Strong Women and the Exclusion of the Masculine in Post-Traumatic Societies

Psychoanalysis and culture

Abstract

This article presents a psychoanalytic study of the phenomenon of strong women in the post-traumatic societies of Russia, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Middle Eastern countries. The author analyzes how, as a result of military conflicts, totalitarian regimes, and social upheavals, a transformation of female subjectivity occurs, when women are forced to take on both maternal and paternal functions. This phenomenon can be viewed as reflecting of society's unconscious desire to restore the archaic integrity of the pre-Oedipal dyad by excluding the potentially traumatizing masculine element from primary object relations. However, there is also reason to believe that this regression to a pre-Oedipal state contributes, among other things, to the formation of new forms of subjectivity to overcome collective trauma.