This unique book examines the psychanalysis of madness and trauma through an extended discussion of Tristram Shandy. Crossover between literary studies and psychoanalysis. Francoise Davoine explores the entire novel, taking a psychoanalytic lens to the monologue by Tristram's embryo in the opening chapter, the war traumas of Captain Toby and Corporal Trim, and several key themes including confinement, love and history. The book presents Shandean wit as a valuable tool in therapeutic work.

Contains personal accounts as well as psychoanalytic and literary analysis. Davoine is the leading figure in psychoanalytic/literary studies. Draws direct comparison between trauma in human history (e.g. WW1 and plague) and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This unique book examines the psychanalysis of madness and trauma through an extended discussion of Tristram Shandy. Crossover between literary studies and psychoanalysis. Francoise Davoine explores the entire novel, taking a psychoanalytic lens to the monologue by Tristram's embryo in the opening chapter, the war traumas of Captain Toby and Corporal Trim, and several key themes including confinement, love and history. The book presents Shandean wit as a valuable tool in therapeutic work.

Contains personal accounts as well as psychoanalytic and literary analysis. Davoine is the leading figure in psychoanalytic/literary studies. Draws direct comparison between trauma in human history (e.g. WW1 and plague) and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book provides a psychoanalytic reading of works of literature, enhancing the illuminating effect of both fields. The second of two volumes, The Birth of a Political Self: The Jean-Max Gaudilliere Seminars 2001-2014 contains seven of the "Madness and the Social Link" seminars given by psychoanalyst Jean-Max Gaudilliere at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris between 2001 and 2014, transcribed by Francoise Davoine from her notes. Each year, the seminar was dedicated to an author who explored madness in their depiction of the catastrophes of history. Surprising the reader at every turn, the seminars speak of the close intertwining of personal lives and catastrophic historical events, and of the possibility of repairing injury to the psyche, the mind and the body in their wake. These volumes expose the usefulness of literature as a tool for healing, for all those working in therapeutic fields, and will allow lovers of literature to discover a way of reading that gives access to more subtle perspectives and unsuspected interrelations.

This book provides a psychoanalytic reading of works of literature, enhancing the illuminating effect of both fields. The second of two volumes, The Birth of a Political Self: The Jean-Max Gaudilliere Seminars 2001-2014 contains seven of the "Madness and the Social Link" seminars given by psychoanalyst Jean-Max Gaudilliere at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris between 2001 and 2014, transcribed by Francoise Davoine from her notes. Each year, the seminar was dedicated to an author who explored madness in their depiction of the catastrophes of history. Surprising the reader at every turn, the seminars speak of the close intertwining of personal lives and catastrophic historical events, and of the possibility of repairing injury to the psyche, the mind and the body in their wake. These volumes expose the usefulness of literature as a tool for healing, for all those working in therapeutic fields, and will allow lovers of literature to discover a way of reading that gives access to more subtle perspectives and unsuspected interrelations.

This book provides a psychoanalytic reading of works of literature, enhancing the illuminating effect of both fields. The first of two volumes, Madness and the Social Link: The Jean-Max Gaudilliere Seminars 1985-2000 contains seven of the "Madness and the Social Link" seminars given by psychoanalyst Jean-Max Gaudilliere at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris between 1985 and 2000, transcribed by Francoise Davoine from her notes. Each year, the seminar was dedicated to an author who explored madness in his depiction of the catastrophes of history. Surprising the reader at every turn, the seminars speak of the close intertwining of personal lives and catastrophic historical events, and of the possibility of repairing injury to the psyche, the mind, and the body in their wake. These volumes expose the usefulness of literature as a tool for healing, for all those working in therapeutic fields, and will allow lovers of literature to discover a way of reading that gives access to more subtle perspectives and unsuspected interrelations.

This book provides a psychoanalytic reading of works of literature, enhancing the illuminating effect of both fields. The first of two volumes, Madness and the Social Link: The Jean-Max Gaudilliere Seminars 1985-2000 contains seven of the "Madness and the Social Link" seminars given by psychoanalyst Jean-Max Gaudilliere at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris between 1985 and 2000, transcribed by Francoise Davoine from her notes. Each year, the seminar was dedicated to an author who explored madness in his depiction of the catastrophes of history. Surprising the reader at every turn, the seminars speak of the close intertwining of personal lives and catastrophic historical events, and of the possibility of repairing injury to the psyche, the mind, and the body in their wake. These volumes expose the usefulness of literature as a tool for healing, for all those working in therapeutic fields, and will allow lovers of literature to discover a way of reading that gives access to more subtle perspectives and unsuspected interrelations.

Francoise Davoine has been investigating psychotic phenomena and trauma for over thirty years, in collaboration with Jean-Max Gaudilliere. In this book, she draws on her literary background to take the reader on a fascinating voyage with an unexpected but most helpful guide: Don Quixote. In her work, Davoine approaches madness not as a symptom, but rather as a place, the place where the symbolic order and the social link have ruptured. She sees the psychotic as a seeker, engaged in a form of exploration into the nature and history of this place. This brings us to the seeker Don Quixote. Davoine takes the reader into the world of the knight-errant, to describe his adventures in a fascinating new light.Cervantes, the survivor of war trauma, captivity, and all manner of misfortunes, created this hero, first and foremost, so that the tale be told.

Francoise Davoine has been investigating psychotic phenomena and trauma for over thirty years, in collaboration with Jean-Max Gaudilliere. In this book, she draws on her literary background to take the reader on a fascinating voyage with an unexpected but most helpful guide: Don Quixote. In her work, Davoine approaches madness not as a symptom, but rather as a place, the place where the symbolic order and the social link have ruptured. She sees the psychotic as a seeker, engaged in a form of exploration into the nature and history of this place. This brings us to the seeker Don Quixote. Davoine takes the reader into the world of the knight-errant, to describe his adventures in a fascinating new light.Cervantes, the survivor of war trauma, captivity, and all manner of misfortunes, created this hero, first and foremost, so that the tale be told.

After giving us a fascinating reading of Cervantes' classic novel in Don Quixote: Fighting Melancholia, Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere co-author a second work, to reflect on the hero's battle against perversion. To do so, they retrace his adventures in the Cervantes' second Don Quixote, written ten years after the first. The authors follow in his footsteps as he embarks on this other extraordinary journey in which perversion is laid bare for all to see, creating not only a powerful social link, but even a form of government. Cervantes shows us how madness acts as a means to confront it: here again, the field of action presented to the reader is explored in rigorous detail. The reliability of this strategy derives from the power of the given word, which has to oppose lies, seduction, secrets, trickery and crime, in order to confer authenticity to what madness reveals.

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."

"Wittgenstein's Folly" is a translation of Francoise Davoine's "La Folie Wittgenstein."
"Folly" has many meanings, referring to the "madness" of the fool, as well as to the madness of what we call the "mentally ill." "Folly" is linked with the fools of medieval plays, with the fools of Renaissance satires, and with the folly that speaks as a woman in Erasmus's "Praise of Folly." In this book by Francoise Davoine, "folly" often refers to the madness of those isolated by historical catastrophes that have not been processed across generations, and which can only be studied by exploring the fields of madness, by finding ways to hear Folly herself speaking. The title does not refer specifically to the madness or folly of Wittgenstein himself. "Wittgenstein's Folly" is about psychoanalytic experience, and specifically about the madness or folly that comes to reside, in a way, in what Francoise Davoine refers to as a "psychotic transference."
Francoise Davoine is a psychoanalyst trained in the 1970s at Lacan's Ecole freudienne de Paris. With advanced degrees in the Classics and in French Literature, she obtained a doctorate in sociology at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), at the Centre d'etude des mouvements sociaux (Center for the Study of Social Movements), led by Alain Touraine. She and her husband, Jean-Max Gaudilliere, have led a weekly seminar (Madness and the Social Link) at that Center for over thirty years.
Francoise Davoine is convinced that psychosis is a field of research for both analyst and analysand, in which the events of History, or perhaps pieces of those events, which could not be processed by the individual or even by human beings as a group, can be identified, recognized, and finally put in a place where they can be fully experienced within a symbolic framework created by social links; i.e., with others, within a social world.

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."

What is common among mad people, good intelligentsia and children? What is common among Rabele and Wittgenstein, Arteau and Spentiger, Cartecious and Cantor, Homer and japanese theatre No? Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere come up against them as they track divergencies, deviations and achievements of human spirit in otherworldly and unfamiliar place of trauma and destruction. Human's personal stories are connected with History. Every time, beyond the symptoms and crises, it is revealed the unspeakable horror of war, betray and fall of social web. Their understanding in the prompt of transmission gives us the key of healing. The historization of the moments of the fall of social web in the analysis include this certainty which is necessary for the birth of subject. In this book, in which french psychoanalytic thought meets with the american psychiatry in conditions of destruction or war, the authors set in question "means" of psychiatry. They redefine its history work as they examine again the possibility of subjectivity in the room of traumatical. Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere are psychoanalusts and teach to Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, in the contect of seminar "Madness and social web." Professors of Classical Studies (Greek, Latin) and doctors of Sociological Sciences have been coperating for decates with clinicals of United States in the context of their researches about the traumatical in the social web.

In the course of nearly thirty years of work with patients in psychiatric hospitals and private practice, Franoise 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 Salmonprinciples--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.