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History Beyond Trauma
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.
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.
312 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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April 7, 2011So far this book is amazing, I sat up at 1am utterly impressed (and god knows I have read on my share of trauma).
September 2, 2018
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.
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.
October 11, 2023
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.
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.
January 6, 2025
Revisión que desde los que trabajamos en la comprensión de la locura deberíamos leerlo.
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January 7, 2009a 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.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews