Why do some men kill women?

By Dr. Raquel Berman

In Mexico, there are currently 11 femicides per day. These femicides are just the tip of the iceberg of a machismo that has always existed, but which is now erupting in a more violent form, due to various social changes.

Organized crime violates the country. Firearms, once forbidden to the population, are now commonplace. Savage capitalism has alienated human relations. And yet, these social changes are not the most important to explain the escalation of femicides.

In this work, based on objective data, on my observation of patients in my office and on the analysis of more than 2000 texts from women victims of violence received at the Raquel Berman Foundation, founded by me precisely to receive and analyze them, I argue that the main cause of the escalation of femicides is an omnipresent phenomenon in Mexico today.

That is, the new female identity.

Today, as never before, Mexican women study and work outside the home in similar numbers to men; they have their own money, they have fun according to their desires, they dress as they wish, they go to bars and dance halls, they choose their sexual partners and if they feel controlled or mistreated, they break off these relationships and start new ones; and many are single mothers. This new autonomy of women annihilates the traditional identity of men and annihilates their old patriarchal values, based on control and omnipotent power over women.

In other words, macho men fear being at the mercy of these women who sexually incite them, but are not dependent on them, and can easily abandon them. Moreover, they expose them to envy, which they do not know how to channel constructively.

I add here the social extrapolation of the phenomenon of the 11 daily femicides. Killing "these bad women" - bad according to patriarchal values - is silently approved by the majority of the male population - and also by the "good women" - good in the sense that they continue to adhere to the submissive role assigned to them by the patriarchy.

In short, the feminicide is the man who acts in the collective unconscious of the majority of the population, a majority that still has macho values. And as further proof of the social dimension of this clash between machismo and the new autonomy of women, is this observation.

In recent years, political authorities have passed a cascade of pro-women laws but otherwise fail to enforce them, while the judicial system silences female sex crimes and sabotages investigation procedures.

Another very visible contradiction. In no other country in the world do women hold as much political power as in Mexico. Today women occupy 50% of the seats in the federal Congress, 8 governorships, half of the ministries of the federal government, there are 4 women judges in a Supreme Court of Justice with 11 chairs. In short, women have broken the patriarchal belief that power belongs only to men. And yet, at the same time, the new state and private institutions created by women in politics to protect other women have been dismantled by the current government, even if it is a government that presumes to be of the Left.

And finally, a third sample of the clash between collective machismo and women's empowerment, this very plastic sample. In Mexico there are no more numerous marches than the feminist ones, they are marches that flood the main avenue of the country's capital with women of all generations and skin tones, and at the same time, to receive each annual feminist march, the President's Palace is walled with high metal fences.

It seems a paradox but it is not: it is the progress made by women, insufficient by the way, that has increased aggression against women. It is men's eagerness to maintain their dominance that has increased femicides and also family violence and rape outside and within marriage.

I now turn to the psychodynamic explanation of the feminicide.

As a psychoanalyst, I have asked myself these two questions: Why do some men kill women and what intrapsychic factors trigger their destructiveness towards women?

Let's start with a brief definition of machismo.

Machismo is the excessive affirmation of masculinity. An excessive affirmation forced by the belief in male biological superiority. It is also an identity centered on the penis and sexual potency that corresponds to severe pre-oedipal anxieties of separation and abandonment.

Santiago Ramirez, one of the founders of Mexican psychoanalysis, wrote in the 1950s that the Mexican has "too much mother and not enough father." This is not only an accurate psychological description, it is also a demographic one. Currently, 40% of households in Mexico are single-parent, with only a mother and no father. And in most other households, the father is sadistic, indifferent, i.e., emotionally unavailable.

Due to this physical or emotional paternal absence, in the typical Mexican home, the male child fears feminization and fusion with the mother, and when he fails to renounce his incestuous impulses and feels powerless against them (that is, when he does not achieve a positive Oedipus Complex), he counteracts them with a chronic rage against women in general. That is, a sadism, contempt and control over all women.

Thus, in the case of the male, the fear of being soft "like a woman" leads him to control women, punish them, isolate them, abandon them and even kill them, which subjectively "masculinizes" him.

The following 4 vignettes illustrate different degrees of macho male behaviors. In order to preserve therapeutic confidentiality, the facts below purposely omit other data that could identify them.

• This is a woman who was facially disfigured by acid burns. The aggressor was her husband. This is her story.

She came from a provincial family, won a scholarship to study in the nation's capital, got a well-paying job and had feminist friends. She met a professional man with progressive ideas, fell in love and got married. She had two daughters, managed to organize herself to continue working and earn money. As she became more autonomous, he began to control her in every aspect, including her money; he forbade her to frequent his friends and, in the face of her protests, he raped her sexually.

She then decided to leave him and they divorced. She started dating another man and one night, the ex-husband raped her and threw acid in her face.

After three years, she succeeded - with the support of an international feminist NGO - in bringing charges against him. He was arrested and imprisoned but not tried. With therapeutic help and the emotional support of a feminist sorority, plus 30 surgeries, she is currently trying to recover and rebuild her life, motivated mainly by the desire to continue caring for her daughters, and to help other women who have also been victimized.

Every day she wakes up with the feeling of being dead and having to come back to life. She fears she will be killed by her husband if he gets out of jail free.

According to the traditional macho script, her husband's rage and his tactics of terrorizing her should have controlled her. When he was arrested, he said that she was guilty of what happened to him, because she betrayed him as a prostitute, denying that they were already divorced. Obeying his masculine Overself, he decided to kill her.

It is usual that violent male males do not usually resort to psychoanalytic treatment and if they initiate it, they abandon it quickly. Those who do seek treatment autonomously do so because of a sudden traumatic denarcissization due to the loss of economic or political power or because of their doctors' indications due to psychosomatic symptomatology. But when they obtain symptomatic relief they usually abandon treatment. Those who remain in treatment are passive aggressive men, with functional impulses towards women, dependency problems and whose Ego Ideal is to be as macho as their narcissistic father without having achieved it.

• This is a man with several university degrees, who feels that despite his education he has had no concrete achievements and in reaction has conscious and frequent desires to kill women.

His pathology is clearly manifested in his sexual maladjustments. He avoids coitus with his wife, which he associates with being exploited, emptied by her and feeling that he is committing incest. He is addicted to pornography, compulsively masturbates, satisfying his voyeurism by contemplating sexual scenes in which the male protagonist exercises sadistic sexual control over the woman who is always ready to serve him sexually.

The aforementioned characters represent his parents in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship and he lives as a spectator of their sadomasochistic intercourse. He is pre-oedipally fixed to an anxious, always sick, seductive, demanding, abandoning and sadistic mother. He is his mother's confidant and with him she complains about her husband's mistreatment, while despising this son for his smallness and lack of real power. These maternal comments accentuate his inferiority to the father, specifically in relation to the size of his penis in comparison to paternal virility. His dependent passive aggression was and remains his favorite defense against his fusional desires for the mother. That is to say, in order not to fuse with her, he desires to kill her. His behavior towards women is seductive, pseudo-helpful, but intrapsychically chronically contemptuous and with fantasies of killing them or being killed by them.

For example, when he drives his car and a female motorist crosses his path, he feels desires to run her over and kill her. When I asked him why he does not act on these desires, he confessed that his male father never physically abused his mother.

This example illustrates that the quality of the paternal Overself is crucial in the containment of homicidal impulses of the male toward the female. In contrast, the father's overt physical aggression toward his wife and daughters induces in the son an unchecked corrupt Overself of his hatred of the woman.

For a long time his main transference was to me as his father, for two reasons. He attributed analytic power to me, which he envied, and he felt me less threatening than his mother, who represented incestuous temptation to him, because of her seductive behaviors.

• This is a man in his fifties, economically and politically powerful, who comes for treatment because he is afraid of dying like his father, at the age he is now, but cannot sustain curiosity about his own psyche.

The patient, after an initial period in which he attends the office regularly, and feels relieved of his anxiety by my interpretations, begins to miss his sessions, communicating to me by e-mails his multiple economic triumphs and his closeness with renowned political figures. On the other hand, he insists on paying for the sessions he misses, sending me cash with his driver.

Finally, I send him an e-mail in which I tell him that it is essential for him to come to a session so that we can talk about his absences.

When he finally attends a session, we explore the possible motivations for his absences and the meanings of his style of paying me related to his personal history. In particular, we explore his treatment of his wife, who meekly accepts his absences, and his treatment of his mistresses, whom he gratifies financially.

The transfer to me is obvious. I represent to him the unconditionally available mistress and his economic control over her. I am just another woman in his harem.

He tells me that he does not feel motivated to change anything in his life, feels very satisfied with his achievements, and thanks me for helping him to reduce his death anxiety. Countertransferentially, I felt that my "therapeutic know-how" was intolerable and threatening to him, that is, that my feminine analytical power violated his macho expectations.

• This refers to the English serial feminicide, Sutcliffe, who was studied psychoanalytically by English therapists.

I quote in this vignette some of the psychodynamic elaborations of those professionals, as well as some of my own.

Sutcliffe killed 13 women and failed in his attempts to kill 7 other women. He was imprisoned and imprisoned for life. The English press described him as a "disgusting animal", denying that a large number of English men physically abused their wives, a fact reported by English therapeutic institutions that treated violent men.

Sutcliffe grew up in a violent family environment, with macho values, where the father and grandfather bragged about their sexual potency and their conquests of women. Sutcliffe, the eldest son, felt he had to be like his quarrelsome and womanizing father and uncles, but Sutcliffe didn't much like sex and fighting. He was very attached to his mother, and was always enormously afraid of being "feminine," while fearing his violent father.

The mother was submissive to the father and sexually subservient to him. Suttcliffe realized that identifying with the mother meant being weak, despised and unrecognized.

He married a very young woman, shy, demanding and to whom he submitted himself by repeating with her his relationship with his mother. Since it irritated him that his mother had sexual relations with his father, he did what most men do, he split the maternal image into Madonna and prostitute, that is to say into idealized, self-sacrificing and asexual woman and sexualized woman or prostitute.

Because of his chronic dread of being invaded by the feminine and in order to deny it, Sutcliffe had to hold the conviction that all women were prostitutes, so they were all bad, and so he decided he had to kill them. Holding these convictions made him feel like "a real man," a belief he had to constantly prove to himself and others. Moreover, as mentioned above, he feared the father but also admired him, and tried to identify with him, a difficult intention because the father was distant and sadistic.

Sutcliffe probably felt inundated and impotent by his sexual impulses towards his father (his negative Oedipus Complex). So, to banish his femininity and shore up his fragile masculinity, he began to kill women in reality.

Every time he raped, stabbed and ripped apart the body of his victim, he felt VIRIL , powerful, but not particularly sexually satisfied.

In short, Sutcliffe tried to avoid disintegrating by killing women. This is the case with every feminicide. To be "a man"-the patriarchal idea of what a man is-he kills women.

Dr. Raquel Berman is a psychoanalyst; this paper was presented at the FEPAL Congress, Mexico 2022.

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