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Sacrificial Bodies: Terrorism,Counter-Terrorism, TortureSue Grand Ph.D. a b ca NYU PD programb Steve Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysisc PINCPublished online: 17 Sep 2008.
To cite this article: Sue Grand Ph.D. (2008) Sacrificial Bodies: Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, Torture, Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of RelationalPerspectives, 18:5, 671-689, DOI: 10.1080/10481880802297699
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Sacrificial Bodies: Terrorism,Counter-Terrorism, Torture
Sue Grand, Ph.D.
In this paper, I illuminate the underlying demonology of religious terrorism. Iargue that counter-terrorist practices mirror the demonology that they aredesigned to resist. This argument focuses on our system of detention and tor-ture. I suggest that the terrorism–counter-terrorism discourse relies on sacri-ficial bodies: the bombed body, and the tortured body. To find a creative re-sponse to terrorism, and to restore human rights, we need an alternatenarrative for global violence. I suggest that this alternate narrative exists. Itrace it through citizen resistance and a case study.
IN SUICIDE BOMBING, DESTRUCTION HAS BEEN PERFECTED. IT TRAVELSlight, and it travels anywhere. It is cheap. Small acts can bewilder largenations. Terrorism requires few leaders but has infinite converts. It
spreads like a virus and operates in diffuse cells. Secular reason cannot per-suade it. Warfare only increases its fervor. The material realm has little tooffer it. Improved political and material conditions might reduce its massappeal. But once suicide bombers have undergone conversion, they seembeyond the reach of corporeal existence. Their mission feels exalted; theirsacrifice, transcendent; they have an imaginary fusion with the divine (seeStein, 2002). We may understand some of the political/cultural conditionsthat motivate this conversion. Still, we think this mission is madness. Loveis confabulated with hatred, and random lives are left at the altar of God. Inthis practice, “the death fear … is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice of theother” (Rank, 1936, p. 130).
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Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 18:671–689, 2008Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10481880802297699
Sue Grand, Ph.D., is faculty and supervisor, the NYU PD program; faculty, the SteveMitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis; faculty for PINC; Associate Editor of Psycho-analytic Dialogues; and author of The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective.
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For generations, humanity has sought such supremacy1 through tradi-tional warfare. But this supremacy was always the province of generals andkings. The tragedy of combat was inscribed on the soldier’s material body(see Grand, 2007). With the advent of religious terrorism, tragedy is erasedfrom the body of the foot soldier. Ecstatic possibilities seem accessible toeveryman. In militant Islamic fundamentalism, new converts can alwaysfind “infidels”; they can construct and detonate bombs. Thus, the ter-ror-warrior becomes more than a foot soldier, as Stein (2002) and J. Stern(2003) have suggested. He subordinates himself to God, and then he imag-ines a fusion with that God. Awakening in the afterlife, he will become hisown king. Sacrificing innocent lives, and sacrificing his own material body,he gains the sense of “mystical election,”2 which Nietzsche (1963) ascribedto the “Super-Man”:
I no longer feel in common with you; the very cloud which I see be-neath me, the blackness and heaviness at which I laugh—that is yourthunder-cloud.
Ye look aloft when ye long for exaltation; and I look downward be-cause I am exalted … . (p. 40)
The Demonizing Structuresof Terror and Counter-Terror
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.
—Yeats (1921/1956, p. 184), “The Second Coming”
To formulate effective answers to terrorism, we must concede its brilliance.As a strategy of war, it is extraordinary. As a mode of psychic/political trans-formation, it seems perverse. But it is also radical and alluring. To us, ofcourse, the suicide bomber is the archetype of what I would describe as the“demonic hero.” To attain the status of absolute goodness, the demonic heromust find a personification of evil and then vanquish that personification.
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1This sense of transcendence can be linked to religious or secular ideology.2See Girard (1972).
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The demonic hero claims purity and power in violent contest with an identi-fiable villain. This villain is portrayed as a formidable and evil opponent,whose death confers strength on the hero. In demonizing structures, this“formidable villain” is actually an innocent, and helpless, victim. The de-monic hero must cloak his violence in mystery, awe, and revelation, so thatthe actual innocence of this “villain” is never discovered. This is the founda-tional structure of terrorism and human sacrifice. To achieve his own heroictransformation, the terrorist requires thebombedbodyof thecivilian-infidel.To acquire his “talisman of supremacy” (Girard, 1972, p. 12), evil is projectedinto innocence, and violence is practiced as a form of ritual purification. Anout-group must be dehumanized and used as the repository for badness. Toclaim his own ecstatic goodness, that badness must be subjugated, extruded,exterminated. When this type of “sacrificial ritual”3 is ascendant in a culture,there is a continual search for the “evil Other,” and a continual effort to purgethat evil Other, without any evidence that this Other is “evil” (see Frank-furter, 2006). There is no presumption of innocence, there is no discourse ofreason,andthere isno“hero”withoutasacrificial “villain.” Inthesecontexts,reason is replaced by exhortation, fear, awe, and exaltation. In my view, this isthe structure of heroic demonology, and it is the underpinning of fundamen-talist terrorism.4
To outwit terrorism, we must answer, and resist, its heroic demonology.Tragically, American counter-terrorism is a shadow of its opponent: we,too, are in a fever of unreason. Throughout our counter-terrorism prac-tices, there is no presumption of innocence; there is no discourse of reason,and there is no hero without a sacrificial villain. We search for the evil“Other,” we imprison and torture that evil “Other,” without demonstrableevidence that this particular Other is “evil.” Our heroic mythology relies onhuman sacrifice: the dead in Iraq, the prisoners in extraordinary renditionand indefinite detention. Meanwhile, real threats remain uncontained. Wedon’t implement the recommendations of the 9/11 committee; we havenever kept our focus on Bin Laden. In Iraq, we projected evil to justify afalse war. We, too, have our rituals of mystery and revelation. Creating a sys-tem of torture, disappearance, and indefinite detention, we have eviscer-ated our democracy.
Looked at from this perspective, the counter-terrorism machine is a re-fracted demonology. Detention centers utilize torture; they are kept secret,
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3See Girard (1972).4It is also the underpinning of state terrorism, slavery, genocide, and other forms of mass
violence.
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and they are void of due process, evidence, and the rule of law (see Davis,2008; Smith, 2007). In our detention centers, prisoners are held in an in-contestable category of guilt. Interrogated because they must be guilty; theyare guilty because they have been interrogated. The word suspect hasdropped out of our public lexicon, and with it, any possibility of innocence.As citizens, we are meant to defer our own knowledge to those who operatethe mechanisms of counter-terror. In this discourse, we seem like unpatri-otic “infidels” if we want transparency and evidence. In all of these features,counter-terrorism echoes the Salem Witch Trials and the Inquisition (seeFrankfurter, 2006), the “Dirty Wars” in South America (see Graziano,1992), Block Eleven in Auschwitz (Broad, 1951), and the S-21 prison inCambodia (Nath, 1998). They evoke the taped, coerced confessions ex-tracted by the “exorcist-prophets” of the terrorist groups themselves, priorto the beheading of journalists, soldiers, and civilians.
All in all, these practices refract the deep structure of religious terror-ism.5 Our detention policies confirm the very structure of terror, because“terrorism, then, aims to produce signs that cannot be read, but can only befollowed. Such signs demand submission rather than interpretation” (Moss,2003, pp. 325–327). When submission and faith displace reflectivity andevidence, we become a mimesis of Jihad.
When the photographs of Abu Ghraib were first exposed, they signaledthe need for transparency. Citizen protest aroused a human rights inquiry:How did this happen? Then, this inquiry was displaced by a darker one: Doestorturework?Onwhomcan itbepracticed?Thus,asLichtenstein(2003)put it,
The word terror (or its variants, terrorism, “terrorist”) taken asself-evident and absolute truth, provides a portal for the sense ofmonstrosity to enter the debate. The implication is that once in therealm of terror all restraint is lifted. Any response to the monstrous isacceptable. (p. 315)
When torture has been normalized, it silences democratic inquiry (see alsoHollander, 2008), and it spreads the terrorism it is designed to contest. AsGirard (1972) pointed out, violence is mimetic. It is “like a raging fire thatfeeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames” (p. 31). In the af-termath of 9/11, we felt fragile, humiliated, vengeful, and helpless (Moss,2003). We refused to admit that we were mortal, and insecure (Ensler,2006). We turned into a manic society (Altman, 2005; Peltz, 2005). We im-
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5See J. Stern (2003).
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prisoned a “detachable villain” to suppress our sense of “tragic impossibil-ity” (Wheeler, 1985, p. 205). Then, we denied the existence of our own de-monology, while we fused with the demonology of terrorism.
Listening to Sacrificial Bodies
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he doesnot become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyssalso looks into you.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche(1966, p. 102), Beyond Good and Evil
As Altman (2005) and Peltz (2005) suggested, splitting and demonizationare not the only way to resist terrorism. To refute terrorism’s structure, wemust restore our reverence for the material body. We must insist on the hu-manity of both sacrificial bodies: the bombed body, and the innocent bodyin indefinite detention. We must bring these bodies into a condition of si-multaneous and mutual recognition.6 When we do this, we are insisting onan alternative vision of counter-terrorism. Creative, effective strategies willbegin to come into view. These strategies will attempt to answer terrorism,without replicating its practice of human sacrifice. As citizens, many of usare participating in this project. And we contribute to it, as citizen-analysts,when political motifs enter our clinical process. In the public domain, andin the privacy of the consulting room, we are exposing, and resisting, theprevailing discourse.
While the United States government perpetuates the demonic structureof terrorism, citizens are trying to resist it. In the United States, we are see-ing an emergent narrative of resistance. This narrative restores reverenceto both sacrificial bodies. The bombed body of terrorism; the tortured bodyin detention: neither is sacrificed in deference to the greater import of theother. In disparate forms of protest and testimony, this discourse is emer-gent. It is being articulated within the government, the military, the FBI,the CIA, inside of detention centers, by lawyers, journalists and humanrights groups, and concerned citizens. It is articulated by the papers in thisissue. Converging in the public domain, these voices expose the problem-atic nature of counter-terrorist practices without occluding the barbarism ofterrorism. In this process, we are resisting terrorism’s heroic demonology.
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6For a discussion of cruelty, submission and mutual recognition, see Benjamin (1988).
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We are keeping faith with democratic precepts. We revere human life, andrefuse to perform as terrorism’s “evil Other.”
This shift is occurring in the public domain. But it also occurs throughclinical process, when motifs of terrorism–counter-terrorism enter our of-fice. As analysts, we cannot close the door on global conflict. The violentpassions of supremacy and sacrifice; the lost reverence for human bodies;the imprisonment, disappearance, torture, and extinction of the evil Other:these themes may be threaded through an individual psychoanalysis. Of-fered up to the analyst as personal trouble, these themes repeat, expose, andresist our shared political trouble. In this type of analysis, intimate experi-ence is inscribed with, and illuminated by, global knots. When analysts canhear, and decode, all of these layers, our empathic capacity expands. Thepatient’s complaint becomes more complicated. But it also becomes morevisceral and accessible to the analyst.
The analytic dyad is always a citizen dyad. At the moment, the wholeworld seemstobeon fire.Entering theconsulting room, theparticipantsexistin a shared field. Our unconscious processes are being colonized by the sameviolence.Ourmindsandbodiesarebeingseduced,anddamaged,by thesamedemonizing structures. When human sacrifice is the hallmark of violent ide-ologies, the sacrificial body tends to exist in a state of “catastrophic dissocia-tion” (Boulanger, 2007). These bodies are inscribed on what Layton (2005a,2005b) called our “social unconscious.” Until we restore them to human rev-erence, they will continue to seek recognition by making us “sick.” They willwrite themselves into our psyche-somas, and into our interpersonal fields(see also Apprey,2003; Davoine& Gaudillier, 2004; Grand,2000). They willdisturb our passions, and our desires. They will bewilder our agency, and in-crease our anxiety, and our guilt. As Layton (2005a, 2005b) suggested, per-sonal conflict cannot be unlinked from its social context. Layton’s perspec-tive permits us a new realization. For personal healing to exist, clinicaltransformation must be linked to cultural transformation. If we are open tothis shared experience, we have the capacity to recognize our patient in newways. In thiscontext, there isaheightenedpotential forpersonalhealing.Thispersonal healing contributes to our project of cultural healing.
Global Conflict Enters Psychoanalysis
I discovered this in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, when I wastreating Alan. A few months before he came for treatment, the photo-
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graphs of Abu Ghraib were published. Every morning, on the way to myoffice, I bought the New York Times. Throughout the morning, I left it onthe floor, next to my chair. Its headlines were both obscured and exposed.Unmetabolized news and unmetabolized communications: these metthose patients, who arrived each day, before my lunch hour. At lunch, Iate, and cussed, and finished my reading. And then, in the afternoon, thenewspaper vanished: I threw it away, but it was not out of me. I had swal-lowed it along with my food. And so, over time, my esophagus began toburn. Moving through my days, concentrating on my work, I began tohave a recurrent vision. My esophagus appeared to me as an inflamed ori-fice. I found myself thinking that something deadly was happening inthere. I imagined my esophagus stretched, swollen open. Sometimes itseemed like a ring of fire, dead center in my body. Or it is my “whole”body, and there was nothing else. Then, it would appear to float in theair, dispersed, uprooted, “blown apart” from the me that the rest of “me”is in. I lost weight and found it difficult to eat. The newspaper, my weightloss: I didn’t think about what this was communicating to my patients.But in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, I had “entered a new territory whichreveals the abject nature of our current corporeality” (Orbach, 2006,p. 109).
All of this remained subliminal to my awareness, until Alan returned totreatment. I have treated him once before. He is a homosexual artist, politi-cally progressive, committed to a life lived in compassion. Our work has al-ways focused on his pursuit of love and intimacy and passion. His previousrelationship was a shared depression; there was warmth and home and thefundamentals of kindness. But there was no desire. Alan always thoughtthat he “had no libido.” Sex was effortful, self-conscious, contrived. Ourfirst treatment encounter had parallels to his partnership. Alan and I werehard working and earnest and insightful and productive. We were kind andwe liked each other, and we readily processed grief. But the ecstatic juice ofhis viscera never appeared. We had, of course, talked occasionally of poli-tics. His apartment, my office: we are on the same block in downtown NewYork. We read the same newspaper, at the same time. Like me, he lives inthe memory, and the anticipation of terrorist attack. He is appalled both byJihad, and by our country’s answer to Jihad. But we have never had a con-versation about detention and torture.
He returned to treatment when my esophagus hurt. He has broken withhis old boyfriend, mourned, tried multiple partners and sexual experimen-tation. Impersonal sex was hot, and it was hollow, and he sill didn’t know
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what it was that he wanted. But now, Alan is wildly in love and in lust anddesire. With a new man who is creative, proactive, alive. Alan is enlivenedin ways he thought were impossible, but he is obsessed by new layers ofshame and guilt. Outside of bed, these men exist in a mutual, tender, egali-tarian relationship. In bed, the lover likes to be sexually submissive; he hasinvited Alan to play at aggression, possession, domination. To engage in sexacts that simulate degradation. The lover likes to surrender himself as“girl,” to Alan, as the “man.” My patient is excited, and his lover is excited.But the license to dominate insinuates a dangerous edge where mutualpleasuring could evoke Alan’s sadism.
When Alan is with his lover everything seems “all right.” But when he isaway from his lover, sexual memory converts into unwanted images of hisbeloved. Face down, prone, unmoving, anus red and swollen from a limit-less series of anonymous “penetrations.” And then horror converts intosomething else: a consuming jealousy that this intimacy has been given, ca-sually, in the past, to someone else. Then jealousy becomes shame andshame becomes horror, the tape runs again and he cannot stop seeing, norexit from, his obsession. And then, they have sex and he is captivated bypleasure. They are tender, and he is captivated by love. Telling me, helaughs and says he wants psychosurgery; be careful what you wish for, hesays, you might get it!
If menace is implicated in Alan’s desire for his lover, we, too, come to-gether in bodies which are burning. Me, in my hunger for food; he, in hishunger to enter, and dominate, his beloved. For both of us, lust signifieswounded orifices, and fugitive pleasures. We have eyes and ears lockedopen to too much knowledge. Anuses and mouths distended by the lustof repeated invasion. For both of us, appetite is the somatic opening forviolence. Once open, these somatic places are locked open, never permit-ted to close, to say “yes” or say “no,” and never permitted to recover. Weare suffering a tandem preoccupation, a cinematic tape of body parts inabjection. We exist, both of us, on a dual track. Witnessing a dual vista.Ordinary life, here, now. While we hear an echo of interminable submis-sion. Dark moans which seem to be transferred from another time andplace. For me, these are the sights and sounds of history’s cycle of interro-gation and detention. For him, they are the sensorium of sexual exploita-tion. Practiced on the tender opening to his lover’s heart. Our bodiesseem to witness atrocity, and to feel implicated in that atrocity. If we de-sire, and if we satisfy our desires, somehow, this brutality will have beenwrought in our name.
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Neither of us, alone, has anything with which to metabolize this prob-lem. What we have, together, is an uncanny resemblance in our sensoryvisitations. We are formulating a kind of fraternal twin-ship. My hetero-sexuality, his homosexuality, my vagina, his penis, the mirrored series ofsomatic ghosts: we are alike, and yet different, suffering in intimate refer-ence to each other. Unbeknown to ourselves, we are becoming the sacrifi-cial bodies of terrorism. Neither of us can close our eyes on the body inpain. He is aware of his toxic emotions; but until I point it out, he is notaware that his is a visual-body obsession. He realizes that he thought thateverybody’s eyes ran on these two tracks: the ordinary, here, now, andthe other, the dark, cinematic, looped tape. I am thinking yes, and I amthinking, no. There is at least one other person whose vista runs on twotracks. But I also know that this is a figment of trauma. I query his as-sumption that this is the very essence of vision. This inserts a new per-spective, a point of entry into the way in which he suffers. There is a sud-den jolt of synchronous, electric memory. Speaking in one voice, we bothsay, all at once: “Do you remember A Clockwork Orange” and then “theway his eyes were pinned open.” Yes, yes, of course, we recall that scenewhich each of us must have read 30 years ago (Burgess, 1962). A torturer,tortured: he was bound to a chair, eyes pinned open, forced to watch,overstimulated, prohibited from sleep. So begins the implicit resonance ofour bodies, the refraction of sadomasochism and guilt and desire. Ourgaze is locked open, fixed on body rings of fire. In fascination and hungerand horror. Our association describes our own experience, and is also areferent to other, wounded bodies. To thirty years of intervening history.In which bodies have been pinned open, pinned down, entered by malig-nant forms of domination. They incite our imagination because they havebeen concealed from our gaze, because we have never seen them.
I do not tell Alan about my tandem vision or my tandem torment; butI am encouraged to use my resonance to enrich the work. There aretimes we seem to be in direct, pre-verbal communication. My esophageal“hole” burns in my chest, floats in the space between us, intermixing witha burning anal ring. Our body parts are blasted out, severed, lost as in a“suicide bombing”; they are penetrated by cattle prods; they entwine likelovers. In this intimate refraction of each other’s somas, we evolve a newfluency about sex and bodies and genders and violence. The clunky gapbetween my heterosexuality and his homosexuality softens up. He riskstelling me graphic sexual details, I risk asking. There are times when I amtoo shy to ask about details that I think I should already know about as a
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sophisticated analyst. There are times when he is too shy to tell me aboutspecific practices. There is pain and embarrassment and exposure andvulnerability for both of us. And a lot of laughter about what a female“vanilla” heterosexual analyst doesn’t know about gay sex. What’s this,what’s that, I keep saying, to our great amusement. I sense that this is amoment when he could be contemptuous, play out some sadistic game onmy naïve display. For him, these are frightening moments when I couldjudge, inspect, pathologize, and humiliate. When I am ignorant, he neveris withholding or contemptuous, but relieved, enthusiastic; there is a will-ingness to explain, to bring me in, to let me know, even though he isafraid I will think he is perverse. I do not feel he is perverse, he feels“seen” without feeling shamed or “inspected.” I am curious, and moretherapeutically empowered.
Our conversations about sex are becoming more like the actual sex heis having with his lover. We are mutually exploring questions of domi-nance and submission; but that question is engraved on the deep trust ofmutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988). In the meeting between our bod-ies, we are revealing, and resisting, the structure of global violence. Werisk domination and cruelty, and we refuse cruelty in favor of empathicenlightenment. In this interaction, we are two subjects, alike, and yet dif-ferent. There is an excited switching off of “who is that girl, who is thatboy” (Layton, 1998). There is an identification in our bodies, orifices thatkeep replicating and differentiating, translating into somatic fusion, dif-ferentiation, and exchange. Hunger intensifies, and hurts. Our eyes burnwith an excess of sight. Gradually, he takes me into what he calls his“porno torture chamber”: that place where familial history met the pho-tos of Abu Ghraib.
What I discover, first, is that, for Alan, there is a rapid oscillation be-tween male and female, which corresponds to the “do-er” and the“done-to” roles which Benjamin (1988) described. And then, the flux ingender identity undoes that split. Alan has always felt “masculine” andyet, he says he is a “woman” about love. He wants fidelity, home, andromance. But now, apparently, he also wants hot sex. To Alan, when aman lusts, he becomes a heterosexual “dick” in search of a fungible holeto “fuck”: “he” is faithless, a betrayer, a perpetrator of women. Inphallically “penetrating” another man who plays at being a submissive,inviting, prone girl, Alan is afraid he will become the perpetrating “dick”that he uses. If my esophogeal hole sweats the pain of others’ interroga-tions, his lover’s anal hole seems to sweat the shame of women’s sexual
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degradation. For both of us, the perpetrator always seems to be a “man.”Even when that “man” is a woman interrogator sexually humiliating maleMuslim prisoners. Even when the vision before us is Lynndie England,7smug and muscular, with a crawling man-dog prisoner on a leash. Evenwhen a suicide bomber could have been wearing a veil. In the field be-tween us, the lover/prisoner always appears as a “woman” even though heis often a “man.” Neither Alan nor I know how to escape the identifi-catory, phallic evil of the agentic position. All we can do, apparently, iscomplicate desire with passive self-torment. So that inside each of us,there is a done-to and a do-er, hooked onto a penis in relation to theanus–mouth–vagina.
Then Alan tells me this. Once, when he was young, Alan was asked togive an erotic spanking to another man. He lost control, and did not hearthe man asking him to stop. He became afraid of his own sadism, and hasavoided the erotic pull of domination. This admission collides with amemory of my own. I recall my initial coldness toward the prisoners atGuantanamo Bay, a post-9/11 desire for them to be interrogated by phal-lic, military women. My fantasy of vengeance toward Bin Laden: I wantedto see him coerced into a sex change operation. I wanted him to live outhis days as the humiliated vaginal property of Islamic fundamentalistmen. For Alan, as for me, there was a slippage into cruelty. Ancient his-tory, now, but unmetabolized. This sadistic wish has been resurrected inthe theatre of our bodies, in the cinematic loops running before our eyes.In memory of the spanking, he resists all hunger for sexual domination.But what appears, instead, is a tormented craving for possession. Eyespinned open in his “porno torture chamber,” he envisions his lover anallypenetrated by another. These images evoke the humiliation of jealous im-potence. Then, in search of reassurance about fidelity, his grilling of thelover begins. He “extracts” information about the lover’s sexual past. Re-assurance fails, past sex acts fuel his jealousy, and the partner seems bothwanton and suspect. The lover seems like someone who is too “hot” to beconstrained by love. Intimacy is then riddled with further interrogation,and the porno-torture chamber fills with horrific detail. To be playedupon his eyes, for days at a time. So that the dread of agentic sadismkeeps converting into passive masochism.
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7A former United States Army reservist serving in the 372nd Military Police Company.She was convicted in 2005 by the Army courts-martial for inflicting prisoner abuse at AbuGhraib prison.
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In our prior work, Alan has always tried to work his way out of his jealouspreoccupations. He wants to protect his relationships from this type ofcross-examination. In his past treatment, we could not really break throughthis enactment. But in the past, we have never lived in matched cells. I didnot understand his reversible, somatic play of dominance and submission. Ihad not experienced the fascination with cruelty, and the dread and shamewhich attends this fascination. I had not yet lived through 9/11, through myown fantasy of female interrogators humiliating militant Islamic men. OfBin Laden, sexually dominated by militant Islamic men. My country hadnot yet picked up, and made real, my private fantasy of vengeance. Now,my hunger seems complicit in such cruelties. I needed to imagine such cru-elties, and to have a protective parental shield create boundaries aroundthat imagination. So that, like Alan, the wish to spank would not go too far.But things have gone too far, and my body is inflected with those bodies indetention. While I am both there and here, inside psychoanalysis, and out-side of it, Alan is telling me about bondage, blindfolds, masks. About theerotic simulation of humiliation and coercion. About practices that controlvision and blindness. As his therapist, I am not worried about Alan enact-ing real sadism. And I want him to enjoy his passion without shame or guilt.I do not think that his sexual acts are perverse, or in need of change. But Isense that he cannot exit from the “porno torture chamber” unless we bothrecognize cruelty.
I say nothing about detention, or torture, or the photos of Abu Ghraib.But suddenly, I hear my own descriptors shift. I talk about his possessive,jealous self as the interrogator, conducting surveillance, holding lovers in “con-finement,” seeking, but never finding, “actionable intelligence.” I talk about thereversibility of torture, as he himself is pinned into the porno-torture cham-ber by the very body he has dominated. Alan hears my language, and now,there is something visceral, deeper, more fluid happening in his treatment.So that finally, the anal site of his desire appears to us as a site of trespass, asignature, not of jealousy, really, but of violence and horror. And becausehe has phallic desires towards this site of trespass, he is the enemy combat-ant, the would-be perpetrator, who must be contained in indefinite confine-ment. Stripped of the right of habeus corpus.
I suggest that there is some scene engraved upon his memory. Somethingold, made more acute now by our geo-political landscape. I ask about theimpact of the news we are both exposed to each day. The news that lies si-lently, each session, next to my feet. Now, at last, I can ask about the impactof terrorism and torture, about the fascination of cruelty, about his dread
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that such cruelty might be his. All of this comes together for us. And I saythat the wounded orifice fixed upon his vision is ambiguous in its shape.And he says, suddenly, that all of the women in his family were raped. Atthe very end of a session.
I have known him well, over several years. He was the only boy of a se-verely depressed mother; he had four older, depressed sisters. In this family,there was a rough kind of loyalty and bonding, through which Alan tum-bled, bewildered and neglected. The children had several fathers, but therewas never a father living in the house. One of his sisters committed suicide.As a boy, he felt his mother was suicidal. From birth, he was overexposed toall their sexual development and bodily functions. There was a kind of vagi-nal befoulment which followed him through the house. There was an utterfailure of discretion, self-care, or any type of cleanliness or boundary. Dirtwas hormonal sweat, a female slovenliness of every type and dimension.These were women for whom womanhood was never a celebration. Wom-anhood was resignation and bitterness; it was dependency on, and aban-donment by, men. He was always looking at prone female bodies, legsspread, undressed, drunk, depressed, asleep, passed out. Women’s sexualityseemed infused with alcohol and cigarettes and an aftermath of despair. Ev-erywhere he looked, there were dirty tampons, soiled sanitary pads, wornstockings, bloody underwear, “woman” troubles, hysterectomies, filthybathwater. As an infant, he had opened his eyes into these signs of femaleabjection. In this family, men almost seemed like an imaginary construct,mere phantoms suggested by all this bodily evidence. Whatever a man was,he somehow signified longing and rescue and betrayal.
So I ask him to clarify what he means when he says that they were allraped. He can tell me only of one incident. He was 7 or 8 years old. It wasnighttime, he was in bed. He heard a man chasing his sister, a scream, furni-ture crashing, weeping, nothing said in the morning. Another image of a sis-ter, sent away, returned months later, the sense of a baby missing. Thesememories seem to crystallize what is causing all this female depression.Phantom dicks were stuck up women’s holes, ripping body and soul topieces. These dicks produced bloody underwear, lost babies, tumors, thesurgical removal and reconstruction of damaged parts. Men are cause ofdrunkenness, the cause of suicide. In all of this, here was a little boy in pos-session of a penis, that instrument of torture which should never be insertedinto a “hole.” In this family, he is not allowed to become a girl. He has to bethe boy who will compensate for all of these male abandonments. He has towant to “make love” to girls, not “screw” them.
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In this family, his heterosexuality is mandated, and then, he has to be-come celibate. His heterosexuality is required to affirm female desirabil-ity, and then, he must stop seeking sexual liaisons. He must be the fam-ily’s White Knight, restoring virginal innocence, undoing befoulment andexploitation. He is not supposed to want, or seek to love the father-menwho have left him; he is supposed to punish and repudiate them. But heis not heterosexual. He can have sex with girls. But really, he is a boy whowants to have sex with boys. He is a boy who wanted a father. And so thedeux ex machina unfolds: sex and separation happen all at once. He fleesthese women in his late teens. He has the enduring guilt and shameabout that abandonment. He thinks his disengagement caused his sister’ssuicide. He certainly wanted to rip his way out of the supporating woundof depression. But he also wanted to shelter the vaginas, keep them frommale trespass. Through the theatre of the porno torture chamber, he be-comes the mother and sisters, toward himself and with his male lovers, at-tempting to imprison the only “him” whom his family could both accuse,and lay claim to.
We talk about this over many sessions. He continually returns to themystery: What caused all of their pain? Why couldn’t they go on, live, re-cover? There was always something missing, he said, about what had hap-pened before he arrived. He refers, again, to the fact that his mother wasconsidered the “slut” in her family, repudiated, poor, promiscuous. Shewas kicked out of her own family, and then, left by a series of men. Allbecause she was indiscriminate in “her” lusts. I say that he was born intowounded orifices, into a world of fugitive pleasures. Then he says, “Shejust couldn’t keep it in her pants.” So that, for a moment, mother is, andhas, the “dick” that exploits her own “hole.” This hermaphrodism was au-tistic, intriguing, and monstrous, setting off cascades of familialtraumatization.
We are working on all of this when the wounded orifice appears tofloat into the space between our chairs. These wounds are no longer hisand mine, unknown to one another, separated at birth. Now, they are in-tercommunicating human experiences. They are ours, alike and yet dif-ferent, speaking to each other. I am cautious about “inserting” my so-matic/political preoccupations into his analysis. I am worried that mydamaged woman “orifice” will swallow up his separate experience. Butsomehow, now, the wounded orifice is also anybody’s. Nobody’s. Every-body’s. The ring of body fire is severed from its cohesive, named body,and I feel, momentarily, like we no longer can know whose it is. I think,
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suddenly, it is as if it were a dismembered body part, blown apart in a sui-cide bombing, in the Twin Towers. The wounded orifice is no longer sig-nifying the whole, abject body in detention. Somehow, its representa-tional status expands. It refers to five women in his family, all sufferingdifferent, but related, forms of phallic trespass. It refers to the two sacrifi-cial bodies of global violence. All of them are carrying each other, into myoffice. All of them are clamoring for our recognition.
I decide to say, again, that these terrible times have potentiated the trou-bled reckoning with his lust. There was the arrival of a new boyfriend, re-laxed in his instruction of my patient’s desire. But there were also the pho-tos of Abu Ghraib, articles about Guantanamo Bay, an insurgency in Iraq,beheadings, our national discourse about torture. I ask him now, how thephotos of Abu Ghraib have effected him. He talks about the dangerousheat of global phallic fervor; of vengeance and domination unleashed. Sothat his dread increased about his own repressed “brutality.” Every time thenews records a death in the “war on terror,” that body converts for him intosomething vaginal: it is tortured, and dismembered, by “phallic” weaponry.As in his family, the penetrating penis always appears as the first cause of allthis unrelenting grief: in Iraqi civilians, in victims of terror, in prisoners ofindefinite detention. In his sisters and mother. As his own penis was em-powered in the exploration of his lover, daily news would reignite his confla-tion with a perpetrator.
In this analytic dyad, sexuality locates the intersection between child-hood trauma, and culture trauma. As Stein (1998) suggested, the verynature of sexual desire is its condition of enigmatic excess; it observes andviolates taboos; it is incited by transgression. Verging on the inexplicable,erotic heat breaks down order, and yet, it has an affinity with the sacred.Referring to the work of G. Bataille, Stein (1998) suggested that lust isproximal to the de-differentiation of near-death experience. Such statesare imbued with awe, a fascination with power, with a feeling of bound-lessness, and with the possibility of spilling over into violence. The sacrifi-cial bodies of terrorism arouse in us an identificatory horror, and anidentificatory fascination with cruelty.8 Sexuality is the arena in which wecan express the excess of that horror. In erotic life, there is a registry forunseen political practices which are “immoral, sinister, scheming andshady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that usesthe body for barter …” (Kristeva, 1980, p. 232). In the construction of
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8See Moss (2003).
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this erotic narrative, we enacted the demonological structure of terrorismand counter-terrorism. But as Alan linked tenderness to what Dimen(2005) called the “eew” factor, he restored sacrificial bodies to humanreverence.
To inscribe, and resist, our global demonology, the “social unconscious”(Layton, 2005a, 2005b) enlisted our body parts. It enlisted my esophagus/vagina; it communicated through erotic shame and desire. According toGuss (2007; and in press), our culture regards homosexual anal sex as atheatre of dominance, submission, power, and humiliation. Guss noted thatin psychoanalytic theory, anal sexuality is infused with motifs of explosive-ness, cruelty, secrecy, and control. He pointed out that, in our culture, ho-mosexual anal sex has been read as a pathological distortion of heterosexualintercourse, in which the male “bottom” keeps becoming a passive, and ab-ject, vagina. When a sexual practice is infused with these cultural connota-tions, it readily inscribes the sacrificial bodies of terrorism. In Alan’s treat-ment, these tropes were enacted, critiqued, and reworked into a system ofempathic intersubjectivity.
This reworking required a series of bodies: his, the lover’s, mine. I am awoman who is carrying a wounded orifice close to her heart. My esophagusrepresents the identification with, and dread of, sadistic domination. It re-fers to the wounded orifices, to shame, hunger, and desire. Moving backand forth between his childhood, his current sexual practices, and the con-temporary political climate, Alan has his first conversation with thewounded orifice of domination. My body signifies other, damaged bodies,but I am alive, and I intend to stay alive. I do not feel abandoned, or sui-cidal, because of his desire to go off and be intimate with a man. In our con-versation he finds his first hope. Together, we recognize that body orificeshold multilayered histories: the one here, now, ongoing in our culture; theother, back then, in his family and his culture.
Now pleasure does not sacrifice innocent bodies. It does not turn grownmen into wounded vaginas. He stops the interrogation of his lover, andslowly, the porno-torture chamber ceases its existence. Alan is no longerafraid that lust will unleash his sadism. Anal sex doesn’t turn his lover intoan abject “girl.” Snapshots of infidelity do not visit him. The interrogator isgone. Neither Alan, nor his lover, are in indefinite detention.
In this treatment, we found a series of wounded bodies: the sisters andmother of Alan’s childhood; myself, Alan and his lover; the bombedbody, and the body in indefinite detention. Traced through visceral, andmetaphoric motifs, these bodies emerged. They were refracted through-
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out the analytic process. Then, they were restored to human reverence.We recognized our own complicity, and guilt, and the paralysis of ourown agency. We situated our problem in both personal, and cultural, fac-tors. We renewed our agency and our desires, on behalf of ourselves, andfor the other. Once, we had engaged in a more bland psychoanalysis. Inthe wake of Abu Ghraib, that analysis became thick, and dense, and pas-sionate. It was filled with the pain of others. That pain illuminated Alan’spersonal struggle, and his personal past. This process occurred because Irecognized that the analytic dyad is also a citizen dyad. As D. Stern(1997) suggested, “To be a psychoanalyst is inevitably to take a politicaland moral stand” (p. 141). As citizens, and as psychoanalysts, we mustcontinue in this type of endeavor. Every time we work within our con-temporary cultural metaphors, we contribute to a shift in our cultural dis-course. We repeat, and resist, our global demonologies. We facilitate analternate narrative for counter-terrorism. As each of us participates inthis effort, we have hope for our personal, and our national, integrity.This possibility exists because in “every transformation of reality … everychange of form … every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss ofnothingness is crossed” (Scholem, 1955, p. 117).
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