This book is dedicated to women. To those who suffered and continue to suffer violence. Stories of women who come hand in hand with our ancestors

The author tells us that "this book is dedicated to women. To those who suffered and continue to suffer violence. There are so many stories that they could not enter these pages. I was only able to rescue a few, very few. Stories of women who come from the hand of our ancestors. Some – such as the pioneering psychoanalysts – suffered all kinds of violence. For holding revolutionary ideas for their time, for being women and breaking molds. Also because they were women who produced theory and opened new symbolic spaces, they were destined to be forgotten, and in many cases, appropriation and theft. Many of them were women of Jewish origin, which is why they suffered the cruelties and persecution of Nazism that was sweeping Europe at that time. Other stories are nourished by the testimonies of women from our continent, from our provinces, from our peoples. It was also built with fragments of those lives and also with the words of numerous women I heard in clinical spaces and in educational and social institutions..."

Hence the question that is asked: "What do we call symbolic violence? At the origin of all violence. So well defined by Pierre Bourdieu, as ... muffled, insensitive violence, invisible to its own victims, which is exercised essentially through the purely symbolic paths of communication, knowledge (...) and feeling. Bourdieu places it in the symbolic order that pre-exists us and gives it a fundamentally political-cultural character, since it is structural to the patriarchal system and legitimizes all other violence. It is the one we inadvertently incorporate through discourses, symbols, myths, the said and the unsaid in our culture. This is how we build our subjectivity and our common sense, from which we interpret life and the world. That is why symbolic violence is constitutive of our psyche. There is not a single woman who has not suffered symbolic violence in this patriarchal and androcentric world..."

Finally, he points out that "something is changing in these times. Women are increasingly taking to the streets, shouting, writing, investigating, networking, crowding, groups, gangs, tribes. We resist together and act collectively. We are resisting, creating and acting. New times and new ways of facing old and new problems. Nothing has been easy on our way."