History Beyond Trauma

by Francoise Davoine, Jean-Max Gaudilliere, Susan Fairfield (Translator)

Overview

In the course of nearly thirty years of work with patients in psychiatric hospitals and private practice, Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere have uncovered the ways in which transference and countertransference are affected by the experience of social catastrophe. Handed down from one generation to the next, the unspoken horrors of war, betrayal, dissociation, and disaster in the families of patient and analyst alike are not only revived in the therapeutic relationship but, when understood, actually provide the keys to the healing process.

The authors present vivid examples of clinical work with severely traumatized patients, reaching inward to their own intimate family histories as shaped by the Second World War and outward toward an exceptionally broad range of cultural references to literature, philosophy, political theory, and anthropology. Using examples from medieval carnivals and Japanese No theater, to Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt, to Sioux rituals in North Dakota, they reveal the ways in which psychological damage is done—and undone.

With a special focus on the relationship between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, Davoine and Gaudilliere show how the patient-analyst relationship opens pathways of investigation into the nature of madness, whether on the scale of History—world wars, Vietnam—or on the scale of Story—the silencing of horror within an individual family.

In order to show how the therapeutic approach to trauma was developed on the basis of war psychiatry, the authors ground their clinical theory in the work of Thomas Salmon, an American doctor from the time of the First World War. In their case studies, they illustrate how three of the four Salmon principles—proximity, immediacy, and expectancy—affect the handling of the transference-countertransference relationship. The fourth principle, simplicity, shapes the style in which the authors address their readers—that is, with the same clarity and directness with which they speak to their patients.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590511114
Publisher:	Other Press, LLC
Publication date:	03/17/2004
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Francoise Davoine
Over the past thirty years, psychoanalysts Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere have worked at a public psychiatric hospital, as consultants, and in private practice. They are currently professors at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and both hold advanced degrees in classics (French, Latin, and Greek literature) and doctorates in sociology.

Jean-Max Gaudilliere
Over the past thirty years, psychoanalysts Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere have worked at a public psychiatric hospital, as consultants, and in private practice. They are currently professors at theEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and both hold advanced degrees in classics (French, Latin, and Greek literature) and doctorates in sociology.

Susan Fairfield
Susan Fairfield is an editor, translator, and poet. She is also the author of papers on literary criticism, a psychoanalyst, and co-editor of Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis. She lives in the Bay Area of California.Also by this translator: Biology of Freedom, Freud, The Whispering of Ghosts, Dreaming by the Book, Freud the Man, Shattered Dreams, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, Why Do Women Love Men and Not Their Mothers?, Lacan, Lacanian Psychotherapy with Children, The Clinical Lacan, What Does a Woman Want?

Table of Contents

	Foreword	xi
	Preface	xvii
Part I.	Lessons of Madness
1.	From the Collapse of a World to the Search for Insanity	3
1.1.	Folly Speaks	3
1.1.1.	Auguste: In the Beginning Was Shame	3
1.1.2.	The Twofold Tradition of Folly: Speaking of, Speaking to	6
1.1.3.	When Folly Is Speaking to No One, to Whom Is It Speaking? A Social Link in the Making	11
1.1.4.	Adam, Holzminden: The Return of the Real	16
1.1.5.	Gilda: Madness Speaks to the "Leftovers" of the Analyst's History	21
1.2.	The Analyst Speaks	23
1.2.1.	The Analyst's Situation	23
1.2.2.	After Some Others	26
1.2.3.	The Analyst as "Annalist" of Inaudible Histories	28
1.3.	Exiting Madness: A Demand for Truth	29
1.3.1.	Gilda: On the Threshold of Time	29
1.3.2.	The Army of the Dead	32
1.3.3.	Auguste Comte: An Excess of Subjectivity to Confront a "Superpositivity"	34
2.	From the Principle of Objectivation to the Birth of a Subject	39
2.1.	From the Lesion in the Brain to the Lesion in the Other	39
2.1.1.	Neurology and Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Issue	39
2.1.2.	Objectivation/Positivity: A New Paradigm for Psychoanalysis	41
2.1.3.	The "Superpositivity" of Madness	44
2.1.4.	The Subject at Stake	46
2.1.5.	The Logic of Catastrophic Zones: Lesions in Otherness	47
2.1.6.	The "Children" of Phineas Gage	49
2.1.7.	"A Death in the Family": The Neurologist Comes to the Aid of the Psychoanalyst	51
2.2.	War and Peace in Psychoanalysis	54
2.2.1.	A Problematic Causality	54
2.2.2.	Transference in Neurologists	55
2.2.3.	The Horrified Other	58
2.2.4.	On the Borders of Language: The Analyst's Dissociated Impressions	59
2.2.5.	Henry: Casus Belli in Analysis	61
2.2.6.	Genesis of the Symbolon against the Background of War	64
2.3.	Showing What Cannot Be Said	68
2.3.1.	The Festival of the Mad Rises from the Ashes	68
2.3.2.	Canton, China, July 1985: The Silence of an Admirable Mother	72
2.3.3.	The Analyst in Clown Costume	75
2.3.4.	Truce, Truth, Trust: "Join the Dance"	77
2.3.5.	"Whereof One Cannot Speak ..."	79
3.	Conclusion of Part I: From Scientific Revolutions to Therapeutic Revolutions	81
3.1.	What Scientists Are Risking	81
3.2.	Descartes' Error?	84
3.3.	Proferam: From the Real to Inscription	88
3.4.	Descartes' Dreams	91
3.5.	From Madness to the Method	94
Part II.	Lessons from the Front
4.	"On the Road"	99
4.1.	Geographical Transfers: Finding Someone to Speak to	99
4.1.1.	Transfers, Journeys, Exiles	99
4.1.2.	Austen Riggs Center, Winter 1978--Summer 1979	100
4.1.3.	The Ghost Road	102
4.2.	The Soldier's Tale	104
4.2.1.	Symptoms as Old as the War	104
4.2.2.	From Shell Shock to Traumatic Neurosis: "God Only Knows"	106
4.2.3.	"Men Learn from History Only that Men Learn Nothing from History"	109
4.2.4.	The Half-Pay Veterans of War Psychiatry	110
4.3.	Peace Psychoanalysis, War Psychoanalysis	112
4.3.1.	Thomas W. Salmon and Some Others	112
4.3.2.	Getting Out of Hell	114
4.3.3.	The Salmon Principles	116
4.3.4.	Koan: "Let Me Die, or I'll Perish"	117
5.	Proximity: Constructing Space in a Boundless Space	121
5.1.	Getting in Touch	121
5.1.1.	The Challenging First Interview: Close to the Uncanny	121
5.1.2.	After the Battle	124
5.1.3.	The "Unsung Battle": In Touch with Facts Stricken with Nonexistence	125
5.1.4.	Only Psychoanalysis Can Find the Trace of the Breaking Point	128
5.2.	The Mirror of History	130
5.2.1.	Madness, Trauma: The Same Combat	130
5.2.2.	The Memory of Freedom	133
5.2.3.	The Political and Transferential Outcomes of Trauma	135
5.2.4.	Interferences: The Birth of a "Transitional Subject"	137
5.3.	The Children of War	140
5.3.1.	The Mother of Vinegar: Making Use of Coincidences	140
5.3.2.	Children on the Firing Line	144
5.3.3.	They Have Good Reason to Be Crazy	146
5.3.4.	They Know Too Much for Their Age	149
5.4.	Therapon	150
5.4.1.	Betrayed by One's Own	150
5.4.2.	Proximity to Combat	153
5.4.3.	Psychoanalysis Upside Down	157
5.4.4.	The Man without Qualities	159
6.	Immediacy: The Coordinates of Time When Time Stands Still	163
6.1.	Beyond the Causality Principle	163
6.1.1.	The Mad Tea Party: Speaking to Time	163
6.1.2.	Urgency	164
6.1.3.	The First Crisis, the Nth Crisis	167
6.1.4.	A Minor Character	169
6.2.	A Time that Does Not Pass	172
6.2.1.	Joseph: Presence of the Thing	172
6.2.2.	Inferno: Appearance of the Real Other	177
6.2.3.	A Summons from beyond the Grave	181
6.2.4.	Rough Music in the Face of the Confiscation of Time	183
6.3.	Fighting the Ghosts	184
6.3.1.	Satori: An Omnipresent Danger	184
6.3.2.	Potential Simultaneity According to Schrodinger	188
6.3.3.	Here and Now: An Interpretation in Search of a Subject to Interpret	190
6.3.4.	Ghosts of All Nations: Unite!	192
6.4.	The Child with White Hair	196
6.4.1.	Mayday! The Measure of Time	196
6.4.2.	The Transmission of a Catastrophic Immediacy: An American Gilda	199
6.4.3.	The Devil to Pay in the Badlands: A Brazilian Epic of Battle against the Real Other	202
6.4.4.	Don Quixote's Lady	204
6.4.5.	The Thing and Words	205
7.	Expectancy: The Trustworthiness of the Other	209
7.1.	Yes: An Initial Affirmation	209
7.1.1.	Trauma Speaking to Trauma	209
7.1.2.	Blue Flower: Freedom of Speech	211
7.1.3.	The Children of Terezin	214
7.1.4.	The Plural Body: The Authority of the Lady	217
7.1.5.	The Plural Body with Ancestors	219
7.2.	We Do Not Choose the Mouth that Says, "Yes, I Am Waiting for You"	222
7.2.1.	Who Is Waiting for Whom?	222
7.2.2.	The Tunnel Awaiting Louise and Her Analyst	223
7.3.	Dreams that Say No	231
7.3.1.	Dreaming in a Totalitarian Situation	231
7.3.2.	A Dream of Wittgenstein's	235
7.3.3.	The Psychiatry of the Nazi War	237
7.4.	The Subject of "Historical Truth"	239
7.4.1.	Edwige, Sunken Red: A Cruel Truth	239
7.4.2.	The Theater of Cruelty	243
7.4.3.	Telling Secrets	245
7.4.4.	And What about Simplicity?	247
8.	A Simple Conclusion: Frozen Time, Frozen Words	249
8.1.	"What Is Well Thought Out Can Be Clearly Expressed"	249
8.2.	Hearing Frozen Words	251
	References	257
	Index	273