Histoire et trauma La folie des guerres

by Françoise Davoine

Les auteurs ont interrogé des psychiatres de guerre, ont écouté des chamanes et ont rencontré des fous. Ils montrent que la folie est aussi une manière d'échapper à la perversion et de surmonter un traumatisme. Ils mettent en évidence que la transmission des drames humains entre générations ne peut se faire qu'au regard de l'Histoire.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Nonfiction

420 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Natalie]

So far this book is amazing, I sat up at 1am utterly impressed (and god knows I have read on my share of trauma).

[Jorge Rodighiero · Rating 3 out of 5]

The authors show how to apply a psychoanalytic method in the treatment of psychosis, something that Freud recognized the traditional method would not be able to treat.

The key idea is rooted in the belief that in psychotic structures there is a rupture with the Other, that social contract that guarantees our word exchanges, even if just as an pragmatic illusion. A traditional treatment rooted in this Symbolic register won’t be fruitful, since that register was pierced in the psychotic by trauma and what couldn’t be said or thought at the time.

The authors propose then a particular way to handle transference and counter-transference, in which the analyst express themselves —their feelings, their dreams— to the patient, even at the risk of being “a jester”, with the goal to reintroduce back a foreclosured fragment of their unconscious. Thus, the goal is to recover something from the non-symbolized Real to the Symbolic shared with the analyst, through an interexchange at the level of the Imaginary, where identifications between analyst and patient may not be an impasse as it is in the treatment of neurotics, but a pass to the cure.

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've finally found the book on psychosis I've needed to read.

Sure you can try to get through Lacan Seminar III where he talks about Schreber or other interesting ideas of the nom-du-père; but this book is from a psychoanalyst who trained with Lacan and has been working specifically with psychotic patients for decades. She knows Lacan, and she knows literature, and she has real world experience with the praxis of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Invaluable reading to anyone who is working in the psychoanalytic field and comes across psychosis in their work.

[Consuelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revisión que desde los que trabajamos en la comprensión de la locura deberíamos leerlo.

[Germz]

a fascinating read, and accessible if you already understand some psychoanalysis. The authors try to dissociate an irreducible historical expression from psychosis/trauma/madness in a 'clinical' definition, towards a truth in that expression to be attended to by a witnessing of the symptom on its own terms.