24

This article examines certain psychoanalytic theories of domestic violence in the light of clinical experience with abused women in suburban São Paulo. This perspective relies on a correspondence between the psyche and the social context. Domestic violence against women questions in a new way the historicity of theory, its social, cultural, and political definitions. These are questions that gender studies poses to psychoanalysis. Taking into account the clinical and historical signification of domestic violence may help prevent a frozen an-historical metapsychology becoming a paradoxical resistance against psychoanalysis.