TO think of the question of the tendency for retribution from the point of view of the victim of child sexual abuse is to ask a question about the way children experience both love and violence. Sudhir Kakar, the noted psychoanalyst has written extensively on the ‘inner world’ of Indians. In this brief accompanying interview he connects the various strands that make up the question of the appropriateness of death penalty for perpetrators of sexual abuse. His responses assume significance in view of the clamour to legitimize the death penalty across the world and specifically in India.

In this brief note accompanying his thoughts I will draw upon the larger body of his own writing and the work of other eminent psychoanalysts to elaborate upon his thoughts. First, I will highlight some significant issues raised in the interview that reflect on the specificities of the problem in India. I will then argue that the desire for death penalty is a search for retribution that is an understandable response to the trauma and pain of sexual abuse. However, to acknowledge the desire for retribution must not imply the acceptance of the practice of death penalty. It is here that it seems necessary to introduce a psychoanalytic reading of the human psyche, particularly in relation to its origins in infancy and childhood.

At the beginning of the interview Kakar notes that there are frequent references to experiences of abuse amongst his adult clients. He also notes the distinction between sexual abuse and incest. While the physical impact of both may be comparable, incest, where a member of the child’s own family is the perpetrator of the abuse, is likely to be a more complex experience for a child. In noting the frequent mention of abuse and incest in his practice, he acknowledges the presence of sexual abuse in families in India. The Indian family, despite critiques from feminists, has been widely described as an ideal structure that protects its members from emotional insecurity and psychological damage. The family in India is no more holy than that found elsewhere.

Second, like contemporary psychoanalysts elsewhere, Kakar recognizes that when people speak of abuse, they are not referring to fantasized states alone. This reiteration becomes significant when it comes from a psychoanalyst simply because of the controversy around Freud’s writing on abuse. Freud began his work by noting the presence of sexual abuse in the worlds of the hysteric women he saw as patients. However, he reversed this position as he began to rework his understanding of the fantasy life of the child. Freud’s apparent denial of the presence of sexual abuse became a rallying point for critics of psychoanalysis who saw this as his support for the institution of the family.

 

In mentioning the frequency with which clients who come to him speak of child sexual abuse, Kakar gives recognition to the presence of this as a part of the reality of his patients lives. At the same time, he suggests that there is a striking variability in the manner in which sexual abuse is interpreted by the person who experiences it. Further, there may be great cultural variability in the understanding of what constitutes abuse as well as on what might be seen as reparative. In cultures such as ours where familial ideology dominates, the imposition of a death penalty on the abuser could in fact contribute to considerable guilt in the survivor. The idea of death penalty for the perpetrator of sexual abuse on his or her own kin may therefore be thought of as absurd.

In the remaining part of this note, I will elaborate upon the absurdity of the claim that the survivor will find retribution in seeing the death of his or her perpetrator. This does not imply that survivors may not wish for the death penalty. Let me depart from Kakar’s argument here for a moment and ask: what if the survivor does express desire for the death of an abusive member of the family? Would that be good reason to support the idea of death penalty? In order to attempt an answer to this question, I will return to the question of the experience of love and rage in the child’s psyche. I will also return to the question of discourse in constituting the desire for retribution.

When Freud created the tripartite imagination of the psyche, he provided us with the possibility of seeing the human condition as vacillating between the possibilities of connection and aggression, of instinctuality and creative sublimation, of violence and compassion. This complexity of humans comes from the inseparability and intertwining of the sources of goodness and evil. The emergence of compassion and empathy are achievements that human civilizations have a potential for, but it is one that is constantly under threat from our more destructive capabilities.

 

More significantly psychoanalysis, particularly as developed by later thinkers such as Melanie Klein, conceives of the interpenetration of the internal and the external in the infant’s world. Setting aside the variations amongst theorists one might argue that our sense of ourselves and of others is co-constituted. The experience of the self arises from the experience of the body and of the world of persons that are involved with the body. External stimuli including the people who make up the external world are introjected to become a part of who we are. Klein and those who follow in her tradition think of the ambiguous terrain of infancy in terms of primitive affect constituted by need, insecurities, and the body’s incapacity to express itself in any clear mode.

In the inchoate world of the infant, the state of unmet need is likely to be experienced as rage projected outwards and onto the figure of the caretaker, producing a responsibility in the caretaking part of this relationship to generate a set of actions to try to meet and aim at satisfying this state. The desire to kill and hurt is a part of the world of young infants and children. As any observer of young children knows, they can be enraged. Fantasies of killing parents are expressed both in children’s play and in their speech. However, these very same desires are also intensely painful, frightening and evoke guilt because of the dependency and emerging love for the caretaking figure.

Its primitiveness is further compounded since the ambiguous states generated in the infant may spread into a limitless chaotic mismatch every now and then. Feminist writer and poet, Adrienne Rich writes of anger and tenderness as coexisting experiences for the caretaker. Much depends however on the caretaker having received the benevolent caring that enables her or him, to become capable of holding the child’s rage, becoming for a brief while an object the child can use to attain a sense of self, without the fear that they may destroy the very persons on whom they are so dependent. The child’s own anger towards parental figures also becomes the source of guilt towards them. Love, anxiety, guilt and rage thus exist simultaneously but can rarely be experienced together.

 

If the complexity described above is the usual staple of human experiences, one might imagine how much more complex it might become where caretaking persons have defaulted on their primary responsibility of maintaining boundaries. Caretakers are required to be the object the child acts upon. Unfortunately, they often enact their sexual or angry impulses upon the child. In such instances, the world of the child becomes chaotic and confusing. Rather than knowing that love can be experienced with safety in a trustworthy environment, the child grows up not knowing where to feel angry and whom to love. The ambivalences characteristic of all human relationships are magnified for those who have been abused and intense feelings of rage can accompany deep feelings of guilt.

Our propensity for conflict and ambivalence does not imply that we will not at times experience only rage or only guilt. Rather mechanisms such as splitting that are used by the psyche to negotiate these conflicted states can result in a relatively pure state of rage to be followed by equally intense guilt. Melanie Klein writes about two psychical positions that human beings employ to deal with unconscious feelings. In the paranoid schizoid position there is a clarity that the world is made up of good people and bad people. Occupying the paranoid schizoid position reduces the anxiety caused by the pain of trauma and the confusion caused by the sometimes good feelings one may have for the abuser. There may also be a belief that if all bad people could be killed the world would be a good place to inhabit.

 

The depressive position recognizes the greyness of the world in which we are all sometimes loving, tender and caring and at other times greedy, vicious and violent. For the abused child and for those protecting persons who have felt the violation done to their loved ones, occupying the paranoid schizoid position can be a source of survival. Their demand for death for the abuser can therefore be understood as a response to the unbearable pain they have experienced. The question may nevertheless be asked, will this take away the pain of what has already happened? Will the enactment of one part of the split truly address the dependency and love that was also encountered at the same time?

Would not greater healing happen when the abused person can feel that sexual violation does not imply that all of her has been destroyed, that her anger and pain is justified, that the world has been unfair and that relationships have proved to be untrustworthy. In the interview, Sudhir Kakar brings the concept of familism into play. He also provides readers with an ideal that requires families and persons to recognize the survivor’s trauma and to publicly regret that this has happened. Such a process would also shift the focus from two individuals, the abuser and the survivor to the family as a system, thus diffusing the possibility of guilt in the abused.

 

A haunting image from West Delhi’s Burari interrupts the imagination of the familial involvement in care for a survivor that transcends the narrow pursuit of family honour. The image is of 11 members of the family hanging themselves on a day and date decided by one male member’s apparently spiritual search. The terrible truth is that two young children, one an adolescent and several women agreed to be a part of the bizarre ritual. Although it is too early to ascertain the true facts of the case, if these were indeed suicides inspired by a man in a ritualistic communication with his dead father, it is noteworthy that no one in the family spoke about the strange behaviour outside it.

Patriarchal cultures often support a culture of silence. Even where the victim/survivor is not blamed, she is rarely encouraged to speak out. In such a context the ideals of the depressive position are twisted to protect the family. This can work particularly well in a moral order that is relativistic and contextual but often revalidates hierarchies of age and gender. One of the difficulties of familism is the absence of space for anger, particularly when it is expressed upfront, verbally and with a demand attached to it. Because much of family life in India is based on the maintenance of hierarchy and solidarity, overt expressions of differences are not tolerated well.

The death penalty understood psychologically is the desire to eliminate the sources of violence and hurt that have caused damage to us. This desire needs to be held and received. Unfortunately, many survivors of sexual violence have been failed by their family in this matter. As faculty in colleges and universities we are accustomed to hearing such stories of disappointment. It is difficult for children to understand what constitutes abuse. However, it is not uncommon to hear that when they confide, most often in their mothers, they are accused of eliciting the abuse because of their own behaviour. The problem is compounded when the perpetrator is a member of the family, particularly when he is older and a ‘respected’ member of the community. In many ways the scene in a family where CSA happens is the reverse of the ideal family where children can express both desire and rage expecting it to be contained and shaped towards a greater purposefulness by the adults around them.

For those who can take their abused selves to therapy or sometimes to therapeutic environments, trust and hope can be gradually restored in the knowledge that not all we turn to for care will be disappointing. For the rest, the rage will sometimes turn inwards and take the form of depression and suicide. In others it will be anger and the desire for punishment. The desire is to eliminate the other who has destroyed one but also to somehow extinguish the pain the abuse has caused.

 

The internal contradictions of the psyche cannot form the basis of action in the absence of discourse. It is discourse that enables fantasy to become idea. With conservative governments emerging across the world there is a growing fascination for absolute truths, a clearly defined moral order that demarcates the world into the virtuous and the evil and a commitment to absolute measures such as the death penalty.

The dominant discourse around death penalty seems to be that of cleansing society of evil persons and recreating a utopian world of goodness. Proponents of death penalty, regardless of the issue for which it is deemed appropriate, assume that the imposition of the penalty on accused will act as a deterrent and sexual abuse will therefore decline. Further it is assumed that causing pain to another will take away the injury that one has experienced. For victims of child sexual abuse and incest, the singularity of the discourse can help at least momentarily to silence the ambivalent, conflictful experience of abuse.

Yet a careful analysis will reveal that such an analysis locates the blame for violence exclusively on the individual. There is a search for a cause, the personality of the abuser, his upbringing, drugs, alcohol and so on that may help us come to terms with the disease called sexual abuse. Little attention is paid to the social conditions that produce the problem. The method also has another advantage, it allows us to distantiate ourselves from our own capacities, both for inappropriate desire and murderous rage.

The opposite of this might be the attitude of forgiveness. This is what families, at their best, request survivors to reach. However, turning too quickly to forgiveness involves a denial of the toxicity that a survivor bears in his/her body. For those of us with a psychological bent of mind, forgiveness can come only through an encounter with grief and rage. This requires family, friends, mentors, teachers and therapists to walk the journey of pain with the abused. For the survivors themselves, this will perhaps call for connecting with others’ rage and grief, asking not why I suffer but why, as the Buddha suggests, do humans suffer?