Session 6: Suicide and Violence

Session 6: Suicide and Violence
Chair: J David Slocum

Hurtling Toward Darkness, Faces of Violence in the Contemporary World
Susanne Chassay
MFT, California, USA

This paper is a personal exploration of the interface between acts of personal violence and their repercussions and the wider culture of violence that has been playing out on the world stage.
One afternoon, a patient who had been in three times weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy with me left my office after her session, drove down to the train tracks half a mile from my office, and sat down facing an oncoming train. Her suicide occurred during the period of the massive build-up for a pre-emptive war with Iraq, a little over a year after hijackers took over four passenger airplanes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center. This paper explores the very personal impact on the writer of these interlocking events of personal, political, and state-sponsored violence.
I explore my patient’s and my personal struggle with her overwhelming destructiveness and how our efforts to transmute it ultimately failed. I interweave this intimate personal struggle with the larger inability to stop the war despite the unprecedented mobilization of voices for peace across the world. It is a journey through the shattering impact of violence into the tentative discovery of a sustaining vision of hope. It explores the theme of terrorism, both personal and political, as a theater of violence designed to create maximum impact, and considers how fantasies of redemption, fuelled and blinded by righteous certainty, can mutate into acts of breathtaking violence, finding justification in their own mad logic.
Through the elaboration of my patient’s story and its impact on me, I offer a very personal attempt to understand and come to terms with violence, to recognize how openings of hope and new creative possibility are often followed by a violent regressive backlash, and to find a way to survive them without losing heart for the work.

In 1997, a schoolgirl named Reena Virk was beaten and murdered in Victoria, BC, Canada. I live in Victoria and vividly remember the coverage. One of the striking points about the murder is that teenage girls were involved–the violence gained huge media attention because of the participation of girls. One young man who was involved is currently in prison. The key accused young woman was convicted, but now has been awarded a new trial. Another crucial aspect of this tragedy is time between the death and the discovery of the body, which was found several days later through an air search. Evidently dozens of young people knew about the crime (as several had participated), and the silence regarding Reena’s death is chilling.
In 2001 a Canadian playwright named Joan MacLeod wrote a play titled “The Shape of a Girl” (published 2002, Talon Books), and this play explores the Reena Virk case from the perspective of a young girl living on another island and who is involved in the mistreatment of a fellow schoolgirl. MacLeod’s play offers some insight to motivation for such horrific violence and the accompanying silence.
The play uses two references to poems by Stevie Smith and Adrienne Rich in its examination of why and how such violence occurs. I would like to explore these ideas, which have to do with collective behaviour, ritual, and gender. Macleod’s approach is particularly effective as the entire play is a monologue by a girl who is essentially talking to her absent brother. Thus, the play itself in its form undercuts the possible reasons for the violence, and it shows the necessity of speaking out and breaking molds, both collective and gender.
I have taught this play at my college, and it always generates a huge response from students, especially the women, who say that what MacLeod has written is deadly accurate. How sad.