From Mother’s Milk to the Unspeakable: Women’s Bodies, Migration, and the Trauma of Rejected Femininity

“The body keeps the score” (van der Kolk, 2014), a truth psychoanalysis has long recognized: trauma is embodied, not just remembered. This is vividly seen—and often violently denied—in the experiences of women facing migration, conflict, and repression. Drawing on insights from the International Psychoanalytical Association’s Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP), this reflection explores how women’s bodies become central in contexts of war, migration, and adolescent sexual violence. The refusal of the feminine—from rejection of maternal nourishment to wartime sexual violence—is not only social or political, but a deep psychic defense. As Kristeva (1982) suggests, the abject feminine must be expelled for the subject’s psychic stability, but this comes at profound cost.

Repression, Migration, and the Maternal Body

In repressive regimes marked by internal conflict, women’s bodies have often been battlegrounds in both political and psychic terms. Testimonies reveal widespread sexual violence used strategically to humiliate, dominate, and erase the feminine (Boesten, 2010). Psychoanalytically, this reflects a terrified disavowal of maternal power, reaching deep into the unconscious.

The mother’s breast—symbol of nourishment, comfort, and early identification—can become a source of fear when associated with danger, betrayal, or abandonment. Klein’s (1946) theory of “good” and “bad” breasts helps understand how, in traumatic contexts like migration, the maternal is experienced as failed or threatening, feeding silence or even death. As COWAP highlights, women’s bodies carry unspeakable pain, often transmitted across generations via projective identification.

Adolescents, Rape, and the Psychodynamics of Silence

Adolescent girls who experience rape—especially during displacement—face a breakdown in symbolic processing. Trauma interrupts the integration of bodily experience with language and meaning. Freud’s (1917) work on mourning and melancholia describes how unprocessed grief becomes psychic poison; migrant girls’ bodies hold stories that remain unspoken.

The rejection of the feminine here is a defense against psychic fragmentation (Irigaray, 1985). For migrant women and girls, femininity may be feared as weakness or threat to fragile identity boundaries.

Migration as Psychic Dislocation

Migration is a liminal crossing, not only geographical but psychic. Women may lose social power, bodily autonomy, and narrative coherence. They risk being reduced to symbols of excess or danger, echoing Kristeva’s abjection: the feminine expelled to preserve identity but returning as horror.

Here, the mother’s milk becomes metaphor for an inheritance of trauma, often bypassing language entirely and traveling somatically (Mitchell, 2000).

Women’s Bodies as Witnesses

When words fail, women’s bodies bear witness. Psychoanalysis must reengage with the body—not only as symbol, but as site of real suffering, especially with refugees and survivors whose trauma is often pathologized or ignored.

The challenge is to give voice to the unspeakable—not by forcing speech, but by attending to what the body expresses through pain, dissociation, or other symptoms. The feminine, so often feared or rejected, must be reclaimed psychically as a source of meaning and survival.

Conclusion

To understand women’s suffering in migration and conflict, we must attend closely to the body as a lived site of trauma and history. The rejection of the feminine, rooted in fears of maternal power and vulnerability, leaves scars across generations. From the fear of breast milk to adolescent rape, these traumas reveal the unspeakable—and the urgent need for spaces where it can be spoken.

Only by recognizing the political, social, and psychoanalytic significance of women’s bodies can healing begin.

References

Boesten, J. (2010). Sexual Violence During War and Peace: Gender, Power and Post-Conflict Justice in Peru. Palgrave Macmillan.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. In Standard Edition, Vol. 14.
Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the Other Woman. Cornell University Press.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works.
Mitchell, J. (2000). Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria. Basic Books.
International Psychoanalytical Association, Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP). Various publications.