ABSTRACT
The author digs into the world of emotional abuse and violence in sexual relationships. She turns to Melanie Klein for insights into why passionate feelings of love and sexual desire can arouse powerful and sometimes dangerous feelings of rage and hate. She delves into the dramatic emotions experienced by babies in what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid stage of development: ranging from blissful satisfaction and contented dependency to extreme rage, the urge to destroy the mother, and after the rage has wreaked havoc, the terror of being abandoned and the urgent need to make reparations. She notes the similarities with the behaviour of the abusers in sexual relationships. She describes a common cycle of abuse acted out by the couple. She looks at David Celani’s research in The Illusion of Love: Why the Battered Woman Returns to Her Abuser (1994). She finds disturbing similarities in the childhoods of perpetrators and victims who are ‘addicted’ to the cycle of abuse. She discusses the difficulties for therapists when working with clients who are addicted to the abuse cycle. Finally, she asks if Klein’s insights can help us to understand why, despite the challenges of feminism in liberal society, misogyny remains so devilishly hard to eradicate.
