The Body of an Iranian Woman in the Culture of Acid Attacks

Reza Kazemzadeh, a psychologist and researcher residing in Belgium, who authored the book "The Psychoanalysis of the Blind Owl," has examined the culture of acid attacks in Iran in five articles. In Iran, all events occur with a dizzying speed; incidents quickly become newsworthy and push previous newsworthy events off the scene. Often, this urgency is due to the untimeliness and simultaneous intensity of the impact that events create in the minds and psyches of Iranian citizens. The rapid pace of events and incidents in these years of the Islamic Republic has led to a hasty and impatient political and social activism. This haste in understanding events, as it creates an addiction to a lack of time, inevitably leads to the formation and ultimately the reinforcement of thought habits that gradually become fixed and unchangeable clichés. Thus, currently, every unfortunate event in Iran is immediately attributed by opponents to the Islamic Republic and by representatives of the Islamic Republic to its opponents inside or outside Iran. The constant repetition of seemingly different but fundamentally similar and fixed clichés not only does not enhance our understanding of events but also obscures and hides the characteristics of each of those events amidst generalizations. The acid attacks last year in Isfahan were one of the shocking and terrifying events that initially struck the minds and psyches of countless people like lightning, creating a sudden, intense, and collective fear, and then disappeared just as quickly from the public sphere and the virtual world. In the article you have before you, an attempt has been made to reflect on various aspects of this painful and traumatic event. Trauma, in the context of its impact on human psychology, often necessitates discussing public and collective trauma. Psychologists who treat traumatized minds are well aware of the consequences of trauma, which, due to the intensity of the shock, leads to an inability to express and even to rationally comprehend and, more importantly, to digest the event. Trauma, precisely because of its intensity and its sudden occurrence, stupefies the human mind and psyche. The inability to rationally understand and emotionally express what one experiences internally compels the psyche to exert all its energy to expel the unpleasant memory from the realm of self-awareness and, in some cases, even from memory. For this reason, in severe cases, affected individuals sometimes do not even remember events related to before and after the incident. The acid attacks last year in Isfahan were one of the shocking and terrifying events that initially struck the minds and psyches of countless people like lightning, creating a sudden, intense, and collective fear, and then disappeared just as quickly from the public sphere and the virtual world. Reza Kazemzadeh By suppressing the "representation" of the event, the accompanying feelings of fear and terror are also repressed into the unconscious. In the process of repression, the representation of the event is dissociated from the accompanying feeling of terror, allowing for the possibility of reconnecting this feeling to new representations that no longer have a direct relation to the traumatic event. These new representations can manifest in the unconscious as nightmares or in the waking world as various forms of unreasonable phobias, creating serious and long-term psychological issues. The feeling disconnected from the traumatic event can also suddenly emerge in daily life conflicts as intense and sometimes uncontrollable anger, even leading in some cases to acts of violence against oneself or others. Nevertheless, one of the most important methods of treatment and coping with the long-term consequences of trauma is the recollection of the painful event, of course in a safe environment, to revisit the traumatic event and ultimately strive to understand what has happened to oneself. If we focus the discussion more on the collective trauma of the acid attacks in Isfahan, we can say that one of the most important methods of coping with the social consequences of collective trauma also involves creating a calm space for collective discussion, producing various narratives from individuals and groups, and creating a shared and multifaceted understanding of the event. Such work can only be achieved by allowing media to prepare and disseminate accurate and complete news, providing explanations from informed authorities in the police, municipal authorities, judicial officials, etc., identifying the perpetrators of the crime, conducting public trials, reflecting the words of direct victims and their relatives, soliciting public opinion, and holding discussions among specialists to clarify the sociological, psychological, criminological, legal, and other aspects of these painful events. Now, if contrary to what has been said, government officials attempt to downplay the event and close the case as soon as possible, they effectively act as a force of censorship in the realm of pre-consciousness, only succeeding in pushing the memory of that event into the collective unconscious. In this case, the suppressed emotions and feelings that these events produce become like a compressed spring within the layers of human psyche and can erupt in the future, either in various social events or in individual confrontations among citizens. Reza Kazemzadeh Suppressing these countless events over the past three decades has made the psychological economy of Iranians very fragile, unstable, and explosive. Psychological fragility and emotional instability are undoubtedly one of the significant reasons for the high rate of violence in our society today. Among the significant examples of collective trauma in our society, which unfortunately have never had the opportunity for discussion in a calm environment free from various tensions over the past thirty years, we can mention the following: the violence related to the 1979 Revolution, the bloody and ongoing suppression of many national, religious, gender, and other minorities from the very beginning of the revolution to the present, the widespread and continuous psychological and physical violence against women, the Iran-Iraq War, the internal conflict in the 1980s, the suppression of the Green Movement, and the recent acid attacks on women's faces in front of the helpless gaze of citizens. These are just a few examples of phenomena in our society that have directly or indirectly inflicted deep and lasting blows on the mental health of Iranians over the past three decades. In connection with events of such terrifying magnitude and such widespread dimensions, the most common collective action taken in the public sphere has been to hold "memorial ceremonies" (either by the opposition or the regime). However, memorial ceremonies are not a suitable venue for discussion, free dialogue, and critique. The primary function of such ceremonies is, first and foremost, to reconstruct collective memory in order to preserve and strengthen individuals' sense of belonging to the group. In such an atmosphere, the priority is to enhance feelings of solidarity and closeness among individuals who find themselves close to each other in terms of thought or life experience. While such ceremonies are undoubtedly effective and beneficial for alleviating the pain of victims and their families, one cannot expect that the performance of ritual ceremonies, which are often accompanied by the repetition of emotionally charged clichés in speech and execution, will create an opportunity for collective thinking and dialogue among various social groups. A superficial look at the biased articles and emotional speeches that take place in such ceremonies, whether inside or outside the country, clearly illustrates our point. In our society, the suppression of thoughts and feelings and their repression into the collective unconscious of Iranians has created traumatic taboos; taboos that we all live and breathe under their psychological influences without having the ability to speak freely about them. Our current and chronic inability to think about the painful events of contemporary Iranian history has led us to live under the influence of events and matters for over three decades that we have not yet been able to discuss in a healthy environment, free from turmoil and violence. The existence of numerous collective traumas over the past thirty-plus years has turned the public sphere of our society into a minefield. Until now, our thinkers and intellectuals, who have acted as the only "digestive system" of our collective psyche over the past century, have found two methods for thinking about these traumatic events, two methods that follow a common principle: avoiding direct confrontation with trauma. One of these methods refers to the past ("historiography") and the other delves into the abstract world of concepts ("philosophizing"). These two methods, which in many cases have blended together, are attempts to find meaning, the meaning of what has happened to the Iranian people over these three decades, to find the primary and ultimate cause of wounds that do not heal. In our society, the suppression of thoughts and feelings and their repression into the collective unconscious of Iranians has created traumatic taboos; taboos that we all live and breathe under their psychological influences without having the ability to speak freely about them. Our current and chronic inability to think about the painful events of contemporary Iranian history has led us to live under the influence of events and matters for over three decades that we have not yet been able to discuss in a healthy environment, free from turmoil and violence. Reza Kazemzadeh For thinking about these collective traumas, on one hand, some consider starting from the symbolic beginning of our modern history (the Constitutional Revolution) sufficient, while others even go back to the Arab invasion of Iran 1,300 years ago. On the other hand, some convert tangible events into mental concepts and, through sometimes clever addition and subtraction of these concepts, attempt to establish a new meaningful system over the worn-out and broken ideologies of decades past. Although revisiting and rewriting contemporary and ancient history—conducted to understand what the Iranian person experiences and feels today—is scientifically and technically invalid from the perspective of historiography, it can be "beneficial" (in terms of public health) for our collective psyche from the perspective of the subjective effort to understand collective traumas and especially to find meaning for them. The historiography that starts from finding reasons to justify what we live today is, in fact, a kind of effort for collective psychotherapy. The important characteristic of this type of subjective and purposeful historiography (which simultaneously distinguishes it from realistic historiography) is that the knots and focal points of its texts are influenced by and even dominated by the black holes of the unconsciousness of the collective psyche. A precise and psychoanalytical analysis can accurately display the connection between such texts and various types of collective traumas experienced by Iranians over the past thirty years. The existence of countless individual and collective traumas is one of the significant reasons that leads us to look at our present without truly seeing it. Seeing is, in fact, becoming aware of what we are looking at. Thus, one can look at something without actually seeing it. We are witnesses—direct victims of our times—without being able to directly observe certain phenomena; we only feel their impacts on our psyche and collective emotions. In fact, we are the current witnesses of our times, influenced by collective unconsciousness and under the sway of repressed and often suppressed anger, fear, and suffering, taking up the pen to recount what has happened to us while simultaneously concealing some of its most painful aspects. In connection with collective traumas and in fact to compensate for psychological losses, various ways of reacting can be employed: holding memorial ceremonies at certain times of the year, collecting and then publicizing the testimonies of victims and witnesses, establishing courts or truth commissions, and finally historiography for the realistic recording of events. In our society, the boundaries between these various domains are still not properly observed, and the different objectives pursued by each are not well recognized. Therefore, among these various approaches, the predominant practice is holding memorial ceremonies. Limiting oneself to holding memorial ceremonies leads to a situation where, while maintaining or increasing the sense of connection between the individual and the group, both the individual and the group remain in a traumatic position.