja,
     2000, pp. 21-27).

   Claudio Risé makes the possible ideological outcome of this perspective
clearer:
     ‘The Father teaches, testifies, that life is not only fulfillment, confirmation,




                                                                         ly
     reassurance, but also loss, lacking, fatigue. The deepest experiences, starting with




                                                                  on
     love, originate and form from that loss. In the life of man, the Father transmits
     the teaching of the wound because his first psychological and symbolic function


                                                       e
     is to organize, give a purpose, to the matter in which the child remained immersed
                                                    us
     during the primary relationship with the mother, and which in itself would simply
     tend toward the continuation of the existing being. For this reason, the father
     inflicts the first emotional and psychological wound, interrupting the symbiosis
                                                 al

     with the mother (in which the child remains until the paternal intervention
                                             ci


     becomes of vital necessity), and proposes, from that moment on a télos, a
     purpose’. (Risè, 2004, p.12).
                                        er
                                   m




   The psychological dimension is thus transposed to the social and sym-
                           om




bolic level, showing the risk of a regressive outcome of this perspective.
The transposition of an interpretative apparatus specific to the field of indi-
vidual evolution to the wider social context through reference to culturally
                      -c




constructed archetypes emerges as a mechanism for the naturalization of
                on




family models and parental roles, and of the complementarity of the atti-
            N




tudes attributed to the two genders themselves from a specific culture. The
paternal function is not only a model proposed to men but is part of a system
that structures the representation of the sexes: the maternal instinct and the
social role of the father, the social construction of paternity and the male
identity. The function of the father needs to represent the maternal as an
emasculating welcome, and the female as a biological function at the same
time carrying an annihilating potential of subjectivity. In this case, it is evi-
dent that the use of a theory justifying the complementarity between male
and female attitudes and functions has a specific value of ‘naturalization’ of
a socially constructed habitus.
   The removal of feminine subjectivity and desire refers to a maternal
dimension as founded on oblativity, unconditional welcome, a cure and a
service function that is implemented toward the infant, but also toward man
and that structures female sexuality as a ‘service sexuality’ and not as an
expression of subjectivity.
  Interpretive categories, implicit representations and resistance against violence in relationships 49



    This confuse historical construction with a reality that does not depend
on time or on different cultural forms: anthropology has taught us that sys-
tems of the symbolic construction of parenthood and processes of identifi-
cation belong to specific and historically determined social constructs.
    The reference to an archetypal reality based on complementarity, more-
over, stiffens differences in an identity form by reducing them to marked
destinies, it prevents the invention of new relationships and prevents the
recognition and meaning of the many novelties that emerge in male prac-
tices in parenthood. It is therefore necessary to be aware of the theoretical
implications of a reference to the value of male regulating ability, to the
symbolic paternal or to the model of virility as ‘resources’ in the fight
against male violence.
    The inferiorization and infantilization of women, resulting from this rep-




                                                                      ly
resentation, presuppose that women are placed under protection and guid-




                                                               on
ance. A male guardianship that can be paternal guidance, defended and sup-
ported by the husband or the State. But this protection, this safeguarding,

                                                   e
easily becomes control and often justifies the exercise of male violence as
                                                us
a ‘pedagogical’ tool in relations between the sexes, or as an exercise of
legitimate authority.
                                             al

    I often remember, in meetings on this subject, how our family code
                                         ci


before the 1975 reform, that is, the legislation governing family relation-
                                    er



ships and roles, provided for the exercise by the husband of the Ius corri-
                               m




gendi [the law that confirmed a right to correction], also through the use of
vis modica [moderate force] on children, but also towards the wife. Wife
                      om




and children placed under the guardianship, authority and control of the
pater familias [father of the family]. It is precisely this model that legit-
                 -c




imized the use of male violence in the face of female excess or female inca-
          on




pacity for self-control and returns to the imagination of men who justify
their violent behavior by the need to respond to women who are ‘exagger-
      N




ated’, irrational, exasperating and unable to stay in their place. If we were
to read a ‘clinical diary’ in a female asylum in the early 1900s we would
have read about ‘symptoms’ of women interned such as: petulant, gossipy,
flirtatious, nymphomaniac, chatty, irreverent, talkative, insolent, excited,
capricious…
    It is precisely the psychoanalytic reflection, however, that appears to be
a knowledge crossed by conflicts and epistemological perspectives that are
different and not homogeneous, that seem very articulated with regard to
the role of the mother and father figure in the processes of identification.
Manuela Fraire proposes psychoanalytic readings that instead see the moth-
er as herself the carrier of a ‘wound’ in the symbiotic correspondence in
which the child would be immersed imposing limits, interpretations and
meaning on the experience of subjectification of the infant: a rupture pro-
duced precisely by the sexuation of the mother and her unconscious inhab-
50                                     Stefano Ciccone



ited by sexual desire (Fraire, 2011). The ‘maternal pole’ does not remain
characterized by an oblative fagocitating tension and incapable of ‘order’,
but is recognized, by authors such as Laplanche, as the instigator of a strong
action of traumatic interpretation of the unexpressed needs of the infant and
thus an agent not at all reducible to silent satisfaction.
    The radicality we need, therefore, is not the removal of complexity but,
on the contrary, the ability to go to the root and recognize how much our
representations share the universe in which violence arises, such as the idea
of protection just mentioned. It is not a question of referring to relationality
by looking at the dynamics of that single relationship between two subjects,
but to the social context that determines the forms of relations between the
sexes: roles, expectations and power dynamics. Lea Melandri (2011) high-
lights precisely the link between sexual dualism, the myth of complemen-




                                                                         ly
tarity in the couple, and violence in her book with the significant title of




                                                                  on
‘Love and violence’ and in her previous text ‘How the dream of love is
born’. Even Oria Gargano, President of an important association committed

                                                       e
to the fight against male violence towards women, focuses on the love rela-
                                                    us
tionship not to ‘justify’ the violence that is produced in it but, on the con-
trary, to question our imagination associated with love:
                                                 al
                                             ci


     ‘If we really want to talk about violence against women, we must not do so with
                                        er



     the terms and images used by most, and not by chance adopted by the right to
     crystallize the phenomenon in a scenario of female misery and male cruelty, in
                                   m




     a constant echoing of rhetorical questions – Why? How come? What can we do?
                           om




     –, skillfully used to not really go into things, and to reduce the subject to an
     exception, an unforeseen epiphany of male folly and female submissiveness, as
     if the whole context in which we are all immersed was not yet based on the
                      -c




     power of men and the subordination of women, cornerstones of a social con-
                on




     struct that still acts as a reference structuring relationships within only apparent-
     ly updated power relations. […]
            N




     ‘This book proposes to profoundly analyse the concept of love, considering it a
     powerful concept that attracts, actualizes and perpetuates archaic content by frag-
     menting its value into a series of signifiers and effects – including male oppression
     behaviors and the female attitude to suffer and endure these. Can we dare say that
     violence is inscribed in romantic relationships, that the relationship of couples, as
     it has come to be structured, makes it systemic for the simple fact that it is right
     there that it manifests itself, within the couple?’ (Gargano, 2013, pp. 7,8).

   If violence challenges us, we must rethink about family, ‘romantic rela-
tionships’, love attitudes attributed to the two sexes. Rather than a relation-
ship that ‘explains’ violence on the basis of internal dynamics, it is violence
that questions our idea of relationship.
   Male violence in relationships is, of course, not just the violence that has
been perpetrated for years to assert, as we have seen, control over one’s
partner. Violence is exercised to defend one’s honor (often based on the
behavior of ‘one’s own’ women), it takes place in the competitive relation-
  Interpretive categories, implicit representations and resistance against violence in relationships 51



ship with other men, it arises when we cannot back down from a challenge
or an affront. Violence takes place in the ‘game between the parties’,
between the sexes, based on male conquest and female dissimulation, which
does not mean that no really is an expression of unwillingness.

     ‘The ideology of obstacle and deferral considers the précieuse as a feminine
     ideal because it says no, not the coquette, who always says yes. Now, the rules
     of dissimulation presuppose that no is turned into yes via the strategy of behav-
     iors in which it is assumed that sexual difference must be matched by an asym-
     metry of functions so that, in the end, the précieuse must still ‘yield’ but not turn
     into a coquette. From this point of view, the abuser is the one who discovers the
     ‘cards of the game’, in the sense of demystifying the dissmulatory ars [art] des-
     ecrating the rituality of appearance, that is, considering the exercise of ambiva-
     lence that exists in the ‘normal’ relationship between Ego and Alter as superflu-




                                                                      ly
     ous and irrelevant […]. No violence is given that the woman does not want and,
     on the other hand, that sort of arche that, in the reification of the female body,




                                                               on
     sees a principle of pleasure for the woman, independent of subjective and inten-
     tional determinations, as a result of the inevitable destiny of her physiological

                                                   e
     passivity’ (Ventimiglia, 1989, pg. 25).
                                                us
   In this construction, there is the social removal of female subjectivity
                                             al

that brings with it the removal of female desire: two images mother
                                         ci


(madonna) and prostitute. Two very different women, but united by their
                                    er



vocation for oblativity, two women who live according to the needs or
desires of the other and who sacrifice themselves in order to respond to the
                               m




other. Two women who, from my male point of view, will never say no.
                      om




     ‘To give in exchange for another’s sexual act not only one’s own sexual act, but
                 -c




     an additional gift, implies not recognizing the same urgency, necessity and
     autonomy to the sexuality of the other. This relationship model is linked to a
          on




     relationship of dominance that not only denies the autonomy of female sexuality
     but brings with it a representation of male sexuality. [Sexuality] is configured as
      N




     an asymmetric exchange. Men are asking for sexual intercourse that women do
     not want to concede. Not equal exchanges’ (Tabet, 2004, pg.157 et seq.).

    But, paradoxically, this construct, which represents women as ‘silent
bodies’, flips into the male perception of the ghost of a female power. If I
am the only person entitled to express a need and a desire and if this does
not involve reciprocity, I find myself squeezed into the pole of need and this
gives the woman power over me. The power of maternal care and the power
of female seduction, which infringe on my imagination of self-sufficiency,
of a self-governing subject, who is self-motivated and freely responsible for
one’s own choices and future. It brings out my vulnerability. Thus, the
mother, and more generally female care, that as Lea Melandri (2011)
observes, prolongs into adult life even though it has been removed and is
not recognized, becomes the ghost of suffocating fusionality that prevents
them from becoming adult and self-sufficient individuals. So, desire
52                                    Stefano Ciccone



becomes the instrument used by seduction at the service of the manipulative
female opportunism that exerts a power over us. How often is male violence
a violence against this inconceivable and unbearable female power over us?
    We could continue with a long list of different forms of violence related
to a dominant gender model. One particularly important form, for what it
tells us but also for the destructive and self-destructive charge that it
unleashes, is that which emerges in the face of the inability of many men to
accept the end of a relationship.
    The violence that explodes in the face of separation does not depend
only on the pain of abandonment, which applies to both sexes, but because
it questions my self-representation and the imagination I seek to become a
man, based on the removal of my vulnerability and dependence. When I dis-
cover the facade of that construct, that model that is based on being enough




                                                                       ly
for myself, being the master of myself, not needing anyone, that has been a




                                                                 on
pillar of my identity structure, an injunction that, since childhood, has guid-
ed my construct of myself, goes into crisis. Cristina Oddone (2020)

                                                      e
observes how violence can be understood by the author as a tool to restore
                                                   us
one’s correspondence to a model of hegemonic masculinity:
                                                al

     ‘As with other forms of male violence, intimate partner violence also proves to
                                            ci


     be an effective strategy to create gender and masculinity, in this case in the fam-
     ily sphere, in the closest relational environment – the couple, in the relationship
                                       er



     with a Woman – exemplary otherness of the male subject considered neutral and
                                  m




     universal. These particular male assaults seem to be aimed not only at women,
     but also in favor of an idealized self-image. […] Even in intimate relationships,
                          om




     violence shows its full strength, not so much or not only to dominate women,
     but to verify one’s masculinity against hegemonic models and to make oneself
                      -c




     recognizable as adult and heterosexual males, in one’s own eyes and in front of
     other men. […] If we look at the transformations of masculinity, the choice to
               on




     abandon violence in order to adopt alternative behaviors may in some cases lead
     to the active role of «heroes» replacing and contrasting with the passive role of
           N




     «martyrs» – dominated by their own violence and victims of their partner: pro-
     tagonists, dynamic, shrewd, committed with zeal and good faith to the perform-
     ance of masculinity thought of as «non-violent» and «renewed». From passive
     to active, the metamorphosis from martyrs to heroes makes it possible to replace
     violence with other features, positively connotated, of hegemonic masculinity:
     agency, the ability to act and resolve, the exercise of control over one’s life.
     Traits which, moreover, can be more fruitful than violence itself, in terms of
     patriarchal dividend’ (Oddone, 2020, pp. 127-129).

    We must therefore consider violence as a mirror that speaks of us and
overcomes certain temptations that lead us to alienate it from ourselves. The
temptation to naturalize it, to regard it as being inherent to our human con-
dition, which we can try to civilize, but which, as inevitable and constitutive
as the human experience, does not require being questioned but, if anything,
channeled and governed. This push comes, as we have seen, to read the
experience of birth also as an act of a subject that ‘tears’ the body of the
  Interpretive categories, implicit representations and resistance against violence in relationships 53



mother in order to be born. In reality, it is an experience that exposes the
total defenselessness of those who are born and the subjectivity of those
who give birth.
    Another temptation is to neutralize it, not to recognize its historical or
cultural connotations: a kind of original ‘energy’ inherent in the desired
drive, the engine of movement toward the other.
    When we encounter stories of violence, we are confronted with the need
to distinguish between conflict, assertiveness, desire and violence. Between
desire drive, aggression and violence, there is a qualitative divide that
implies a hierarchical relationship of domination, control, subordination or
fear. Moreover, the image of desire as an invasive and threatening drive for
the freedom and subjectivity of the other is built on a negative anthropolo-
gy, employed by liberal thought, whereby the report is always a threat to the




                                                                      ly
borders of the other and the freedom of each person is guaranteed by the




                                                               on
limits placed on the freedom of others.
    To obscure the cultural dimension of the forms of desire, of the images of

                                                   e
freedom and autonomy, of the models of assertiveness, is to produce a facade
                                                us
that crystallizes these forms, preventing a dynamic and critical reading.
    The need to avoid the temptation to neutralize violence, this specific
                                             al

form of violence, is well reflected in the warnings of the Council of Europe
                                         ci


Convention (2011), which specifically speaks of ‘gender-based violence’,
                                    er



both to indicate violence that has its roots in social family models, the rela-
                               m




tionship between the sexes and the attribution of attitudes and roles to the
two sexes, and in order to detect that this violence aims to perpetuate this
                      om




order and to maintain hierarchical relations between the sexes. (It recog-
nizes the structural nature of violence against women, as it is gender-based,
                 -c




and also recognizes that violence against women is one of the crucial social
          on




mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position com-
pared to men).
      N




    We must therefore recognize the structural nature of this violence,
which, starting from a socially and historically constructed order, repro-
duces this order.
    Why is it important to take this aspect into account? Sometimes people
say, ‘but there is also female violence’, ‘there is also violence between
men’, as if they want to point out, in a misunderstood search for ‘complex-
ity’, that violence is not a monopoly of one gender and so the condition of
‘victim’ is also not ascribed to just one gender. But when we talk about gen-
der-based violence, we do not generically refer to violence by one person
belonging to one gender on one person belonging to another gender, but we
highlight, make visible and therefore make object of reflection, the violence
generated by an order that builds, on the basis of gender, relations of power
and dominance.
    This includes the dynamics of female inferiorization but also forms of
54                                      Stefano Ciccone



male socialization. Bullying between males, for example, is a form of enacted
same-sex violence, but it is part of processes of reproduction of dominant
forms of masculinity, of inclusion in a model of masculinity, hegemonic stig-
matizing homosexuality, that is produced by differently from ‘femininity’ and
is based on competition, performance and the discipline of emotions.
    The apparent radicality of condemning ‘all forms of violence, without
stopping to distinguish their forms and causes, becomes in many male posi-
tions of resistance to change, the trigger to deny taking responsibility and
then arriving at an explicitly misogynistic and chauvinistic posture, as in
this passage from that which is called manosphere: (Ciccone, 2019)

     I am radically and secularly antiviolent, and I am proud of it; I remain so even
     if my neighbor manhandles his wife. I distance myself from anyone who perse-




                                                                         ly
     cutes, humiliates or mistreats any person, regardless. It is not a masculine inter-




                                                                   on
     pretation (masculine, another insult, a disgraceful slander opposed to a feminist,
     which is instead elevated to the Sign of the Righteous), the principle is the same
     whether the victim of violence is a man or woman, southern or northern, young

                                                        e
     or old, Italian or foreign. I am not interested in any classification of gender, reli-
                                                     us
     gion, age, sexual orientation or anything else, they are a person. And as a per-
     son, bearer of sacred rights.
                                                  al

     However, my motives are incompatible with the common feeling: I am indig-
     nant because the victim is a person, not because it is a woman. Instead, it seems
                                             ci


     I should be more indignant precisely because she is a woman, just as I should
                                        er



     feel guilty because she is a woman. One-way guilt, of course.
     Because the male-we know-is violent by nature, while the phenomenon of
                                   m




     inverted roles does not exist. Pink indignation imposed urbi et orbi [on every-
                           om




     one], the right to dissent is not contemplated, like autonomous thought, like the
     right to freedom to inform oneself in order to educate oneself.
                      -c




    By neutralizing violence, through a posture of general condemnation of
                on




all violence, I am carrying out an operation that removes the need for me to
            N




take responsibility. This way I do not see, I scotomize the cause of that vio-
lence and I can get out of it: of course, I am a male, but that is not why male
violence against women is my concern. A speech by the lawyer Taormina,
appeared in social networks in 2021, clarifies the ideological sense and the
outcome of this operation.

     ‘I am against violence in the same way, whether it is used against man or against
     woman. I consider murder to be a life sentence offense both when committed
     against man and woman. I therefore find it incomprehensible that there are laws
     which punish these crimes more seriously depending on whether they concern
     a man or a woman.
     The Italian criminal code is becoming intolerably contrary to the constitutional
     principle of equality between men and women, and the management of the trial
     has become an unacceptable form of violence against men because prosecutors
     and judges have invented a system of evidence for which women are right
     regardless and man is wrong regardless. The word of a woman is enough to sen-
     tence the man, even in the face of indisputable realities. In addition, women are
  Interpretive categories, implicit representations and resistance against violence in relationships 55



     assisted by organizations and committees that are under the substantial depend-
     ence of prosecutors and gather evidence at their leisure by preparing packages
     that become unbeatable in trials.
     It occurs mainly in sexual assault crimes where evidence is prepackaged and
     often fabricated through evidentiary hearings that cry for revenge and that result
     in the certain conviction in a trial where the judges never bother to check these
     dirty tricks’.

    The condemnation of violence, whether against a man or a woman, is an
opportunity for a ‘revolt’ against laws that would blame men, and against a
dominated culture that tends to undermine the social value of paternity.
    The removal of the social causes of violence thus leads, not to a deeper
understanding of it, we might say, ‘more radical’, but rather to an opposing
ideological operation.




                                                                      ly
    Recognizing the root of gender is not a way to push violence away from




                                                               on
me by placing it in a category: gender is my concern, it belongs to me it
calls me into question, it has shaped my way of being. It is not a question

                                                   e
of ‘anthropology’, understood in the colonial sense that it belongs to cul-
                                                us
tures that I observe from the outside as a phenomenon from which I am out-
side of: to call into question the gender nature of violence is to declare how
                                             al

I am engaged by it.
                                         ci


    It is, therefore, necessary to overcome the idea that in order to combat
                                    er



male violence, we must restore order. On the contrary, gender-based vio-
lence is the result of order and reproduces it. This applies both socially and
                               m




in the individual dimension in which man acts with violence to restore a
                      om




threatened identity and masculinity.
    This interpretation, according to which violence is the result of the loss
                 -c




of the ability to control drives, the loss of that ability to discipline, the eth-
          on




ical reference represented by the paternal norm, often stems from a refer-
ence to the psychoanalytic culture in order to lead to the diagnosis of the
      N




social crisis, as in this case of an article on the supplement ‘D’ of ‘La
Repubblica’ in July 2018.

     Gastaldi warns that the feeling of virility, which is in itself a good value, should
     not be reduced to one of its parts, that of power and effectiveness. Gastaldi cites
     feminicide, which almost always occurs at the same time as a couple’s separa-
     tion, as an inability of losing, thus as a lack of virility. And he reminds us of
     those rites of loss that once marked the male transition from childhood to ado-
     lescence. He concludes: «I hope for an awakening of fathers: to teach pain and
     impotence, otherwise the risk is the loss of the male, it is the aggressiveness of
     fragility» (Ciccone, 2019).

   This narrative involves three elements: the first is that there exists a male
polarity, owner of ethics, disciplining bodies and drives, and a female pole
of corporeality and emotion. Polarization also implies a hierarchy between
these poles.
56                                     Stefano Ciccone



    The second is that there is a naturalness of violence, its pulsational
nature and that culture contains it, the levees, the governments and therefore
the nostalgia for the loss of an order capable of regulating male bodies and
their impulses, but in the name of a more general function of discipline that
concerned the corporeality and therefore the female body.
    The limit we need is the ban imposed by the paternal norm, the limit set
in a world inhabited by silent female bodies available to our needs, and our
desires whose ‘consumption’, bulimic or infantile with losing effects, is
prohibited by the limit represented by paternal ethics? Why not think of the
limit as an opportunity, recognition of a bias, recognition of the fact that the
world is inhabited by another desire and another subjectivity, that that par-
ticular care does not come from a mother without desire and subjectivity,
and that that particular woman does not live according to my desire but is




                                                                         ly
the bearer of an autonomous desire? This allows me to expand my relation-




                                                                  on
ship opportunities, to enrich my sexuality, to have a different experience of
my own body. It is possible to conceive the limit not (only) as a frustrating

                                                       e
interdiction, giving up following a bulimic drive, but as a new experience
                                                    us
of the world and a new space for relationships. To be (also) the object of a
gaze, to be a territory.
                                                 al

    Michel Foucault recalls how the foundation of Western subjectivity is
                                             ci


based on an idea of self-domination as a condition of domination over the
                                        er



other:
                                   m




     The system of the Athenian city is for Foucault, the first place in which one invents
                           om




     a subjectivation: a line of forces that passes through the rivalry of free men.
     A man must dominate himself in order to rule over free men (Deleuze, 1989).
                      -c




    Dominating oneself, not in relation to one’s own body, but by basing
                on




one’s authority on the ability to dominate it and, by dominating it, domi-
            N




nates the woman reduced to a body.
    We should, then, try to think of different ideas of subjectivity in which
the body is in relation to the foundation of subjectivity. Not a subjectivity
that is assumed to be fully rational and transparent to itself in which desire
is a linear projection of oneself to the outside, but subjectivity rooted in the
body and which is not built by emancipating from it and which is founded
in the relationship and cannot be separated from the relationship.
    We therefore need to produce an idea of subjectivity that does not
remove our vulnerability and porosity. Recognizing that we are constitu-
tionally the fruit of the relationship built by the care and gaze of the other.
Accepting Butler’s solicitation, thinking of an opaque subject in itself can-
not rationally ‘account’ for the selves. A constitutionally relational being
against the destructive and self-destructive illusion of self-sufficiency, and
an idea of constitutional subjectivity in relation to the body beyond the illu-
sion, which also has a violent and alienating outcome of emancipating me
  Interpretive categories, implicit representations and resistance against violence in relationships 57



from it until it becomes foreign. At the same time, we need to recognize that
our desire is not the place of our authenticity, of our self-founded subjectiv-
ity, but always remains opaque to ourselves in its reasons and its roots.

     Even the subject is an entity opaque to itself, never fully self-transparent and
     knowable, [a] subject for which the ultimate meaning and intention of one’s
     own impulses do not become enigmatic only to the child, but to some extent
     remain so throughout life […]. Every impulse is besieged by an extraneity, or
     foreignness (ètrangèreté), and the ‘ego’ realizes it is a stranger to itself in its
     most elementary impulses […]. It cannot account for how an ‘ego’ has become
     capable of narrating itself […] [thus] desire retains this external and foreign
     quality even when it becomes the desire of the subject. [But] the idea of a sub-
     ject who is not self-founded, of a subject, that is, whose emergency conditions
     can never be totally narrated, undermines the possibility of a responsibility and




                                                                      ly
     therefore of the act accounting for the self? The opacity of the subject may orig-
     inate in its being conceived as a relational being’ (Butler, 2005).




                                                               on
    The need to rethink the model of subjectivity on which we have built the

                                                   e
hierarchy between male and female and which we have taken as a reference
                                                us
for masculinity emerges in the analysis of the destructive dynamics emerg-
ing in individual relationships but also, in a continuous link between the
                                             al

individual dimension and the social context in the analysis of the dynamics
                                         ci


of frustration and the pathological representations that feed nationalist pop-
                                    er



ulism in the face of the crisis of citizenship that assumed that model of cit-
                               m




izen as rational, self-sufficient and self-centered as a reference. What does
violence tell us in cases of femicide after which, not infrequently, perpetra-
                      om




tors commit suicide or surrender themselves to the police? That extreme
outcome shows something intolerable, an attack on identity that has to do
                 -c




with the weakness of the symbolic resources available.
          on




    The comparison with this phenomenon raises the need to build personal
resources and social resources to build a narrative that is different from that
      N




dead end.
    In this, it can help us to read the ‘male crisis’ and the related crisis of
social ties by not fueling the nostalgia of an order but, on the contrary, by
understanding how it reveals the inadequacy of a symbolic and an imagi-
nary in giving meaning to men’s lives. This requires critical reflection on
the role and social responsibility of psychoanalytic thought and psychology
in the face of a social question that seeks in this knowledge an answer to
one’s own loss, it is a re-interpretation of theoretical statutes and categories
based on archetypes and functions that risk crystallizing the reading of
change by referring to static functions.
    Rethinking the epistemology of one’s categories also means problema-
tizing the male gaze given to make it visible, ‘denaturalizing it.’ For exam-
ple: The idea that the woman represents otherness. If we dismiss the neu-
trality of a male gaze, we might say that the relationship with alterity is
58                                     Stefano Ciccone



instead within the female experience of bringing another life within herself
life that is part of herself and that is detached and differentiated from the
self. The feminine would be constitutionally related to the otherness and
does not correspond to otherness. On the contrary, we could reflect on how
much the condition of paternity corresponds to the experience of being the
‘third’, out of that ancillary relationship, an accessory.
    As a “Maschile Plurale”, we have always disputed a ‘psychologizing’
approach to violence because it seemed to us to carry with it the risk of
reducing violence to its individual and pathological dimension, removing
its cultural roots and thus removing the need for accountability and the need
for more general conflict and change.
    Perhaps we need to rethink this polarity with the contribution of some
authors such as Bourdieu or Butler who highlight the link between domain




                                                                        ly
relations, social productions and the psychic structure of individuals:




                                                                 on
     ‘Even when it seems to be based on naked force, that of weapons, or money, the

                                                       e
     recognition of dominion is the effect of a power, inscribed endlessly in the body
                                                    us
     of the dominated in the form of patterns of perception and dispositions (to admire,
     respect, love) that make them sensitive to certain manifestations of power. When
                                                 al

     the dominated apply to who dominates them patterns that are the product of the
     domination or, in other words, when their thoughts and perceptions are structured
                                            ci


     in accordance with the very structures of the domination relationship they under-
                                       er



     go, their acts of knowledge are, inevitably, acts of gratitude and of submission.
     But no matter how close the correspondence is between the realities or processes
                                   m




     of the natural world and the principles of vision and division applied to them,
                           om




     there is always room for a cognitive struggle over the meaning of things in the
     world and in particular sexual realities […] a possibility of resistance against the
     effect of symbolic imposition’ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 22).
                      -c
                on




    Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence refers to the psychic effect of
the domination that Butler mentions and allows us to interpret the complex-
           N




ity and ambivalence of relational dynamics without drawing from this some
‘radical’ reduction in our contrast to violence but, on the contrary, a more
radical reading of the forms of relationship in which it emerges:

     ‘The insistence on the affirmation that a subject is passionately attached to its
     subordination has been cynically invoked by those who seek to downsize sub-
     ordinate demands. Beyond this and contrary to this vision, I believe that attach-
     ment to subjugation is produced through the actions of power and that the work
     of power is partly exemplified precisely by this psychic effect, one of the most
     insidious of its productions’ (Butler, 1997).

   Recognizing the complexity of the dynamics of gender violence and
measuring ourselves with their roots leads us to question the limits of the
categories specific to our professionalism. If gender-based violence is a dis-
turbing phenomenon that engages us, one possible temptation is to use our
  Interpretive categories, implicit representations and resistance against violence in relationships 59



professionalism, the disciplinary categories available to us, to make it a
screen that protects us from confrontation with it. Competences thus
become not a tool to meet violence but a white coat that protects us from it,
objectifying it, placing it in a test tube: ‘you have a problem because you
can’t get out of an abusive relationship or because you can’t control your
impulses, and I have the resources to help you resolve it.’
    Part of this temptation is the use of standards and protocols that help us
contain, give a predictable shape and normalize the complexity of violence.
Systematizing that disturbing element by protecting my subjectivity.
Referring to a ‘cycle of violence’ that would repeat itself each time, allow-
ing us to predict or understand the evolution of events, to have author pro-
files to ‘explain them’, behavior classifications, to prepare tests and indica-
tors to measure risk…




                                                                      ly
    We must think that we need to add to professional competencies a per-




                                                               on
sonal awareness: Why do I do this work? Why did I choose to work with
violence? How does it stimulate me and what does it arouse? What is

                                                   e
inside me that emerges in this relationship? Not only: are we faced with the
                                                us
need to take on the bias of our point of view and our professional approach,
abandoning the idea that each or every one of us as a social worker, thera-
                                             al

pist or lawyer has the categories to understand and contain the problem and
                                         ci


the means to solve it. Everyone plays their part, there are those who decide
                                    er



whether to remove minors, who refers back to a judge, who enforces the
                               m




rules and decides the penalties, who produces the report as a technical con-
sultant, but all of these figures need to recognize that the problem does not
                      om




end in its own fragment, and they must be able to meet the challenge of the
complexity of a multifactorial phenomenon that requires a multidiscipli-
                 -c




nary approach.
          on




    Gender-based violence, therefore, produces a desire for extraneity, it
questions our epistemological and professional categories, asks us to do a
      N




job that confers the individual stories we encounter with the social and cul-
tural context that we live in. To do this, we need to innovate our tools and
our views.
    Women have produced collective knowledge and practices to put
women’s experience into words and give them new meanings. There is still
a vacuum of male thinking, words and practices that needs to be filled, by
bringing into play a new awareness and accountability, but also a new desire
to change their lives.
60                                            Stefano Ciccone



                                             REFERENCES

Bourdieu, P. (1999). La domination masculine, Seuil, Paris, tr. it., Il dominio maschile, Feltrinelli,
    Milano.
Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself, trad. it. Critica della violenza etica, Feltrinelli,
    Milano, 2006.
Butler, J. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
    1997. (Tr. It., La vita psichica del potere, Meltemi editore Roma, 2005.)
Ciccone, S. (2019). Maschi in crisi? Oltre la frustrazione e il rancore, Rosenberg &Sellier, Torino.
Convenzione del Consiglio d’Europa sulla prevenzione e la lotta contro la violenza nei confronti
    delle donne e la violenza domestica, 2011. https://rm.coe.int/16806b0686
Deleuze, G. (1989). Che cos’è un dispositivo?, Cronopio, Napoli.
Fraire, M. (2011). L’oblio del padre, Rapsodia, rete di psicanalisi, arte e vocalità.
Gargano, O. (2013). Seduzioni d’amore, Per una narrazione non convenzionale della violenza
    contro le donne, Sapere Solidale, Roma.




                                                                                 ly
Haraway, D.J. (1995). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Femminism in
    the Late Twentieth Century in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, tr.




                                                                            on
    it. Manifesto cyborg. Donne, tecnologie e biopolitiche del corpo, Feltrinelli, Milano.
Melandri, L. (2011). Amore e Violenza. Il fattore molesto della civiltà, Bollati Boringhieri.

                                                               e
Oddone, C. (2020). Uomini normali. Maschilità e violenza nell’intimità, Rosenberg & Sellier,
                                                            us
    Torino.
Pitch, T. (2018). Che ha a che fare questo con la libertà delle donne? (e di tutt*?), post pubblicato
                                                         al

    in Studi sulla questione criminale online, consultabile al link https://studiquestionecriminale.
    wordpress.com/2018/07/20/che-ha-a-che-fare-questo-con-la-liberta-delle-donne-e-di-tutt-di-
                                                    ci


    tamar-pitch/
                                              er



Recalcati, M. (2011) Cosa resta del padre? La paternità nell’epoca ipermoderna, Raffaello Cortina
    Editore, Milano.
                                         m




Risè, C. (2004). Il padre. L’assente inaccettabile. Ed. San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo.
                                om




Tabet, P. (2004). La grande beffa. Sessualità delle donne e scambio sessuo-economico, Rubbettino,
    Soveria Mannelli (CZ).
Ventimiglia, C. (1988) La differenza negata. Ricerca sulla violenza sessuale in Italia Franco
                           -c




    Angeli, Milano.
                   on




Zoja, L. (2000). Il gesto di Ettore. Preistoria, storia, attualità e scomparsa del padre. Bollati
    Boringhieri, Torino.
               N




Conflict of interests: the author declares no potential conflict of interests.

Ethics approval and consent to participate: not required.

Received: 3 January 2023.
Accepted: 14 March 2023.

Editor’s note: all claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily
represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, editors and reviewers, or any
third party mentioned. Any materials (and their original source) used to support the authors’ opinions
are not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
©Copyright: the Author(s), 2023
Licensee PAGEPress, Italy
Ricerca Psicoanalitica 2023; XXXIV:756
doi:10.4081/rp.2023.756

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
