Understanding Is Not Blaming: Reflections on Gisèle Pelicot's memoir, A Hymn to Life

It is generally my habit to approach trauma memoirs with some caution. Many are organized around a familiar narrative: an account of cruelty, followed by a hard-won assertion of resilience. Such stories can be powerful and important, but they often invite the reader into a relatively clear moral landscape of victimization and survival. A New York Times review suggested this book was special in that the author presented herself as searching for meaning. As a student of psychology I approached the book with the hope that it might be somewhat like inviting Madame Pelicot into my consultation room and being given the chance to listen. I was amply rewarded.

An initial read of the memoir reveals the author to be a middle class woman, competent in her work, devoted to family, and a person with a comfortable circle of friends. There is little to suspect in this outer portrait that she is living a life involving horrible abuse and exploitation.

The story begins with Giselle telling us about a phone call from her husband informing her that he has lost his phone and needing an access code to activate a new one. A few days later he tearfully confesses that he has been caught be a security guard attempting to photograph underneath women's skirts in a local market.

Giselle reacts with an admonishment to her husband that he must apologize to the women involved, see a therapist, and promise that he will never do something like this again else she will leave him. She copes with the immediate situation by telling herself, things could be worse. Two months later after the police have completed an investigation involving his seized computer and phone the couple is called to the police station, Giselle believes it is a routine administrative proceeding. They are separated at the police station, thereafter she never sees her husband again but in the courtroom. The police present her with photographic evidence that for decades her husband has been drugging her and has solicited over 50 men to rape her while filming and photographing their crimes. On the day of her visit to the police station the world she has inhabited for decades is threatened to abruptly come apart.

Subsequently as the book unfolds the story alternates between struggles in the present as the legal process unfolds, with reflections on the past involving her growing up years, that of her husband, and the evolution of a seemingly reasonably happy and unremarkable marriage and family life.

Salient points in the narrative offered by Madame Pelicot involve her awareness of the trauma she and her husband had experienced growing up, Hers related to the death of her mother at age nine and her father's prolonged and complicated grief followed by her father eventually marrying and abusive stepmother. Mr. Pelicot had been raised in an unstable household with suspicions of a sexually abusive father and grandfather. For much of the book the author views her marriage as a haven for two wounded souls who had found happiness and security with one another.

One of the unusual qualities of the memoir is the manner in which Pelicot addresses the reader. Rather than presenting a polished argument or a simple account of victimization, she gradually unwinds her story in a way that can leave the reader feeling less like an observer and more like a trusted companion. As a professional reader I often found myself with the impression of sitting across from a patient in my office, listening as she struggled to understand events that had shattered her assumptions about herself, her marriage, and her past.

Two questions repeatedly emerged as I read. The first was how Pelicot could have remained blind, or rather unknowing, to what was happening to her. To ask such a question is not to blame the victim. Blame would imply that she knew, or should have known, and bears responsibility for failing to act. The question I am asking is different. What psychological processes might allow an intelligent, capable, and psychologically minded person to remain unaware of realities that, in retrospect, appear impossible to miss? The second question concerns Pelicot's continuing attachment to her husband. Long after learning of his crimes, she retained elements of a caring and protective attitude toward him.

Over the years of her abuse, Pelicot recounts a variety of experiences that, in retrospect, seem difficult to ignore. She describes a strangely tasting cocktail, apparent bleach spots on clothing, persistent and unexplained medical symptoms, and at one point even asking her husband directly, "Are you drugging me?"

At one point in the narrative Pelicot recounts the sudden rupture of a longstanding friendship with a dear friend. The latter having been solicited by Pelicot's husband to have sexual relations approached her with good intentions to warn her stating, 'you do not know the man you are living with.' Pelicot without allowing her friend to tell her what was behind such a comment threw her out of the room and did not speak to her for years. It is perhaps this disclosure in the narrative more than any other that gave this reader an awareness of the amount of psychic energy Madame Pelicot had invested in 'not knowing.'

When we conjecture on Madame Pelicot's psychic structure it is done in the spirit of viewing her as an open, resourceful, and psychologically minded individual. My speculation is similar to the thought processes I would have listening to a cooperative and talented patient, with the caveat that I cannot interact with the author as I would with a patient; it is clinical interaction that substantiates or weakens conjectures.

There is no doubt that Pelicot is a strong and valiant individual. In France victims of sexual crimes are entitled to closed hearings. Anticipating feeling very alone in the proceedings Madame Pelicot chose to open the process and go forward with a public trial. Her rationale was that public scrutiny would likely be supportive as she was facing a courtroom of 50 defendants and attending lawyers. The public ended up very supportive to the point that the state, at the conclusion of the trial, eventually named her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, one of the France's highest distinctions.

So how are we to frame Pelicot's psychological vulnerabily in the face of such clear strength fortitude and dignity? One way of approaching this question is through object relations theory, a family of psychological ideas concerned with how our sense of self develops through intimate relationships.

Two principal authors that come to mind are Winnicott and Heinz Kohut. 'Object relations' is a perspective on human development that is widely accepted. The idea is that the structure and our sense of self evolves developmentally from our intimate relations to caretakers. Winnicott's 'transitional object' is a vivid example this. The child, emerging from absolute dependency on his or her caretakers, first takes on a literal object, say a blanket or teddy bear which becomes a token of the presence of the caretakers. Over time as the child incrementally experiments with independence in the world the literal need for the transitional object becomes less and less important as the sense of security and self caring is internalized.

A similar developmental process occurs in the establishment of the multidimensional quality we call selfhood. Over time, functions initially supplied by important relationships are gradually internalized, allowing the individual to experience increasing autonomy while remaining capable of intimacy and dependence.

What makes Pelicot's memoir so intriguing is that she is an unusually open and psychologically minded narrator. Rather than simply recounting events, she repeatedly attempts to understand her own experience. The book is well written and the reader is allowed to join her in this effort.

My own impression is that Pelicot's sense of security, which originally was deeply intertwined with her experience of her husband as kind and supportive, evolved as she encountered a world in which she was increasingly alone and needing to find an internal sense of companionship. Her husband in an unfortunate way had been a kind of transitional object, Psychologically the marital relationship appears to have functioned as an essential anchor to her sense of self.

Viewed in this light, the catastrophe of her husband's crimes was not merely the discovery that her husband had committed monstrous acts but was complicated by the challenge of maintaining a sense of self despite the collapse of her sense of her husband's integrity upon which much of her experience of self had depended. One of the most remarkable aspects of the memoir is that, as the trial unfolds, Pelicot gradually develops a greater capacity to increasingly integrate her own personality. The reader witnesses not merely survival, but a painful movement toward greater psychological independence.

The remarkable conclusion I drew from the book is that as Madame Pelicot allowed herself to experience her husband as a crumbled and shattered soul she at the same time was discovering her integrity and nobility.