Palimpsests of Sexuality and Intimate Violence: Turning Points as Transformative Scripts for Intervention

In this article we explore transdisciplinary understandings on scripts as transformative interventions. Script, as a term, refers, on the one hand, to cognitive routinised behavioural patterns; on the other hand, it is a multi layered process of enacting, interpreting and re-writing interaction within a specific context. The metaphor of the palimpsest, embodying and provoking interdisciplinary encounters, links the various layers of practiced and narrated scripts. The interrelation of the scripts of the palimpsest is marked by inextricability, as they use the same space and create an illusionary intimacy. We develop our ideas about script as intervention, reflecting on scripts of violence and sexual experience. We make use of the psychoanalytic term ”cryptic incorporation”. Cryptic incorporation entails the idea of an experience psychically “swallowed whole” by the subject, and therefore not accessible to conscious reflection once incorporated. Or methodological readings are both empirical and fictional. The empirical example is based on an interview with one respondent, who has experienced intimate violence during the course of her life. The autobiographical text of Shedding, written in 1975 by the Swiss author Verena Stefan, is an example of fiction. Both texts engage in the inextricability of vulnerability and intimacy. Analysing these narratives, we pay special attention to “turning points”. As turning points represent decisive changes within evolving live stories, they are read as palimpsestuous scripts of a transformative process. Thus, we focus on the human ability to change scripts, to re-write biographical events. We look for a productive entanglement of our scientific writing, understanding the writing process itself as a palimpsestuous layer of script as intervention.