Men Who Batter Women

Adam Edward Jukes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317725657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Men who Batter Women presents a unique psycho-analytic perspective on clinical studies of the roots of male violence towards women.
Most published work concentrates on the experiences of the female victims of domestic violence. This book is unusual in that it focuses on the male perpetrators. Adam Edward Jukes considers both feminist approaches to male violence and those perspectives that treat such violent behaviour as pathological. The author suggests the practical implications of his research for clinical treatment and explores how effectively psychotherapy can be used to treat men who batter women.

1 Introduction

I had intended to subtitle this book ‘Living in the bubble’ to reflect what I see as a basic element of the personality structure of men who abuse women — or indeed of the many men who commit violent crimes against other people. Even now, after more than five years of working with the ‘bubble’ as an operational concept of significant clinical value, it becomes difficult to define in a way which encapsulates all its nuances. That it derives from women’s understanding of chauvinism and the ideology of sexism and psychoanalytic thinking about narcissism and dissociation will become clear. I will begin this study with some simple examples which illustrate what it means to work with a man who is in a bubble. A great deal of the remainder of this book will be an attempt to elaborate and explain its origins and its praxis.

‘She has no voice and cannot speak.’ Anyone familiar with recent developments in psychoanalysis, particularly the French variety, will know what this means. For the uninitiated it refers to a complex set of discourses about the construction of femininity and masculinity and the way these are understood by the psychoanalytic community. As I understand it, the phrase itself, first used by the psychoanalyst Lacan, means that since women never enter the symbolic order begun by the little boy’s initiation into the social world through his identification with the father (who is outside the child’s relations to the mother) which takes him away from the ‘imaginary’ realm of the relation with the mother, she is in effect denied her entry into language. I am aware that it gives great pleasure to write in an obfuscating and esoteric way about the mist of gender, and for a man, even one publicly committed to the loosening of the categories, it is strangely reassuring to read Lacan’s accounts of femininity. His text has the effect of bolstering my maleness, not undermining it. Could it be that he himself, in writing from within the categories, as a man, and in his attempt to reposition the masculine in psychoanalytic theory and practice, actually was more invested in reinforcing than subverting them?

Although it is not the central aim of this book, it is germane to its main theme to try to understand what is the significance of women’s muteness for ordinary women in their relations with men. Let me give a few simple non-esoteric examples of how I believe it works in practice. These case studies have another purpose. They are intended to introduce the reader into the idea of what I call bubble perceptions, that for an abusive man there is only one reality and it is ‘here, behind my eyes’.

The first concerns a man who attended, two years ago, a three day long workshop I conducted on the subjects of male aggression and sexuality. He had been in therapy with another man for about three years and during that time had been abusing his wife, mainly emotionally and verbally, but also on occasion, violently. She was very angry with him about his abusiveness and his therapy was having little effect on his behaviour. He began by saying that he was out of control when he acted abusively but we succeeded in confronting his denial to the point where he acknowledged that his behaviour was decisive and instrumental. Subsequently, on the first day, actually within a suspiciously short time, he managed to make public a decision to give up his abuse. The next day he reported how when he had informed his partner of his decision she had become very angry rather than grateful as he expected. Apparently she had said that it was typical of his lack of respect for her that he should spend one day with a powerful man and make such a decision when she had been saying the same things to him for years, fruitlessly. She had said that it simply underlined the seriousness of the problem that he should ignore her for so long and yet be so influenced by me.

Is it that she had no voice or that he could not listen? Is there any difference? Are women mute or men deaf? I could multiply this example a thousand-fold and each story would be the same: that the men I work with, and they are apparently no different from other men, do not listen to their partners. This deafness does not simply apply to the problems in the relationship identified by the woman, it applies to their politics, their sexuality, their careers, their everyday concerns — in fact seemingly to everything that goes on in women’s heads.

The second example concerns me. It illustrates what I believe is an abiding concern to all men, that of the fear of woman’s separateness. It occurred when I was travelling on an underground train from Heathrow airport to central London. It was a beautiful sunny day. In the carriage was a group of eight French women all aged around 35. The carriage was full of their luggage and they were clearly about to begin their holiday. A quick glance confirmed a thought that they were all married, or at least wearing wedding rings. Why did I look for this evidence? Was it my chauvinism, my need to confirm that they were safely possessed? Thinking about it at the time I realised it was because they were so happy. They talked non-stop in a very animated fashion, the conversation being picked up and handed on freely (in a way which I believe is impossible for men), with much laughter and physical contact. I speak only school French and was excluded from the conversation, if not from the wonderful energy and pleasure they shared with the whole carriage. I was thinking ‘is this what it is like to have no voice?’. The happiness is important. It led me to thinking about their supposed muteness. Perhaps, I thought, nobody has told them that they have no voice. Also, the absence of men struck me as crucial. I had the feeling that I know many men have in such circumstances, that women share a secret language from which men are not simply excluded but simply cannot learn, that we are constitutionally incapable of learning. Of course it is our anatomy which excludes us, even when we are driven to desperate measures such as cross-dressing or masochism. The language is not a language of men, the symbolic of the social order or Law, it is a language about men, predicated on women’s shared and intimate knowledge about us, the contradictions, the frailty, our bullying, our insecurities, our fractured selves. It saddened me, this awareness, not only because of my exclusion, and the knowledge that any attempt to include myself would lead to these women changing tongues (not simply from one language to another, but the switch to a tongue which they know is the only one men can communicate in), but also that they can never speak it with men. The presence of men makes women mute, silences their voice, forces the use of the secondary, ordered symbolic. I believe also that it is the voice of ‘jouissance’, a voice of joy and of openness, rhythm and flow. This is why I looked for the wedding rings, which they all wore. Their voices seemed to me to be the voices of the newly released prisoner, anticipating the denied pleasure to come, the desire acknowledged, the voice heard.

The question which is still with me is to what extent this is predicated on, actually needs the deaf man to exist. I have to believe this, if only because of my firm commitment to the social construction of gender. What this means is that I am committed to the notion that there is nothing innate, that the categories masculine and feminine are a forced division of dubious evolutionary status which now have the effect of bestowing legitimacy on forms of behaviour which might otherwise be highly questionable. I do not believe that there is an innate sense that we belong to either category.

Another case history illustrates everything that this book is about. In particular it illustrates how ‘reaction formation’, in this case compulsive helpfulness, can be used to defend against very violent and aggressive feelings and impulses. As usual the man functioned without any awareness at all of its underlying motivation. His true motives were neatly encapsulated and denied, but broke through with regular ferocity. The nature of the bubble is illustrated sharply here. It concerns a successful entrepreneur in his late thirties who was referred to me by a psychiatrist with whom he had sought a consultation. In recent months he had physically attacked his wife of ten years when they had been arguing. The argument had gone on most of the evening and he had eventually fallen asleep on the bed. He woke to find her leaning over him and shouting, apparently continuing the argument. He had grabbed her by the throat and, choking her, had pushed her upwards against the wall whilst lifting her by the neck. During our first consultation he informed me that this was his second marriage and that he had broken his first wife’s cheekbone with a blow from his fist. His account was long and difficult to follow. It was clear that he and his present wife were tearing each other apart emotionally and that this was not his first attack on her. The relationship was the worst possible mixture of projective and introjective indentifications with all the boundary confusions one might expect. They had been in each other’s company, virtually exclusively, for the whole of their relationship to the point where his various businesses were suffering financially from inadequate management and supervision. She had finally left him after this last attack and he came to me in a state of great confusion. His account was that if she were less aggressive and argumentative they could have a good relationship.

His background is quite disturbed. It involves a lot of loss of significant others during the first two years, including father and a second mother figure. Later his stepfather had him sent to boarding school with his mother’s collusion because the stepfather could not tolerate his presence and consistently humiliated and rejected him. The patient hated his present relationship but was completely unable to end it, as apparently was she. He insisted he was in love with her in spite of everything. He described how when he had met her that she had been very depressed and he had taken it on himself to cure her. After a short time, during which she pursued him obsessively (this was typical of his denial during his early sessions), he fell in love with her and left his then live-in partner to be with her. As he put it, she became his ‘project’, his aim being to make her happy. He began to devote enormous amounts of time and energy to lifting her depression and raising her self-esteem. Apparently her depression lifted and she became increasingly involved in his business affairs, initially at her insistence, according to him. However, she failed to carry out her responsibilities and his businesses began to suffer. Seemingly, her depression made way for a great deal of undifferentiated anger and employees and colleagues began to experience difficulties with her. Their relationship deteriorated and they spent much of their time quarrelling, with him becoming increasingly violent and abusive. He acknowledged that he had become very disappointed when she had not become the happy person he wanted her to be. He was able to see that his expectations of her had changed substantially and that he had ceased to provide her with the degree or quality of support with which he had begun the relationship.

On the face of it he had a strong case for her being the cause of most of the problems in the relationship. The picture he painted was grim. She had upset most of his colleagues and employees, failed to present business accounts and consequently got him into legal trouble, constantly criticised him and generally blamed him for the sorry state of their relationship and her moods. He was obsessional in the detail with which he presented her shortcomings. His resentment of her failure to appreciate his efforts on her behalf and to provide him with the love he had never had was overwhelming. Surprisingly, he was completely unaware of this until I pointed it out. By this point in the relationship he was almost incapable of conversing with her without getting angry, and in very short order. He interpreted everything she did or said from the most negative perspective possible and was convinced she consciously wished to ruin him. It was very difficult for him to focus on his difficulties in the relationship, particularly his violent and abusive behaviour. Instead he constantly recounted her shortcomings and the catalogue of ways in which she failed him or hurt him. I cannot portray the intensity with which he did this. He was clearly very hurt and disappointed by her behaviour. When I asked him if he was as judgmental with her as he was about her in my presence, he smiled ruefully and agreed that was so. He then had no difficulty in seeing that even discounting his violence this might go a long way to explaining why she was so angry and ‘aggressive’. His initial denial of any contribution to the problems in the relationship began to give way as I consistently and firmly challenged his preoccupation with her behaviour. I had already informed him of my working hypothesis and he had agreed to follow it in a spirit of experimentation. Put simply it is that since his partner was not present and we were powerless to change her, we should assume (ridiculous as it is) that he was 100 per cent responsible for any problems between them and try to understand how he was creating them. He seemed to rather enjoy the intellectual challenge this provided. For example, when he talked about how angry she seemed, I reminded him of his violence and asked him how often he was angry with her. It emerged that angry feelings were the only ones he expressed to her. She had never seen any of his anxiety (which was plentiful) or his sadness and grief which were profound. He had been incapable of thinking about why she might be the way she was, other than in pathological terms of her being sick or crazy (with which all his colleagues agreed). The fact is that since they began the relationship his agenda was the only one they had followed. She had fitted into his life completely. He had made no allowances for any of her desires except to be with him. He had sacrificed nothing. These ways of thinking about the past were a revelation to him. They opened his eyes to the narrowness of his perceptions and the fact that he actually knew very little about her because he had always assumed that she was an extension of him, wanted what he wanted, felt what he felt, believed what he believed etc. The only voice she had (and here we might ask questions of her which may be relevant) was the voice of her anger and frustration, a voice to which he was completely deaf.

The similarity with the first example may be clear — his inability to see the world through her eyes. Actually, this is a major developmental failure suffered by the vast majority of men I see. It is the failure to have developed the notion that other people have minds and mental states of their own — usually indicative of failure in early relationship with primary caregivers (Marrone 1998, p. 69). Helping men to develop this capacity is a major goal of treatment.

The next case history illustrates how this developmental lack, coupled with normal male chauvinism and abusive behaviour can place a woman in a situation where the only way she can be sane is to define herself as mad. The client is a middle aged accountant who will also appear later in a different context. Briefly, he had been abusing his partner in a variety of ways, most seriously by conducting a secret affair for many years. She had long suspected and finally found irrefutable proof with which she confronted him. He steadfastly maintained his denial and told her she was imagining things. She refused to desist and he began to violently abuse her. This went on for some months before he finally came to me. By that time she was feeling suicidal. He attended an anti-abuse programme and had not been abusive since he began. They had in fact spent a great deal of time discussing his behaviour and its painful consequences for her. He had felt genuine remorse and guilt about the suffering he had caused her. After about two months into the programme he told of having abused her again by banging a table and approaching her with violent intent. He had seen the fear in her face and stopped, apologised and informed her that he needed to take ‘Time Out’ (an anger management technique) to think about what he was doing. He had banged the table after she had become angry with him when another of a long running series of consequences of his affair had come to light and she became angry and confronted him. This happened frequently, as one might expect. The issue he wished to talk about in the group was his ‘…desire to move forward in the relationship and her constant need to look backward’. As he put it, he was struggling with coming to terms with his past abuse and his almost obsessive need to control her and he could not understand why she insisted on raking over his past misdeeds.

Sounds reasonable doesn’t it? And he is the very epitome of reasonableness (see Seidler 1994). This is a perfect example of bubble behaviour, a combination of blind egotism, selfishness and narcissism where it is assumed that there is only one point from which to view reality and it is ‘here, behind my eyes’. He has actually assumed the moral high ground in a way which is socially syntonic. We all know that it is good to want to move forward in relationships don’t we? We all know that raking over unhappy experiences is bad and can have destructive consequences don’t we? As he innocently asked ‘If she really wanted the relationship to succeed why does she behave in this way? I’m doing everything I can to listen to her and not be controlling.’ At various points in the narrative, other men in the group were nodding vigorously. Many of them had the same difficulty. Perhaps the reader can anticipate my analysis of this event. The most striking thing about it, and there are many, is his assumption that he knows not only what constitutes moving forward, but that he also knows the best way to do so. She, meanwhile, is misled, destructive, rather insensitive and stupid not to be able to see the sense in his analysis of the situation. Her way of proceeding, or being in the relationship, is not moving forward at all, but regressive. He does not think he is elevating himself into a superior position, implicitly showing contempt for her or discounting her feelings and thoughts or needs. He believes he is simply being reasonable and concerned for what is best for both of them. He fails to see why she does not agree with him. My comment on hearing all this was ‘why is it that her insistence on talking about her pain and your abuse is not a way of moving forward? How come what you want is the only way to move forward and that you are the only one who knows what is needed for that?’ The effect of this remark on this unusually laconic, passive man, was dramatic. His mouth dropped open. ‘I’m astonished’, he said, ‘I simply had never thought of it in that way.’ It was clear to me that his astonishment was genuine. It was as if another reality, whose existence he had never suspected, had been revealed to him. It was like a deaf person being given hearing for the first time. For a moment his cognitive bubble had been broken. He saw a reality at right angles to the one he had always assumed was the only one - HIS. However, one should not be deceived into believing that this insight would have shattering permanent consequences. Experiences of this sort are common with abusive men. As in analysis they have to happen many times and be worked through from different perspectives and situations before the penny finally drops and a permanent change occurs.

The next example comes from work with a man who is not in an anti-abuse programme but ongoing twice-weekly analytic therapy. It illustrates how men who would not ordinarily be defined as abusers also suffer from the same problems and that there is a connection between ordinary maleness and abusiveness. He is a professional in his late thirties married to a woman with two teenage daughters from a previous marriage. He has spent over two years complaining about his marriage and her behaviour. To say the least she has a Mediterranean personality compared with our rather repressed, inhibited and ironical Britishness. His difficulties in living with her were considerable. Over the years he had tired of what he saw as her tantrums. As far as I could tell, these ‘tantrums’ were inspired first by his fear of intimacy and general lack of loving warmth, and finally by his punishment of her because of his resentment at her emotional ability, the typical sort of system one sees in couples with problems. This particular example comes from a time when he had been in treatment for about two years. He started his session with a sigh as he sank onto the couch and began his routine catalogue of her recent misdeeds. Work with him was particularly difficult. He is a concrete thinker and obsessed with his partner’s behaviour towards him. Although I am going to give a particular example, I want to make clear that the whole context of it, his relation to her and his way of thinking about them could as well be used to illustrate my point. He had returned late from work, that is at a time later than he had told her he would return. She had been very angry with him for not phoning and letting her know that he would not be there when they had agreed. In fact he had stopped off on his way home to carry out a job for a customer, and it had taken him nearly two hours. I should mention that he has a mobile phone. He was incensed by her behaviour. She had told him, ‘your dinner’s in the dog!!’. She had shouted and yelled about his thoughtlessness, his insensitivity and general lack of care for her. He was particularly angry that she did not understand that his work was of primary importance and paid the bills, put the food on the table etc., and that he hated doing it but had to. This is nonsense, he loves his work and would hate to have her life where she effectively sits at home all day waiting for him to come home. He is her life, and he would not, at that time, have had it any other way. He is highly paid, powerful, active and respected. ‘Don’t get me wrong’ he said, ‘I know that I should have phoned, but her behaviour is completely crazy and over the top.’ Her ‘hysteria’ was a constant thread in his accounts of their life together.

I know that this is a rather gross example, as I am sure t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The problem outlined
• 3 Aggression and violence
• 4 Special problems in the treatment of abusers
• 5 Isolating the violence
• 6 The bubble
• 7 A social psychology of male violence, helplessness, vulnerability and sexuality
• 8 Working with men who are helpless, vulnerable and violent
• 9 Groupwork
• 10 Conclusions
• Appendix 1: Violent, abusive and controlling behaviour checklist
• Appendix 2: Basic group contract
• Appendix 3: The daily diary
• Appendix 4: The Time Out
• Appendix 5: Information for the partners/wives of violent/abusive men
• Bibliography
• Index