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.

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.

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.

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.