If your mentally ill patient dies, are you to blame? For Dr.
Francoise Davoine, a Parisian psychoanalyst, this question becomes
disturbingly real as one of her patients commits suicide on the eve
of All Saints' Day. She herself has a crisis, as she reflects on
her thirty-year career and questions whether she should ever return
to the hospital. But return she does, and thus commences a strange
voyage across several centuries and countries, in which patients,
fools, and the actors of medieval farces rise up from the past
along with great thinkers who represent the author's own
philosophical and literary sources: the humanist Erasmus,
mathematician Rene Thom, writer Antonin Artaud, philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and physicist Edwin Schrodinger, to name a few.
Imaginary dialogues ensue as the analyst conjures up an
interconnected world, where apiculture, wondrous rituals, theater,
and language games illuminate her therapeutic practice as well as
her personal history. Deeply affected by her voyage of discovery,
the author becomes capable of implementing the teachings of
psychotherapist Gaetano Benedetti, a mentor she visits at carnival
time on a final fictional stopover in Switzerland. His advice, that
the analyst become the equal of her patients and immerse herself in
their madness so as to open up a space for treatment, is premised
on the belief that individual illness is a reflection and result of
severe historical trauma. "Mother Folly," which ends on a positive
note, is an important intervention in the debate about how to treat
the mentally ill, particularly those with psychosis. A practicing
analyst and a skilled reader of literary and philosophical texts,
Davoine provides a humane antidote to our increasingly mechanized
and drug-reliant system of dealing with "fools and madmen."
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