Devastation in the masculine and violence against feminine in women

This article aims to provide some contributions from psychoanalysis to clarify the issue of violence against women, a phenomenon that has occurred repeatedly in the history of societies. To analyze the structural bases of that kind of violence, we resort to the Lacanian theory of phallic jouissance and Other jouissance, feminine, proposing a differentiation between what is supposed to be Other jouissance and what is established as jouissance of the Other. Following the path proposed by Lacan, we suggest the hypothesis that jouissance of the Other may be related to the experience by the subject positioned on the masculine side, of an intrusive and devastating jouissance attributed to an Other, lived as absolute, mobilizing misogynous and even feminicide reactions. This distinction was operative in the sense that it allowed us to think about what we call here “devastation in the masculine” and its possible relationship with what we discern as “violence against the feminine in women” in this article.

Key words:
Devastation; feminine; masculine; jouisksance