Marie-France Hirigoyen/The Victim

This author, Marie-France Hirigoyan, is a noted psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and family therapist, who writes with authority about the complexities of the abuser and the victim in personal relationships and in the workplace.  The title of the book I am blogging about today is Stalking The Soul, Emotional Abuse and the Erosion of Identity. She argues that emotional abuse is equally violent as physical abuse.  "It is a crime whose aim is, she says "a virtual murder of the soul."  If one is to define soul as Carl Jung did, the Soul is the Self.


The attributes of the victim are given a detailed analysis in her book, and it's one that explains more than most regarding the disposition and faults of this object of the abuser.

The nature of the abusive attack lies in aiming at the other's vulnerability, where weakness or pathology exists.  Every individual exposes a weak point that the abuser will hammer away at.  Just as a climber hooks into the fault in the mountainside, so an abuser uses the other's faults.  An abuser shows tremendous intuition about where the weaknesses lie, finding how best to hurt and wound.  In some cases, the fault can be exactly the one a victim refuses to acknowledge in herself, and the abusive attack becomes a painful revelation.  It can also be a symptom that the victim tried to minimize or regularize, which the abusive attack reactivates. (pp.137-138)

It makes sense then, that the victim's response to the abuser is less than self protective. She is injured in a way that causes doubt and self recrimination. It is an unfair hitting below the belt.

In an abusive relationship, the balanced equation disappears, replaced by the dominance of one partner over the other and the impotence of the subjected partner to react and stop the struggle.  This is primarily why we are dealing with real attacks on a person's identity.  By previously establishing control the power to say no was taken away.  Everything is dictated with no possibility for negotiation. (p.140)

I think this explanation is a good one, a true one, and it is an opportunity for all of us to see that the subjected partner (victim) is crippled somewhat by the location of the blow, making is that much harder to see that she has choices.  She is struck by her abuser and simutaneously by herself. It's an eloquent description of a bully. 


Re-reading this post reminds me that my partner was a notorious bully in school and had many behavioral problems as a child.  These traits were quieted when we met and I fell for what I thought was a goodness in him that in fact was feigned as a tool of seduction.  I was clueless.