כשגוף פוגש שפה, וזו יוצרת רוח — נשים ערביות־ישראליות על גילוי עריות שעברו בילדות: מבט פסיכואנליטי על מחקר איכותני

Our work is derived from psychoanalytic observation and analysis of semi-structured interviews that were conducted with 10 Arab-Israeli women, all victims of incest in childhood. Our observations reveal specific linguistic constructs through which the victims’ traumatic experiences are being expressed. For example, the analysis highlighted the respondents’ frequent transitions between Arabic, Hebrew and English, heavy use of plural first-person and third-person pronouns, reference to themselves’ in masculine form, and multiple negations – all of which help tell the deeper story ofintra-psychic, family and socio-political power constructs and multi plelosses. Taken as a whole, the victims’ metalanguage tells the profoundstory of the incest survivors’ experience of multiple estrangement orexile – from their bodies, families, their mother tongue, subjectivity and community.The linguistic constructs, and not only the content of the interviews as such, reveal and reflect not only this experience of imposed exile, but also the dynamics of the covering, discovering and recovering, the working-through of some of the most profound and traumatic experiences of these women. Their struggles and psychodynamics are discussed in light of the interrelationships between the private intra psychic language of the subject and the public language of the collective, both saturated with cultural-patriarchal values.The authors suggest that socio-political and cultural-communal oppression is embodied in the oppression imposed by the abuser, and subsequently within the self-imposed intra psychic oppression of the woman herself.The findings are discussed based on a combination of psychoanalytic and psych-social perspectives, emphasizing the ways by which the personal intersects with the socio-political; the personal trauma is reinforced by the collective trauma of living as a socio-political minority. As one of the women interviewed remarked, “If ever again anyone will say that there is no such thing as incest in the Arab society, I will send them to the library of the Hebrew University, to read this research!