Can there be restoration without erasure?

helen DEVINNEY

When I was 13 years old, I was in a fire. I had second and third-degree burns all over my face, arms, and chest. I was wrapped in gauze and went to the doctor daily to have my wounds redressed and evaluated. Over time, the burns healed, and many faded out of view—though a few of the more severe ones remain, markers of an event that I often think of as a moment in time when I first really faced that sometimes damage cannot be undone. My efforts to contain the fire and put it out may have prevented its spread, but the damage that occurred to certain parts of the house could not be reversed or restored. Rather, those parts were removed and replaced with objects that were shiny and new, and that held no memory or visible mark of the fire. My skin, on the other hand, bears faded marks that most often are seen as freckles. In this way, the damage is not immediately visible to others. They may not be looking close enough to notice; they may assume them to be sun damage, or they may be deceived if I were to wear makeup to cover them. However, when I go out in the sun, a different story emerges: marks that are jagged, —more like splotches—marks that tell the story of an event that I might allow to be coded as a bad sunburn or age or excess sunbathing become clear burn marks and indicators of a fairly serious fire. In a different light, what might appear sufficiently healed is revealed only to be sufficiently hidden.

Before becoming a psychologist, I was pursuing a PhD in English. In addition to critical theory, I had an interest in archival material, which in some part reflected a prior degree in Classics and my fascination with the many technologies that have allowed something that was thought to be lost to be revealed. An example of what I mean is The Archimedes Palimpsest project, led by the conservation team at The Walters Art Gallery. This project involves using multispectral imaging to take parchment pages that appear blank to the naked eye and, through advanced imaging, reveal texts that remain, which had previously been thought to be lost because they were not visible. Some of the text remains hidden even using multiple wavelengths and x-ray fluorescence using synchrotron radiation. This idea of visibility as the marker of whether or not something exists or continues to exist is what comes to my mind as I reflect on the experience of presenting with my colleagues on the panel “Sexuality & Sex post sexual violence: how BDSM, kink, and sex can function as aftercare of the self,” and particularly as I think about the experience of being a part of that panel, the privilege of being in the discussion, and listening to Avigi Saketopolou’s keynote address “Sadisms: The risk and the ruse.” the following day, all while holding in my mind the violence carried out in multiple countries in the Global South, much of which is the direct result of US-backed capitalist imperialism.

In listening to Avgi Saketopoulo’s keynote address at the annual meeting this year, I found my mind revisiting the keynote conversation between Stephen Sheehi and David Eng at the 2023 annual meeting in which they discussed, among other things, that contrition and atonement also require self-inquiry; and, the thorny idea—to many in the audience—that contrition and atonement do not guarantee acceptance but merely introduce its possibility. There was a question about what it means to resist acceptance, particularly as it relates to locating the aggressive force—if someone transgresses and expresses contrition and atonement, what does it mean for the one who experienced the transgression to resist accepting the atonement? Here, what was signaled was the swift move that occurs in psychoanalysis where the one who resists repair is the flawed subject, which raises the question of whether or not it is ever even a risk to atone if the acceptance is already a known guarantee.

This question of where aggression is located and whether or not the acceptance of atonement is guaranteed, which is also a question in Saketopoulo’s idea of resisting repair, is also anticipated by the work of Sara Ahmed, particularly in Complaint! and The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. In particular, Saketopoulo’s idea that withholding repair is a form of exigent sadism intersects with Ahmed’s description of how when one speaks to an aggression in a system, in her examples, an academic system or familial system, the subject who languages that an aggression is occurring transforms to being the source of the aggression simply through the process of naming what had previously still been occurring but had only been visible to some. These concepts resonate strongly with my own experience of working with those who have experienced sexual violence, where often they are told directly and indirectly that part of a mature response or “moving past” their trauma involves disappearing the wounds associated with the trauma so that others are not able to see it. There is a fantasy here that if the aftermath of the violence is no longer visible to others, we can safely assume that the one who was impacted has been restored. This is just but one reason that the person who experiences sexual violence and goes on to enjoy bdsm and kink is so disconcerting: in their desire, their nonconformist delight is also a window into a wound that has not disappeared. Far from repaired and transformed into heteronormative desire, in bdsm and kink, there is often an expression of sexuality and eroticism that cannot be entirely separated from the wounds that proceed.

Another part of Saketopoulo’s talk struck deeply and continues to resonate, and that is about the risk involved in resisting repair and allowing wounds to remain visible. And it is also about understanding who that risk most often falls to and why. In my case, I have written and spoken about how I colluded for many years with hyperindividualism and whiteness to obscure my own wounds related to sexual violence under the veil of boundaries and privacy. Only over time did I realize, in the words of Sara Ahmed in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, that the folks who “snapped” over and over after being intentionally “wound up” were always people with less privilege and power and more to lose. Their snap delegitimized them and protected me. Once this came into my view, I realized that I needed to take risks, as it was a betrayal and violence to perform the optics of repair and restoration while that same choice was not available to others equally.

In speaking as a psychologist who has experienced sexual violence and who does not offer a repaired wound to roomfuls of other professionals, I have felt many moments of humiliation and othering. I have seen the disgust, the disapproval, and the sense that I am the aggressor. The complainer. The one resisting repair.

I saw many eyes that have judged me over the years in the crowded room of this year’s panel. I briefly panicked and worried that this time, I had screwed up—sacrificing not only myself but those who were taking the risk—more risk given their junior statuses—of speaking alongside me. And then I looked again, and I realized that the room also had many comrades this time. I could see in the eyes of those who met mine the wounds they had learned to make invisible but were still there for anyone looking. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most profound moments of my life. When I said, “We are “those people,” I knew some would ridicule it, yet I felt its fullness for myself and the many others in the room.

Speaking out about the prevalence—candidly the mundanity of sexual violence—is just one form of risk, one form of resisting repair. Others include my work refusing to collude in acts of performative atonement that quickly transmute to punishment—whether at the interpersonal level, the institutional level, or the broader level of the “helping professions” field. I take a risk each time I say the word “genocide” or refuse to participate in the longed-for relief of joining that somehow, with Biden out of the race, we no longer need to talk about Palestine. I refuse to accept the repair offered to my friends, patients, comrades, and students in name only—the utterance of the supposed conscious without the accompanying behavior and change that would reveal it to me without words.

I turn my face to the sun, allowing my own burns to surface and blossom. It is not comfortable, but it is real.

References

Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint!. Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2023). The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Seal Press.

Saketopoulou, A. (2024, April 3-6). Sadisms: The risk and the ruse. [Conference presentation].

Forty-third annual spring meeting of APA Division 39, Washington, DC, United States.

Sheehi, S & Eng, D. (2023, April 26-29) On the dread of psychoanalytic repair. [Conference presentation]. Fortysecond annual spring meeting of APA Division 39, New York, New York, United States.

Contributor

helen DeVinney, Psy.D (she/her) works in private practice in Washington, DC. In her clinical practice, writing, and teaching, she focuses on making systems of oppression visible as an integral part of understanding one's own psychology, relationships, and worldview. She is also a member of the core faculty in the Professional Psychology program at George Washington University