Cupid’s Knife: Women’s Anger and Agency in Violent Relationships

In Cupid’s Knife, Abby Stein draws from a wide range of theoretical fields, including Sullivanian and contemporary interpersonal psychoanalysis, critical pedagogy, feminist and gender studies, and anthropology, to develop a complex account of a vexing individual and social problem: women who engage in violent relationships. Stein focuses on the underlying emotional factors influencing women to become involved in, and to emerge from, such relationships. Her account is one that situates individual experience squarely within its mutually influential relation to cultural and political contexts. Stein presents psychoanalytic ideas clearly for the benefit of clinicians and other professionals who work with abused women, addressing frequent misunderstandings about their motives and characters. Stein’s main point is that women who become victims of domestic violence and emotional abuse are best understood as individuals whose access to their own anger and aggression has been systematically closed off. This is reiterated throughout the book and illustrated abundantly with material from clinical and research interviews. Furthermore, Stein argues that this closing off of emotions occurs through the mobilization of dissociative defenses established over the course of their development as a response to complex intertwining environmental pressures. Such women are left unable to make adaptive use of their own aggression in recognizing, assessing and responding to harmful relationships, and, therefore, they are more likely to seek out love objects who embody their own disavowed experience. Stein, who until her recent death was a psychoanalyst and faculty member at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was well placed to explore this topic. As she describes in her introduction, she had worked for years with a population of men incarcerated for domestic abuse, before becoming interested in understanding the psychology of the women who were involved with such men. An appreciation of the compelling projective dynamics of the victim–aggressor relationship, as well as for the often covert but powerful cultural requirements and injustices of the social milieu, informs her sophisticated approach to understanding people whose lives are organized around abuse while she engages them in therapeutic work. Stein’s introduction describes how she embarked on a small multiple-case interview study with women who were in the process of emerging from abusive relationships. She explains the Sullivanian underpinnings of her basic approach, including an appreciation of the importance of culture, utilizing concepts such as “affective models,” and “templates of interaction” (p. 11).