Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95:579–585
doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12170
Film Essay Y vos, sabes quien sos? [And you, do you know who you are?]1 Monica Horovitz 6, rue de Navarin, 75009 Paris, France – [email protected]
If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again – even our consciences. For this reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened. (Primo Levi, 1976[1987, p. 396])
This paper takes as its starting point the Argentinean film Cautiva, directed by G. Biraben, which describes the traumatic announcement by a judge to a teenage girl that she is the child, not of the couple who were bringing her up, but of parents who ‘disappeared’ during the military dictatorship. The author explores the notion of identity in general, and focuses more particularly on that of the children of the ‘disappeared’. Replacing ‘the disappeared’ in the context of Argentina and emphasizing the connivance of society as a whole at that time, the author goes on to explore appropriation and its impact on the child concerned – in this case, Cristina, the heroine of the film. Starting with the break-up of her identity, the author describes the stages of its reconstruction and the conditions required for this to be carried out; in particular, it was important for Cristina to be in contact with peers and not to avoid the pain that this long process involved or the uncertainty that continued to hang over her future. *** Disappeared, hidden, out of sight – those were the terms used to designate what could not be mentally represented of the events in Argentina under the military dictatorship. They refer to a void, the void of identity: ‘sucked’ (the word used by the military to designate the ‘disappeared’), NN [no nato], ‘hooded’, ‘silenced’; all identity is lost. The aim was to empty the body, the name, the meaning of words and make everything transparent. The ‘disappeared’ person is a body with no identity – and perhaps even an identity with no body; a phenomenon that has no rationality whatsoever to it. The disappeared are deleted from the world of the living. They belong to the category of ‘mathematical unknowns’, with nothing human about them. 1 The slogan in a publicity campaign that grandmothers addressed to teenagers after the dictatorship came to an end.
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
580
M. Horovitz
This is what President Videla, in the Clarin newspaper, said: “As such, the disappeared constitute an unknown; they are neither alive nor dead, simply disappeared.” With these disappearances, the military junta dared to kill even death, thereby creating an area of confusion between life and death. Society as a whole was the object of this terror, which could not have existed had society as a whole not chosen to see nothing of what was going on: the void left by the 30,000 ‘disappeared’; by 10,000 tortured prisoners whose only memory is their body; by 500 missing children and more than 100,000 exiles who had to leave their country for ever. By choosing secrecy (the ‘no te metas’) rather than accepting the painful responsibility of having been terrified and of having chosen complicity with the army, society had also ‘disappeared’ during those years. The director of Cautiva, Gaston Biraben, dedicated his film to “the thousands of disappeared persons, whose absence is still with us and guides us, and whose histories inspired the one narrated in this film”. The film is a moving reconstruction of one of the perverse legacies of the military dictatorship: the struggle of a child who survived to rediscover her true identity and tried to deal with her experience of loss. The screenplay tells the story of Cristina Quadri, who was 15 when she learned that she was the child of two disappeared persons, her real parents. She is met by a state attorney and a psychologist at her high school, with an official summons in her name. Cristina reluctantly follows them to the law courts, where a man introduces himself as a federal judge, asking to see her identity card. Cristina feels all the more uneasy when she learns that the Quadris, whom she knew as her parents, had not been informed of the fact that she was no longer in school. The judge tells her that the time has come for her to know the truth about her identity and her real age – both different from what was indicated on her identity card: her real name is Sofia Lombardi, and she is 16 years of age. Three DNA tests, carried out without her knowledge, showed that her biological parents were Leticia Dominich and Agustin Lombardi, two architects abducted by the security services in 1978, under the military dictatorship. The judge explains that her situation is known as an appropriation, i.e. an adoption carried out without the consent of the real parents. The judge proceeds very cautiously, realizing just how difficult it is to tell an adolescent both that those whom she thought were her parents were in fact not her parents and that her biological parents had ‘disappeared’. Cristina–Sofia’s sense of loss is thus twofold. She is completely stunned. The judge goes on to tell her that her real family – who had never stopped searching for her – wanted to have her back now that she had been found. He introduces her to her biological grandmother. Cristina, completely bewildered, grabs her bag and rushes out of the law courts, jumps on the first train leaving, calls her ‘mother’, Adela Quadri, who sends her husband to meet Cristina at the station. The federal police, however, arrest him at the station. The federal judge tells the Quadri couple that, since Cristina’s birth certificate was forged, she would henceforth be a ward of court until her situation could be clarified. Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Film Essay: Cautiva
581
These revelations completely shatter Cristina–Sofia. Disbelief and confusion are written all over the girl’s face when she realizes that. Not knowing whom to believe, she no longer knows who she really is. All she wants is “to go home” – to the place that she had always believed was her family home. However, she is obliged to live with her biological grandmother, who has been searching for her for the last 16 years. Fairly quickly she begins to wonder about her past, wanting to know what the Quadris themselves knew of it. In her new high school, while playing volley-ball against another team, she recognizes Angelica, the only one of her former friends who had never made a secret of the fact that her own father had ‘disappeared’. In the shower, after the game, being physically naked helped them bare their souls emotionally, so that Cristina–Sofia was able to tell Angelica that she too was the daughter of disappeared parents. Acknowledging that they were both alike and different created between them a special kind of relationship that encouraged them to seek out together some information about Cristina–Sofia’s real family and their imprisonment. They manage to track down the nurse who was working in the prison hospital and was one of the last people to see Cristina–Sofia’s mother alive. They learn that the young woman was brought blindfolded into the room on a stretcher and that she (the nurse) had helped her to give birth. One absolute rule was that prisoners should never be spoken to, but the nurse was able to whisper to the woman that her baby was a little girl. When the nurse returned secretly the next day, the young mother had disappeared from her cell. All that remained was blood on the sheets and a message scratched on the wall. Martha thus knew exactly who Sofia’s parents were – and her precise date of birth because of the clamour of the crowd shown that day on television when Argentina won the football World Cup: 25 June 1978. Cristina–Sofia shows the nurse some photos from that period, asking her if she recognized anybody. Martha points to a man nicknamed “Tuco” [glow-worm], who probably took the little baby. She said that some of the wardens were kind, others were bad, and that Tuco was one of the worst – everyone was scared of him. Cristina–Sofia is horrified because the man is her godfather, a very close friend of Pablo Quadri. The central themes of Cautiva are Cristina–Sofia’s rupture of identity and her attempts to keep her head above water. She was only 15 (16) when she realized that she was caught up in a web of lies and that everything she was so sure of in life was nothing but an illusion. The Quadris had never told her that she was not their child and, now that they were obliged to admit it, they still distorted the truth. She had therefore to take on board the plain unvarnished truth that her real parents were disappeared persons and that the Quadris had participated in unlawful acts. Reality became too vague for her; she felt desperate and lost all confidence in herself, caught up in a painful struggle between who she thought she was and what was actually happening to her. ‘Appropriating’ a child cannot be seen as an adoption because the child was not abandoned, nor as stealing because it was not the crime of an Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
582
M. Horovitz
individual – it was an activity organized by the state itself, following a systematic plan that made use of all available legal procedures. The appropriators were families linked to the military dictatorship, who knew that these children were the offspring of the ‘disappeared’. The children were brought up in denial, surrounded by a veil of secrecy. Their very origins were based on lies. They were brought up to believe as true what in fact was false, and to cathect as their parental imagos, figures that were deceitful: therefore, they had to metabolize that fraud by identifying with it. The past was everpresent in an unending re-living of kidnapping and horror. It is the hidden and secret features of that experience that make it uncanny (cf. Freud, 1919, p. 219). Terrible family secrets were fiercely burned onto the psyches of these children, a source of great mental pain. The main effects of ‘appropriation’ were breaking all ties of filiations and suppressing identity: the disappearance of the child who ought to have been born, the denial of his/her real name and that of the history of the desire for a child felt by the parents. That break-up was therefore not only an individual one, but also one that was social and group-based. In human beings, the relationship between parents and children is not ordained by nature; it is set up by the law, and “ignorance of the law is no excuse”: the law exists because it is written [scripta manent]. It is therefore via the link between the law and psychoanalysis that I shall try to explore the concept of identity. One’s earliest identity is established by being given a name by an other. This is where ego identification begins. Identity could be seen as the first hesitant – and sometimes contradictory – step towards being oneself, declaring oneself and feeling oneself to be someone. Identity is the acknowledgement both of the differences between one person and another, and of what belongs to the self as such. The sense of self makes continuity meaningful: words, actions, images are registered in the mind, creating a body of knowledge that opens onto the possibility of remembering. Identity is linked to memory. Its roots precede the birth of a child: in the wish – of the parents, family environment and wider cultural milieu – to have a child. This constitutes a matrix that lays the foundation for subjectivity and is prolonged in terms of a dynamic process of construction that goes on all through life, with its internal and external changes. Every identity-related process requires the individual to face up to his/her own particular past history. Some acts, however, fall within the competence of the state both as an agent of society and as the symbolic guarantor and regulator of what transpires between the individual and society. Setting up the processes required for the legal recognition of biological identity is the responsibility of that Other, the State. By taking on that function, it plays the role of a protective third party towards the individual and prevents the expression of any intention that might lead to feelings of guilt. In the present case, the violence perpetrated by the State was embodied in the appropriators who knowingly hid that information and had an alienating impact on any relationship with the child involved, setting up between them (i.e. between appropriators and appropriated) an unconscious pact. According to Ka€es (2009, p. 148): Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Film Essay: Cautiva
583
When the unconscious pact is set up on the basis of repression [. . .] it gives rise to repressed contents, ‘neglected’ elements, things left over, the seeds of which can always make their way back into the relationship. . . When unconscious pacts are established on the basis of denial [. . .] they give rise to other outcomes: within the relationship, they create [. . .] elements that are enigmatic or which cannot be signified or transformed. Deletions, zones of silence, pockets of intoxication, ‘spaces for rubbish’ [. . .] or vanishing lines mean that the individual remains foreign to his/her own past and to history itself.
This is akin to the ‘unrepressed unconscious’ or the ‘unthought known’. Ka€es’s concept of unconscious pacts and alliances implies some degree of reciprocity. In a pact, there are two participants; in an alliance, the relationship is set up on the basis of relative equality. In a pact, there is always some degree of constraint or violence exerted by one of the participants on the other. In the present case, the violence carried out by the state, which, as I have said, involved the appropriators who consciously put aside all knowledge of what was going on, tended to give rise to an alienating impact; this in turn made it necessary to set up an unconscious pact between appropriators and appropriated. In order to sustain it, a splitting takes place within the person concerned, such that part of the self is not aware of what is going on. That pact required several levels of reciprocity, which create, in the child, a splitting of the ego: inside the self, there is someone who cannot know. Yet at the same time the child ‘knows’, but also knows that this knowledge has dangerous consequences. Initially imposed, the Omert a, the law of silence, becomes essential to maintain the link and not lose the relationship with her ‘parents’. This split in the child’s ego is evident in Cristina’s question to her ‘mother’ before being exposed to the truth of her birth. Restitution, a legal term, has to do with the articulation between justice and truth. It is a group-based contribution to the reconstruction of the fabric of society. It takes effect when the child walks out of the courtroom with her lawful family and receives her own personal papers with the correct name and date of birth written on them. For restitution to make the reconstruction of identity possible: (a) the individual’s true place in the line of descent and ancestry must be restored; (b) the responsibility for any violence must be attributed to those really guilty, and there must be no victimization of the victim; and (c) the impact of the social catastrophe experienced by the individual involved must be acknowledged as such and its resolution must be organized. After this, some psychical working-through becomes possible with respect to the uncanny aspect that remains encapsulated in the child’s psyche as a result of the violence to which her parents had been subjected. In Cristina– Sofia’s case, the violence to which she had been subjected in utero, even before her birth, was a fundamental part of the mother/child emotional relationship, the foundation stone on which her identity would later be constructed (the hypothesis of a pre-primary identification). The traumatic nucleus could thus be revealed in an attempt to diminish its latent impact. Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
584
M. Horovitz
As human beings, we are subject ‘to’ crises and the subject ‘of’ crises. No matter how horrifying these may be, we have the potential to stand up to them. It is one thing to suffer an identity-related catastrophe, with one’s life being alienated by some Other, a despot and a criminal; it is quite another to face up to catastrophic change in a dynamic movement that opens onto the future, thanks to the encounter in the present with our origins and the emotional truth linked to these. On that point, psychoanalysis and ethics are mutually supportive, but in this kind of experience suffering is immense: it overwhelms the individual concerned, as occurs in the early stages of every catastrophic change. The risk then is that of the catastrophe taking on a per se aspect, thus nullifying any possibility of change. Whenever anything unexpected comes to the fore, even when we know the reasons for it, we go through an anxiety-provoking experience to do with loss of continuity in our own life. The fear that results from this may lead to complete panic or to experiences of uncanny strangeness and/or depersonalization. The loss of support means that the individual has to look for some other source of reinforcement. This is not a matter of underestimating unavoidable suffering, but of accepting the need to know the truth in order to break free of alienation and create a situation that will enable the individual to come forth as a subject in her own right, where before she was simply an object. Situations of crisis like these occur in legitimate families too. The mere fact of encountering the person who has been searched for during so many years is really quite overwhelming. The imagined child never corresponds exactly to the real child. In addition, the real child inevitably brings with her the scars of a traumatic past. The possibility of such an encounter is a process that requires workingthrough of mutual acknowledgement. In order to overcome that difficulty, what is necessary is a therapeutic setting and/or a supportive social fabric. The present social consensus and the setting-up of peer-groups (in Argentina, for example, the HIJOS2 ) are in this respect fundamental, as the film so clearly shows. What still remains unknown, however, is how the child will metabolize or remodel what the appropriating parents said about the paradoxical situation that they had maintained over so many years: modifying the individual’s identity to prevent her ‘connecting’ with ‘who she is’ as an-other person. In conclusion, I would say that if, as Agamben (1995, pp. 168–9) puts it: “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule”, there are in Argentina hundreds of young adults who cannot escape from that camp. Torn from the arms of their parents, these children, born in captivity or confined illegally with their parents, are still living under a name that is not their true one, without their biological identity or their own past history. They are subjected to bodies and words being 2 HIJOS is an acronym for Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio [Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence]. It is the name of organizations of the children of people who ‘disappeared’ in Argentina and in Guatemala.
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Film Essay: Cautiva
585
manipulated, with the unspoken aim of destroying their subjectivity. Scattered throughout the land, they are walking and living with us and around us. They are our disappeared, and they are still alive.
References Agamben G (1995). Homo Sacer: Il potere soverano e la vita nuda. [(1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, Heller-Roazen D, translator. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.] Freud S (1919). The uncanny. SE 17, 217–56. € s R (2009). Les alliances inconscientes. Paris: Dunod. Kae Levi P (1976). If this is a man, Woolf S, translator. London: Abacus, 1987.
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12170
Film Essay Y vos, sabes quien sos? [And you, do you know who you are?]1 Monica Horovitz 6, rue de Navarin, 75009 Paris, France – [email protected]
If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again – even our consciences. For this reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened. (Primo Levi, 1976[1987, p. 396])
This paper takes as its starting point the Argentinean film Cautiva, directed by G. Biraben, which describes the traumatic announcement by a judge to a teenage girl that she is the child, not of the couple who were bringing her up, but of parents who ‘disappeared’ during the military dictatorship. The author explores the notion of identity in general, and focuses more particularly on that of the children of the ‘disappeared’. Replacing ‘the disappeared’ in the context of Argentina and emphasizing the connivance of society as a whole at that time, the author goes on to explore appropriation and its impact on the child concerned – in this case, Cristina, the heroine of the film. Starting with the break-up of her identity, the author describes the stages of its reconstruction and the conditions required for this to be carried out; in particular, it was important for Cristina to be in contact with peers and not to avoid the pain that this long process involved or the uncertainty that continued to hang over her future. *** Disappeared, hidden, out of sight – those were the terms used to designate what could not be mentally represented of the events in Argentina under the military dictatorship. They refer to a void, the void of identity: ‘sucked’ (the word used by the military to designate the ‘disappeared’), NN [no nato], ‘hooded’, ‘silenced’; all identity is lost. The aim was to empty the body, the name, the meaning of words and make everything transparent. The ‘disappeared’ person is a body with no identity – and perhaps even an identity with no body; a phenomenon that has no rationality whatsoever to it. The disappeared are deleted from the world of the living. They belong to the category of ‘mathematical unknowns’, with nothing human about them. 1 The slogan in a publicity campaign that grandmothers addressed to teenagers after the dictatorship came to an end.
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
580
M. Horovitz
This is what President Videla, in the Clarin newspaper, said: “As such, the disappeared constitute an unknown; they are neither alive nor dead, simply disappeared.” With these disappearances, the military junta dared to kill even death, thereby creating an area of confusion between life and death. Society as a whole was the object of this terror, which could not have existed had society as a whole not chosen to see nothing of what was going on: the void left by the 30,000 ‘disappeared’; by 10,000 tortured prisoners whose only memory is their body; by 500 missing children and more than 100,000 exiles who had to leave their country for ever. By choosing secrecy (the ‘no te metas’) rather than accepting the painful responsibility of having been terrified and of having chosen complicity with the army, society had also ‘disappeared’ during those years. The director of Cautiva, Gaston Biraben, dedicated his film to “the thousands of disappeared persons, whose absence is still with us and guides us, and whose histories inspired the one narrated in this film”. The film is a moving reconstruction of one of the perverse legacies of the military dictatorship: the struggle of a child who survived to rediscover her true identity and tried to deal with her experience of loss. The screenplay tells the story of Cristina Quadri, who was 15 when she learned that she was the child of two disappeared persons, her real parents. She is met by a state attorney and a psychologist at her high school, with an official summons in her name. Cristina reluctantly follows them to the law courts, where a man introduces himself as a federal judge, asking to see her identity card. Cristina feels all the more uneasy when she learns that the Quadris, whom she knew as her parents, had not been informed of the fact that she was no longer in school. The judge tells her that the time has come for her to know the truth about her identity and her real age – both different from what was indicated on her identity card: her real name is Sofia Lombardi, and she is 16 years of age. Three DNA tests, carried out without her knowledge, showed that her biological parents were Leticia Dominich and Agustin Lombardi, two architects abducted by the security services in 1978, under the military dictatorship. The judge explains that her situation is known as an appropriation, i.e. an adoption carried out without the consent of the real parents. The judge proceeds very cautiously, realizing just how difficult it is to tell an adolescent both that those whom she thought were her parents were in fact not her parents and that her biological parents had ‘disappeared’. Cristina–Sofia’s sense of loss is thus twofold. She is completely stunned. The judge goes on to tell her that her real family – who had never stopped searching for her – wanted to have her back now that she had been found. He introduces her to her biological grandmother. Cristina, completely bewildered, grabs her bag and rushes out of the law courts, jumps on the first train leaving, calls her ‘mother’, Adela Quadri, who sends her husband to meet Cristina at the station. The federal police, however, arrest him at the station. The federal judge tells the Quadri couple that, since Cristina’s birth certificate was forged, she would henceforth be a ward of court until her situation could be clarified. Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Film Essay: Cautiva
581
These revelations completely shatter Cristina–Sofia. Disbelief and confusion are written all over the girl’s face when she realizes that. Not knowing whom to believe, she no longer knows who she really is. All she wants is “to go home” – to the place that she had always believed was her family home. However, she is obliged to live with her biological grandmother, who has been searching for her for the last 16 years. Fairly quickly she begins to wonder about her past, wanting to know what the Quadris themselves knew of it. In her new high school, while playing volley-ball against another team, she recognizes Angelica, the only one of her former friends who had never made a secret of the fact that her own father had ‘disappeared’. In the shower, after the game, being physically naked helped them bare their souls emotionally, so that Cristina–Sofia was able to tell Angelica that she too was the daughter of disappeared parents. Acknowledging that they were both alike and different created between them a special kind of relationship that encouraged them to seek out together some information about Cristina–Sofia’s real family and their imprisonment. They manage to track down the nurse who was working in the prison hospital and was one of the last people to see Cristina–Sofia’s mother alive. They learn that the young woman was brought blindfolded into the room on a stretcher and that she (the nurse) had helped her to give birth. One absolute rule was that prisoners should never be spoken to, but the nurse was able to whisper to the woman that her baby was a little girl. When the nurse returned secretly the next day, the young mother had disappeared from her cell. All that remained was blood on the sheets and a message scratched on the wall. Martha thus knew exactly who Sofia’s parents were – and her precise date of birth because of the clamour of the crowd shown that day on television when Argentina won the football World Cup: 25 June 1978. Cristina–Sofia shows the nurse some photos from that period, asking her if she recognized anybody. Martha points to a man nicknamed “Tuco” [glow-worm], who probably took the little baby. She said that some of the wardens were kind, others were bad, and that Tuco was one of the worst – everyone was scared of him. Cristina–Sofia is horrified because the man is her godfather, a very close friend of Pablo Quadri. The central themes of Cautiva are Cristina–Sofia’s rupture of identity and her attempts to keep her head above water. She was only 15 (16) when she realized that she was caught up in a web of lies and that everything she was so sure of in life was nothing but an illusion. The Quadris had never told her that she was not their child and, now that they were obliged to admit it, they still distorted the truth. She had therefore to take on board the plain unvarnished truth that her real parents were disappeared persons and that the Quadris had participated in unlawful acts. Reality became too vague for her; she felt desperate and lost all confidence in herself, caught up in a painful struggle between who she thought she was and what was actually happening to her. ‘Appropriating’ a child cannot be seen as an adoption because the child was not abandoned, nor as stealing because it was not the crime of an Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
582
M. Horovitz
individual – it was an activity organized by the state itself, following a systematic plan that made use of all available legal procedures. The appropriators were families linked to the military dictatorship, who knew that these children were the offspring of the ‘disappeared’. The children were brought up in denial, surrounded by a veil of secrecy. Their very origins were based on lies. They were brought up to believe as true what in fact was false, and to cathect as their parental imagos, figures that were deceitful: therefore, they had to metabolize that fraud by identifying with it. The past was everpresent in an unending re-living of kidnapping and horror. It is the hidden and secret features of that experience that make it uncanny (cf. Freud, 1919, p. 219). Terrible family secrets were fiercely burned onto the psyches of these children, a source of great mental pain. The main effects of ‘appropriation’ were breaking all ties of filiations and suppressing identity: the disappearance of the child who ought to have been born, the denial of his/her real name and that of the history of the desire for a child felt by the parents. That break-up was therefore not only an individual one, but also one that was social and group-based. In human beings, the relationship between parents and children is not ordained by nature; it is set up by the law, and “ignorance of the law is no excuse”: the law exists because it is written [scripta manent]. It is therefore via the link between the law and psychoanalysis that I shall try to explore the concept of identity. One’s earliest identity is established by being given a name by an other. This is where ego identification begins. Identity could be seen as the first hesitant – and sometimes contradictory – step towards being oneself, declaring oneself and feeling oneself to be someone. Identity is the acknowledgement both of the differences between one person and another, and of what belongs to the self as such. The sense of self makes continuity meaningful: words, actions, images are registered in the mind, creating a body of knowledge that opens onto the possibility of remembering. Identity is linked to memory. Its roots precede the birth of a child: in the wish – of the parents, family environment and wider cultural milieu – to have a child. This constitutes a matrix that lays the foundation for subjectivity and is prolonged in terms of a dynamic process of construction that goes on all through life, with its internal and external changes. Every identity-related process requires the individual to face up to his/her own particular past history. Some acts, however, fall within the competence of the state both as an agent of society and as the symbolic guarantor and regulator of what transpires between the individual and society. Setting up the processes required for the legal recognition of biological identity is the responsibility of that Other, the State. By taking on that function, it plays the role of a protective third party towards the individual and prevents the expression of any intention that might lead to feelings of guilt. In the present case, the violence perpetrated by the State was embodied in the appropriators who knowingly hid that information and had an alienating impact on any relationship with the child involved, setting up between them (i.e. between appropriators and appropriated) an unconscious pact. According to Ka€es (2009, p. 148): Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Film Essay: Cautiva
583
When the unconscious pact is set up on the basis of repression [. . .] it gives rise to repressed contents, ‘neglected’ elements, things left over, the seeds of which can always make their way back into the relationship. . . When unconscious pacts are established on the basis of denial [. . .] they give rise to other outcomes: within the relationship, they create [. . .] elements that are enigmatic or which cannot be signified or transformed. Deletions, zones of silence, pockets of intoxication, ‘spaces for rubbish’ [. . .] or vanishing lines mean that the individual remains foreign to his/her own past and to history itself.
This is akin to the ‘unrepressed unconscious’ or the ‘unthought known’. Ka€es’s concept of unconscious pacts and alliances implies some degree of reciprocity. In a pact, there are two participants; in an alliance, the relationship is set up on the basis of relative equality. In a pact, there is always some degree of constraint or violence exerted by one of the participants on the other. In the present case, the violence carried out by the state, which, as I have said, involved the appropriators who consciously put aside all knowledge of what was going on, tended to give rise to an alienating impact; this in turn made it necessary to set up an unconscious pact between appropriators and appropriated. In order to sustain it, a splitting takes place within the person concerned, such that part of the self is not aware of what is going on. That pact required several levels of reciprocity, which create, in the child, a splitting of the ego: inside the self, there is someone who cannot know. Yet at the same time the child ‘knows’, but also knows that this knowledge has dangerous consequences. Initially imposed, the Omert a, the law of silence, becomes essential to maintain the link and not lose the relationship with her ‘parents’. This split in the child’s ego is evident in Cristina’s question to her ‘mother’ before being exposed to the truth of her birth. Restitution, a legal term, has to do with the articulation between justice and truth. It is a group-based contribution to the reconstruction of the fabric of society. It takes effect when the child walks out of the courtroom with her lawful family and receives her own personal papers with the correct name and date of birth written on them. For restitution to make the reconstruction of identity possible: (a) the individual’s true place in the line of descent and ancestry must be restored; (b) the responsibility for any violence must be attributed to those really guilty, and there must be no victimization of the victim; and (c) the impact of the social catastrophe experienced by the individual involved must be acknowledged as such and its resolution must be organized. After this, some psychical working-through becomes possible with respect to the uncanny aspect that remains encapsulated in the child’s psyche as a result of the violence to which her parents had been subjected. In Cristina– Sofia’s case, the violence to which she had been subjected in utero, even before her birth, was a fundamental part of the mother/child emotional relationship, the foundation stone on which her identity would later be constructed (the hypothesis of a pre-primary identification). The traumatic nucleus could thus be revealed in an attempt to diminish its latent impact. Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
584
M. Horovitz
As human beings, we are subject ‘to’ crises and the subject ‘of’ crises. No matter how horrifying these may be, we have the potential to stand up to them. It is one thing to suffer an identity-related catastrophe, with one’s life being alienated by some Other, a despot and a criminal; it is quite another to face up to catastrophic change in a dynamic movement that opens onto the future, thanks to the encounter in the present with our origins and the emotional truth linked to these. On that point, psychoanalysis and ethics are mutually supportive, but in this kind of experience suffering is immense: it overwhelms the individual concerned, as occurs in the early stages of every catastrophic change. The risk then is that of the catastrophe taking on a per se aspect, thus nullifying any possibility of change. Whenever anything unexpected comes to the fore, even when we know the reasons for it, we go through an anxiety-provoking experience to do with loss of continuity in our own life. The fear that results from this may lead to complete panic or to experiences of uncanny strangeness and/or depersonalization. The loss of support means that the individual has to look for some other source of reinforcement. This is not a matter of underestimating unavoidable suffering, but of accepting the need to know the truth in order to break free of alienation and create a situation that will enable the individual to come forth as a subject in her own right, where before she was simply an object. Situations of crisis like these occur in legitimate families too. The mere fact of encountering the person who has been searched for during so many years is really quite overwhelming. The imagined child never corresponds exactly to the real child. In addition, the real child inevitably brings with her the scars of a traumatic past. The possibility of such an encounter is a process that requires workingthrough of mutual acknowledgement. In order to overcome that difficulty, what is necessary is a therapeutic setting and/or a supportive social fabric. The present social consensus and the setting-up of peer-groups (in Argentina, for example, the HIJOS2 ) are in this respect fundamental, as the film so clearly shows. What still remains unknown, however, is how the child will metabolize or remodel what the appropriating parents said about the paradoxical situation that they had maintained over so many years: modifying the individual’s identity to prevent her ‘connecting’ with ‘who she is’ as an-other person. In conclusion, I would say that if, as Agamben (1995, pp. 168–9) puts it: “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule”, there are in Argentina hundreds of young adults who cannot escape from that camp. Torn from the arms of their parents, these children, born in captivity or confined illegally with their parents, are still living under a name that is not their true one, without their biological identity or their own past history. They are subjected to bodies and words being 2 HIJOS is an acronym for Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio [Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence]. It is the name of organizations of the children of people who ‘disappeared’ in Argentina and in Guatemala.
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Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Film Essay: Cautiva
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manipulated, with the unspoken aim of destroying their subjectivity. Scattered throughout the land, they are walking and living with us and around us. They are our disappeared, and they are still alive.
References Agamben G (1995). Homo Sacer: Il potere soverano e la vita nuda. [(1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, Heller-Roazen D, translator. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.] Freud S (1919). The uncanny. SE 17, 217–56. € s R (2009). Les alliances inconscientes. Paris: Dunod. Kae Levi P (1976). If this is a man, Woolf S, translator. London: Abacus, 1987.
Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
