THE TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA:
A TRUTH CLAIM AND
ITS PERVERSION
Francoise Davoine

THE SCIENTIFIC FRAME OF TRANSFERENCE IN THE CASE OF TRAUMA AND PSYCHOSIS: THE IRRELEVANCE OF CAUSAL CATEGORIES
Jean-Max Gaudilliere

Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière have worked as psychoanalysts for more than thirty years at a public psychiatric hospital and in private practice. They are currently professors at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris and both have advanced degrees in the classics and French, and doctorates in sociology. Drs. Davoine and Gaudillière were members of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, are supervisors and training analysts, and are members of the International Symposium for the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia (US branch).

In the course of their work with patients in psychiatric hospitals and private practice, Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière 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.

In their writings, Davoine and Gaudillière 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. Through examples from medieval carnivals and Japanese No Theater, to Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt, to Sioux rituals in North Dakota, they have described the ways in which psychological damage is done--and undone.

With a special focus on the relationship between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, Davoine and Gaudillière explore 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.

Davoine and Gaudillière ground their clinical theory in the work of Thomas Salmon, MD (1876-1927). 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 Drs. Davoine and Gaudillière address their audiences--that is, with the same clarity and directness with which they speak to their patients.