Preamble

When I received from the Revista de Psicoterapia the invitation to write an article on abuse, besides rushing to accept, I began to reflect on the possible approaches and contents. As the publication of my book Del abuso y otros desmanes. El maltrato familiar entre la terapia y el control (“Of abuse and other excesses. Family abuse between therapy and control”) was very recent, the first temptation was to indulge in the practice of cut-and-paste and cobble together a rehash of myself, clipping paragraphs here and there. I must say, in honour of my own honesty and, above all, of the respect this journal inspires in me, that the idea was quickly discarded. But the demon of intellectual laziness does not easily give up its enterprises, so that I was soon assailed by a second temptation: to put together a new text which, in the form of an article, would inevitably reproduce the fundamental contents of the book. I also rejected this idea, which seemed to me unstimulating and just as ambiguous from the point of view of editorial ethics: the book would always be better and more complete and, moreover, an article of this kind would supplant what good reviews ought to be.

That was where things stood when, following one of the seminars on abuse that I gave at that time, I received a letter from one of the participants, training as a family mediator and a professional in the vast territory of socio-therapeutic services. The letter was critical, but grateful and respectful; so, although it caused me a certain irritation (the kind I feel almost every time that, despite my efforts, I do not feel understood), it also made me want to reply, since the image I had of its author remained no less kind and friendly.

I let a few weeks go by and, indeed, I replied to her, while beginning to form the idea of giving publicity to both letters, to illustrate the importance of ideological confrontation on questions relating to abuse. I first thought of asking my correspondent’s permission and even offering her co-authorship of the resulting text, but this generosity, which would no doubt have honoured me, would have enormously complicated the process of elaboration, to the point, who knows, of perhaps making any concrete result impossible.

I therefore chose to assume full responsibility for the writing, making the identity of my polemicist student unrecognizable, to the point of legitimizing speculation as to whether this article is, as it apparently claims, strictly documentary or, on the contrary, a work of fiction. It is the author’s privilege to sow doubt, just as it falls to the reader to assert their own interpretation. What I hope and wish is that this play of intersubjectivities, intended to make the contents more pleasant, does not distract the reader from what is essential in them, and that the maxim uniting the documentary and fictional genres prevails: “se non è vero, è ben trovato”.

Theoretical contextualization