Violence as a psychological outlet

While reading the Margery Kempe stories and especially the Bynum piece on Female Body Relgious Practice, I could not help but analyze these texts from a psychoanalytic point of view and wonder whether through these texts (primarily based on women, the female body and female mysticism) that we could not perhaps learn something about human nature. It must be first understood that the Bynum article makes a huge point out of emphasizing that women were more often than not those who used their bodies in order to express their piety: "Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it - a horrible yet delicious elevation - into a means of access to the divine." Moreover, another point is made by Bynum that there was a huge psychological component to the mystical actions of women and that it was not solely a consequence of the body. The intense suffering that women would put themselves through in order to achieve closeness to God is something that to us seems extremely intense and unheard of. They would try to emulate Christ's suffering on the cross by hurting their own bodies and pray for illness so that they could endure hardship and perhaps prove their piety in the way perhaps that a man at battle who was fighting for the cause of religion could claim to have done. While reading this I could not help but make a comparison to the harming of men to their bodies during violence at battle. It seems as though during the medieval period, for some reason or another, the body and mind connection was very strong. Men managed to use violence with each other and withstood as well as inflicted bodily pain which is unheard to us today. Women, who did not have this outlet on the battlefield used their bodies as well, perhaps as a psychological outlet to answer the doubts that they had about their existence and their morality. It is important to remember that women did not have the battlefield as an outlet to engage body and mind. As Kempe writes, "And when she was at any time sick or troubled, the devil said in her mind that she should be damned, for she was not shriven of that fault" and Bynum writes, "Thus one might artuge that women had to stress the experience of Christ and manifest it outwardly in their flesh, because they did not have clerical office as an authorization for speaking." Thus we can ask ourselves two major questions. Firstly, is there a comparison that can be made with how men united body and mind on the battlefield versus how women united spirituality and body in the ways in which they harmed themselves? And secondly, if women had been granted another, different avenue for expression, is it likely that they would have still partaken in self-inflicted suffering?