My, What Bad Luck She Has: The Case of the Woman-Child

The reference Freud makes to Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, where the hero kills/wounds his love repeatedly without realizing it, is an excellent example of our preconscious ego recreating loss and suffering in a way that enables us to have power and mastery over it. Tancred does not intentionally hurt Clorinda again, but rather, he does so because he has not dealt with the fact that he was the cause of her death. The same applies to the examples Freud gives regarding the man who creates the same destructive pattern in his love relationships, or the child who throws out his toys in place of losing his mother. When we do not learn from or heal from our suffering or losses, we recreate them in order to feel power over them. We enact the loss or hurt upon ourselves, and are consequently more comfortable with it.

It is nearly impossible not to see the existence of such repeated patterns of thought or behavior in our everyday lives and in the lives of those around us. I cannot count how many times I have noticed someone doing something self-destructive over and over again, only to realize that a similarly harmful thing had already been enacted upon them. This is most evident in the case of the ‘woman-child,’ someone I happen to know quite well. At first glance, she is a middle-aged woman with the lightness of spirit and gentleness of demeanor which is reminiscent of a young girl. She speaks softly and loves wearing bright summer dresses. She loves laughing and the only inner darkness she admits to or complains of is a growing sense that the light inside her is being extinguished by others. She is a victim. As I continued to get to know her, I observed that she seemed to have a lot of trouble in her romantic relationships. Men tended to mistreat her by using her for her money or talking down to her or not going out with her in public. She lamented these situations and complained that she deserved better, but she never did anything about it or chose different men.

What she did inform me of was how much better she was doing than ever before. A decade prior, she finally ‘escaped’ a fifteen year, highly physically and emotionally abusive relationship, and prior to that, she ‘escaped’ a childhood comprised of various other deeply troubling abuses. Now, thirty-five years from the start, she cannot see that although the abuses and abusers are different, the hurt is the same. She complains of her mistreatment, yet she chooses to surround herself with unsafe people. This is not to say that she intentionally causes her own suffering any more than Tancred intentionally caused his love’s death and his own suffering. Rather, she never dealt with her original suffering, her original hurt and loss, and so she continues to experience it in a way that is manageable and controlled. She is victim and abuser at the same time. She speaks like an adult and lives like an adult, but is also simultaneously a little girl who has never healed.

People wonder why battered women repeatedly place themselves in abusive relationships after having been abused as children. What people do not understand is the woman’s need to re-experience the abuse in a different way in order avoid the loss and hurt she felt as a child. The displacement of the hurt as a child onto the hurt as an adult by a different abuser makes the hurt more manageable. The only way out of such a cycle is the woman’s willingness to look at the original hurt in order to learn from it and feel it so that she no longer needs to substitute a new hurt for the old one. Without Freud’s intensive research and writing, such an analysis would not be possible, and a woman such as the one previously mentioned would not be understood, and consequently, could never be helped.