“One Tailor (Hindu) and his wife were brought from Baghmari. There were deep wound marks on the body of the man. He and his wife came in half dead. Two days after they were brought in, they both died. When I tried to express my sympathy for the death of his wife, “Don’t regret. She is better than being dead. If she had not died, she would have suffered her entire life. There would be no gain by her survival. When I asked for the reason the man said, he said that the Muslim hoodlums first gang raped her and then put an iron rod through her vagina and wounded it. Her uterus was completely torn into pieces. I asked how their lives were saved. The man said after they attacked them with spade they pierced their bodies with spears. When they lost consciousness, the gang thought they were dead and left them. After three or four days they were saved. The cops also brought some women whose breasts were cut off.” (Partition and The Flow of Communal Hatred, Nikhil Chandra Vaidya, Vak Pratima, Port Blair, 2023, p 19).
According to Freud’s theory of development, there is a psychical energy or libido that is housed in different body parts at different moments in development. They are oral, anal, and genital. During the oral stage all the pleasure or life force is concentrated on the oral or mouth area, during the anal stage, it is concentrated in the anal region, during the genital stage it is concentrated in the genital area. There is no differentiation or identity during the oral and anal stage. It is during the genital stage that gender identity develops via castration complex. The little boy gets the message that he cannot have infinite pleasure, that he cannot masturbate, or have a desire for the Phallic Mother, the mother in fantasy who gives the breast and has the Phallus or the organ of pleasure. So, he represses this desire for infinite pleasure and thus restores his phallus, he becomes the possessor of phallus. The little girl, on the other hand, thinks that she is already castrated, that the little of the phallus is left, the clitoris. She also gets the idea that the mother is not the phallic mother, the mother has no phallus to give. So, she goes to father to get the phallus but does not get it and thus settles for her “biological destiny”. That is, she converts her original desire for a phallus for a baby from father or father substitute. The desire for the phallus goes into the unconscious. Similarly, when the little boy consolidates his masculine identity, his original desire for infinite pleasure and the phallic mother goes into the unconscious. Thus, the unconscious for Freud is the place where all the repressed desires and painful memories are buried.
In racial trauma of genocide, sexual abuse, ethnic cleansing, torture, the victim race usually represses the trauma and sublimates. The pain of that racial experience is usually coped by the race via what Freud calls defense mechanisms. What is a defense mechanism? It is an unconscious process by which the ego stops from being overwhelmed due to extreme painful experiences. While Freud talks about this at an individual level, we can take it to a racial level. Some of the defense mechanisms are denial (denying the painful experience), regression (going back to a previous stage of development), displacement (transferring the anger towards the perpetrator to another person), projection (putting what one feels towards someone else as what that other person is feeling, for example, S hates Y, and in projection would say Y hates S), rationalization (giving reason for the painful experience), sublimation (channeling the repressed energy or desire in a more fruitful way), displacement (displacing the feeling towards someone else), etc. In the case of the trauma of partition, people who lost their land and faced trauma and ethnic cleansing as a race went through some of these defense mechanisms. One of them is denial that it happened and creating a silence around it. This pent-up aggression leads to several other symptoms. One of them is self-hatred and self-accusation. We will talk about the other defenses in subsequent blogs.
References: (Partition and The Flow of Communal Hatred, Nikhil Chandra Vaidya, Vak Pratima, Port Blair, 2023, p 19).
