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. (amazon) (kindle 2019-12-17)
In 2001 Drs. Davoine and Gaudillière organized a conference that they called Casus Belli. The twenty or so invited participants from throughout Europe and the Americas were each asked to present a clinical case, relating somehow to larger societal trauma and involving a turning point in the treatment. Most important, we were to introduce ourselves not with our official, professional designations, but with something more personal about ourselves, especially as that might relate to the patient we had chosen to present. The stories unfolded with an unconscious logic, each illuminating one of the points to be found in this book and each case building on the preceding one.
To my surprise, in those rare instances when the presenters did not introduce themselves personally, they did so unconsciously through their patients. This phenomenon turns out to be central to what Drs. Davoine and Gaudillière are trying to teach us: stories of deep connection and pain must be told. If, for some reason, they cannot be spoken, they are told through an other. If they are unthinkable, their traces or debris are carried generationally and lived as madness by someone charged—in the double sense of an energy and a duty—to represent what Freud called the family’s archaic heritage. And, in the transference with psychotic patients, it is analysts’ responsiveness within their own archaic heritages that creates a field in which analysts may be charged by patients to represent something for them.
Davoine, Francoise. History Beyond Trauma (Kindle location 204-215). Other Press. 2004, Kindle edition.
