Tongues, Bodies, and Borders: Holding Aggression and Vulnerability in a Fragmented World
Introduction: The Nurse, the Witness, and Winnicott’s Baby
In every war zone, hospital, migrant camp, or home ravaged by silence, nurses stand as witnesses to the rawest edges of humanity. Drawing from Winnicott’s core idea—that we are always holding people as we once held babies—the nurse holds not only wounds and bodies, but histories, regressions, and psychic fractures. This applies across geopolitical contexts—from Ukraine’s trenches to Germany’s abortion debates, from US gender wars to China’s suppressed aggression.
Men go to war to protect women and children, only to return with PTSD, broken bodies, and displaced rage. Women, caught in the currents of political regression, lose bodily autonomy and are often silenced or scapegoated for the aggression of a world they didn’t design. Gender becomes not just a personal identity but a battlefield of its own, where each culture maps its fears, desires, and myths onto bodies that bleed, weep, speak, or go numb.
This essay explores the psychoanalytic and social dynamics of gender, war, aggression, and silence through the lens of global nursing, with attention to identity, power, vulnerability, and care.
Part I: Gender and Identification—What Does It Mean to Be a Man, Woman, or Other?
We are told what it means to be a man. In many Eastern and authoritarian societies, that means control, discipline, power, and the repression of vulnerability. To be a woman? That’s often tied to service, care, beauty, and the invisibility of pain. To be trans, nonbinary, or in-between is often to be cast out of the social grammar entirely, punished for disrupting the binary scaffolding that holds patriarchy in place.
In Germany, modern democratic discourse tells us that gender shouldn’t matter. But it still does. Historically, a female civil servant had to choose between marriage and her profession—once she married, she was no longer an officer of the state. First the State owned her, then a man did. Even today, women still contend with the inherited shame of their bodies and the absence of full autonomy in many decision-making spaces.
Gender identity is not just a personal trait—it is a position within a symbolic, historical, and social matrix. Who gets to express anger? Who gets to speak without being punished? Who is seen as a victim, and who is seen as threatening?
Part II: War and Male Aggression—Holding the Broken Soldier
In Ukraine, men are conscripted and sent to die under the justification of protecting women and children. This act of sacrifice elevates the masculine role to one of nobility—but also psychic devastation. These men return shattered, many unable to speak about what they’ve endured. Their aggression, untended and misunderstood, can erupt economically, socially, or domestically.
Winnicott would say that no one can survive trauma alone—that we all need someone to “hold” our experience when it overwhelms the ego. But who holds the soldier after war? Too often, it is the woman—expected to absorb rage, care for the shattered man, and suppress her own needs. Aggression becomes circular: what was once directed outward now infects the home.
In male-dominated societies, such as parts of China, aggression is socially permissible when directed toward women, but rarely tolerated when expressed by them. The social superego punishes female aggression, forcing it underground or sublimated into emotional sharpness, gossip, or silence. In contrast, US culture allows verbal expression, but even then, a woman’s “sharp tongue” is often pathologized—seen as “nagging,” “hysterical,” or “unfeminine.”
Part III: The Feminine as Threat—Witnessing the Mother’s Power
At the heart of many cultural conflicts lies a fear of the mother: too powerful, too needed, too emotionally enveloping. This maternal omnipotence—real or projected—evokes both longing and hatred, particularly in boys growing up without emotionally present fathers.
In Spain, some African migrants speak of mothers who “painted them blacker than they are”—a metaphor for how maternal control becomes internalized as shame. In psychoanalytic terms, this reflects a failure of symbolic separation: the mother is not just nurturing but threatening, and the child’s identity is formed not through individuation, but through opposition and fear.
This unresolved maternal dynamic often spills into adult gender relations. Women become scapegoats for internal psychic chaos. Misogyny is not just cultural—it is transgenerational, rooted in the unresolved trauma of dependency, vulnerability, and rage. Men may unconsciously punish women for being the site of both origin and subordination.
Part IV: Silence, Writing, and the Tongue
Women’s aggression has often been silenced or minimized, seen as emotional rather than political. Yet women fight back—with their tongues, with their pens, with silence so loud it reshapes the room.
Writing is one of the oldest weapons women have used. As Hélène Cixous wrote, “Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” Female aggression in the form of writing is socially potent, especially when it refuses to play nice.
In the U.S., women have the linguistic tools and platforms to express themselves, but face backlash for doing so. The rise of the Trump-era misogyny, the rollback of abortion rights, and the reassertion of white patriarchal dominancesignal a global trend: we are living in a regressive period. The backlash against female agency is a reaction to the unconscious fear that women are no longer containable.
Meanwhile, in China, female aggression remains largely repressed. To be “too loud,” to argue, to confront male authority is seen as deviant or dishonorable. This doesn’t make Chinese women less angry—it just means the aggression is relationally expressed or turned inward: psychosomatic symptoms, eating disorders, or shame.
Conclusion: Bridging the Personal and the Political, the Body and the Word
We cannot analyze the individual without analyzing the frame that holds them: their society, their history, their psychic lineage. The nurse knows this, whether in a war zone or maternity ward. She holds not just pain, but meaning.
Psychoanalysis offers tools not to individualize suffering, but to witness its symbolic roots—to see how aggression, victimhood, identity, and gender are shaped by history and culture, and how each body carries a national story.
Women are not victims by nature. Victimhood is a position, not an essence. It is a moment of uncontainable rupture—a moment that, if held, can be transformed. If not held, it repeats.
So the question is not only how to stop the violence, but:
How do we hold aggression before it becomes destruction?
How do we hear the silences women live with?
How do we raise boys not to fear the feminine within?
How do we let people speak, even when their voices threaten the very structures we’ve learned to call safety?
References
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment
Benjamin, J. (2020). Beyond Doer and Done To
Laub, D. & Felman, S. (1992). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
Cixous, H. (1975). The Laugh of the Medusa
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Reports on Gender, War, and PTSD in Ukraine and Global South (UNHCR, WHO, 2023–2025)
