Through nearly thirty years of clinical experience, the authors explore how social catastrophes influence transference and countertransference in therapy. They reveal that the unspoken traumas of war and disaster, passed through generations, manifest in therapeutic relationships. By understanding these inherited horrors, both patients and analysts can unlock pathways to healing, highlighting the profound connection between personal and collective trauma in the therapeutic process.
This book presents unique insight into the experiences of frontline medical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, psychoanalytic work with trauma and perspectives from literature. Part One presents a set of six 'testimonies', transcribed from video interviews conducted by Françoise Davoine with nurses, doctors and intensive care anesthesiologists. These interviews are drawn on in Part Two, 'Frontline Psychoanalysis', which tells the story of transference related to catastrophic events, discovered and subsequently abandoned by Freud when he gave up the psychoanalysis of trauma in 1897. Davoine discusses the occurrence of this specific type of transference, both during the First World War, in which psychotherapists modified classical techniques and invented the psychoanalysis of madness in order to treat traumatised soldiers, and during the current and previous pandemics. The book also considers social and artistic responses to trauma, from the popularity of the Theatre of the Fools after the Black Death ravaged Europe, to the psychotherapy described in such circumstances by Boccaccio's Decameron. This accessible work offers an insightful reflection on trauma and the human experience. Pandemics, Wars, Traumas and Literature will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and academics and scholars of literature.
This unique book examines the psychanalysis of madness and trauma through an
extended discussion of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,
the provocative eighteenth-century novel by Laurence Sterne.
