Mother Folly: A Tale (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Davoine, Françoise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804782784 ISBN 13: 9780804782784

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

If your mentally ill patient dies, are you to blame? For Dr. Françoise 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 René Thom, writer Antonin Artaud, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and physicist Edwin Schrödinger, 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."

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Françoise Davoine is a writer, psychoanalyst, and professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Mother Folly

A Tale

By Françoise Davoine, Judith G. Miller

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8278-4

Contents

Author's Note for the American Edition, 
Preface by Mieke Bal, 
PART I: BUFFOONERY OR POLITICAL THEATRE, 
1. The Entrance, 
2. The Honor Court, 
3. Folly's Mirror, 
4. The Common Ward, 
5. Judgment, 
6. The Theatre of Cruelty, 
7. The Esplanade, 
8. The Clinic, 
PART II: THE RETURN OF THE SUBJECT, 
1. Asphalt, 
2. School, 
3. Schrödinger's Call, 
4. The Transference Box, 
5. The Subject of Coincidence, 
PART III: BIG HISTORY AND LITTLE HISTORY, 
1. Which Science Can We Trust?, 
2. The Anti-dictator, One for All, and All Are Rotten, 
3. The Erl King, 
4. Gaetano Benedetti, 
5. Morgestraich, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

The Entrance

APICULTURE

All Saints' Day was hovering.

And here's the conundrum I faced. Like every Monday for the last twenty years I found myself reluctantly driving to the psychiatric hospital where I worked. Yet I would always leave wanting to return again the following week. And that day, while my car waited in front of the iron gates, I was less inclined than ever to be carried inside. I'd just learned that one of my patients had died.

Was I a monster? Just before leaving home, I'd almost killed a clumsy insect—mechanically, without feeling—on the simple pretext it had no business being in my house. Looking closer, I saw a bee, who managed to get back to her feet after having messed up her landing and tumbled about. She was unable to fly away and she didn't touch the jellied biscuit she'd targeted. She just let me watch. I thought I could read in the prisms of her eyes: "What's the use?"

What's the use of these comings and goings required by the queen, these countless flying hours, these ceaseless transferences, especially in the blooming months when a worker's life won't last more than six weeks? And on this autumn day, what's the use of this completely unseasonal morning outing?

I had no idea how to answer and, in the same tone, upped the ante: "What's the use of my work as an analyst in a psychiatric hospital? Why should I work in a clinic; who's forcing me to do it? Who can explain the wasps' nest I've been plunging into for nearly twenty years without anyone making me do so? I go there of my own free will. Did she know why? Let me tell you what I really think: They are right, those doctors with their shock treatments and tranquillizers. Psychoanalysis has lost its edge. It takes too much time, leaves itself open to too many questions, ends in brick walls, exhausting transferences, lame results, without locating the slightest nectar to nourish the queen.

Maybe, indeed, folly is our queen, and analysts and patients her worker bees and knights errant. This is Erasmus's Folly, the one who speaks like a woman: 'I know no one who knows me better than myself.' The words of a sovereign, but what kind of knowing are we talking about?"

The insect shot me a cross-eyed glance. What's the use of knowing oneself, she must have thought, when there are so many collective problems? Psychoanalysis is just excessive individualism.

I took that prejudice to task: "That's a completely unfounded rumor! Folly tries to create a social bond in order to escape winter's hibernation. What looks like a session with a shrink reveals a concentrated and busy society. There's no need to number in the thousands like you! Our work goes so much farther than the limits of the self that it exposes society's fissures. I paid the price to learn this through many sessions of crazy-making transference. The analyst often finds herself taking the place of a monster or a tyrant, or becoming the cause of horrors going back farther than her own birth: the First World War, the Second World War, the Hundred Years War. Are you surprised by all this? I bet like lots of others you don't realize how folly shows us the zones of social catastrophe. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, it's all the same to folly. Time gets confused, it stops, even reverses itself.... But what could you know about folly's time or ours," I whispered, "You're just a bee ..."

To conclude, I wanted to take her down a notch. Missing its landing, my lecture flew off on its own wings: "You pride yourself on being a social insect, so be it. But in the matter of sociology, folly also has a lot to say. For example, to survive in case of danger she becomes a plural body, sometimes even becoming a thing. If you want to see what I mean, go visit those people who persist in speaking to patients in the obscurity of their own institutions. Some of them will remain objective, as if they personified science. Others will tell you that once back home, they find themselves exhausted and don't know who they are. They've paid with their person in building and rebuilding the frame of each session, in defending it from outside attacks, in reaping the harvest of the unconscious, in inventing language games when the unconscious grows mute, and especially in finding dream food for subjects undergoing birth."

The bee raised her eyes to Heaven.

"You think I'm idealizing the profession and you're right. As is true of the hive's darkness, the secrets of analysis don't really eliminate pillaging hatreds, deadly rivalries, massacres of colleagues or suicide attacks against those who relentlessly hunt honey. But year after year, as I've said, all those hours spent talking culminate in a new social bond. At least in theory ... because, today, you see, I'm not sure I believe anymore ..."

I wanted to share my doubts with her. But as she was acting like a dumb animal, I had to explain: "The social bond has to be stitched back together when it gets torn on society's death zones. Folly entreats her agents to fix things up or to take off in a swarm. A lot of people get lost in the effort. They wander without rhyme or reason and end up being hospitalized. Sometimes an analyst travels with them, moving between dream and reality. And believe me, more than one person has recovered because they encountered someone to talk to in the midst of their hell."

The bee looked incredulous; she didn't like the word hell: wasn't her society a model of harmony and democracy, with a monarch whom Diogenes praised as needing no arms to rule?

"Your honeyed words are pure propaganda," I grumbled. "Your queen has a stinger and she uses it. Of course it's true she saves it for running through her rivals during a putsch. Drop the official line and let's face facts: for example, the Varroa epidemic that threatened to exterminate every last one of you in every corner of Europe, the civil wars, the summary executions of so-called useless males during the slow period before autumn. What do you do then about the Name of the Father? And what if your queen, who guarantees your survival and the language that unites you, disappears by accident? It's a calamity, isn't it? Doesn't the orphaned hive turn into a kind of hell, left to chance and certain death?"

WAR VETS

"Institutionalized people know best about zones of catastrophe, whose importance can impact not just a beehive, but also generations of human beings, their homelands, their jobs, and the way they speak. Thrown by necessity or by chance into those zones, regions where no one wants to go, such people try to survive by living negatively, offering as little as...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804782784
• ISBN 13: 9780804782784
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 218
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande