After trial Firdaus was sentenced to death. .
After researching the effects of abandonment, I feel that I can relate to Firdaus because I have dealt with the outcomes of abandonment first hand. While I had a different reaction to Firdaus, I still recognize the negative effects of abandonment happening over and over again. My goal is to raise awareness of the psychological and physiological effects of abandonment. Christian Schmahl, Barbara Hart, and Jean Baker Miller have all worked on raising awareness of this issue and each manages to show how the outcome could be different. In Nawal's memoir, Firdaus's abandonment by people leads to personality disorders, results in destructive behaviors, and causes her to exert power in unconventional ways. The research of Schmahl, Hart, and Miller support these findings with their own research on abandonment which illustrate that Firdaus's experiences reflect the consequences of abandonment and abuse.
According to Schmahl, borderline personality disorder is linked to early stressors and a major feature of those stressors is abandonment. In her article Neural Correlates of Memories of Abandonment in Women With and Without Borderline Personality Disorder she describes an experiment in which twenty women with a history of sexual abuse during adolescence were examined for a measure of brain blood flow with positron emission tomography while listening to scripts describing neutral and personal abandonment situations. In the experiment, brain blood flow during exposure to the scripts was compared amongst women with and without Borderline Personality Disorder. Exposure to scripts that contained situations relating to abandonment was heavily correlated to greater increases in blood flow than with the placebo group (Schmahl, 2003). .
In Nawal's text, Firdaus shows signs of Borderline Personality Disorder over time. Saadawi went into the jail in search of Egyptian women with Neurosis which is a condition extremely similar to Borderline Personality Disorder.