Much domestic violence literature has called attention to the fact
that women's material needs for shelter, daycare, employment, and
legal protection may render them helpless to leave toxic
relationships. Yet, even with the provision of these, many women
remain tightly wound in their abusers' embrace. In Cupid's Knife:
Women's Anger and Agency in Violent Relationships, Abby Stein draws
on the gripping narratives of physically and emotionally abused
women to illuminate how splitting off their own aggression
undermines women's agency, making it almost impossible for them to
leave violent partners. Psychology, with its focus on 'managing'
men's anger in violent relationships, has had little to offer in
the way of substantive critical work with women on the
identification, integration and constructive use of a range of
darker emotions typically labelled as antithetical to the norms for
female behaviour. In this book, Abby Stein shows that although a
number of psychological processes that contribute to the
intractability of abusive relationships have been identified - such
as trauma bonding and learned helplessness - their recognition has
offered no clinical pathway out of the abyss. Stein suggests that
our attention to other aspects of the internal world, the
relational framework, and the cultural context in which both
operate, may be more useful than current interventions in
determining individual treatments that break the oft-cited 'cycle
of violence'. More globally, Cupid's Knife: Women's Anger and
Agency in Violent Relationships jumpstarts a provocative
conversation about how female aggression can be repurposed as a
catalyst for social change. It will be essential reading for
psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists,
criminologists, students and the lay reader with an interest in
clinical treatment, interpersonal psychoanalysis, domestic
violence, gender roles, dissociation and aggression.
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