Too Close For Comfort: Psychoanalytic Cultural Theory and Domestic Violence Politics

Abstract

This paper takes up a series of questions concerning the narrating of domestic abuse, seeking a rapprochement between psychoanalytic cultural theory and domestic violence politics. The paper makes use of a line of psychoanalytic theory pursued by Frances Restuccia (2000) as point of departure, introducing alternative pathways for navigating between psychoanalytic cultural theory and a feminist politics of battering. The paper unpacks the narrative strategies deployed in the domestic violence movement, starting with the work of Lenore Walker on the “battered woman syndrome” and extending into the work of Ellen Pence and Michael Paymar, whose “power and control” model displaced the psychiatric discourses underpinning the work of Walker. In bringing psychology back into analyses of stories about battering, the paper closes with a psychoanalytic-feminist reading of a film discussed by women's advocates in the course of the author's domestic violence research carried out at the Pine Ridge Reservation in the United States.