Echoes from the Front Lines: Pandemics, Wars, Traumas, and Literature (Online Mini-Course)

6 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers

Practitioners and General Public: $160

Students: $80

In this four-session seminar, Françoise Davoine will explore transferences related to trauma-inducing catastrophic events, first studied by Freud, such as wars and plagues, including the current pandemic.  It will explore modifications in classical psychoanalytic technique devised by therapists to treat soldiers traumatized by the First World War, and it will analyze testimonies given by front-line workers in the early days of the current pandemic that reveal a transference that is not simply a consequence of having lived through a catastrophic moment, but rather is a transference at the moment of catastrophe.

Session 1:  Working with Psychotic Transference:  An unconscious that is not repressed

Session 2:  Madness and the Ruptures of the Social Link:  How to create otherness

Session 3:  Wars and Plagues:  When time stops, a “therapon” is needed

Session 4:  Testimonies from the Front Lines in the Time of Covid:  A forward psychotherapy since antiquity  

Françoise Davoine, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Paris.  She trained in the École Freudienne de Paris founded by Jacques Lacan and was a member of that school until Lacan’s death and the school’s dissolution.  She worked for thirty years as a psychoanalyst in public psychiatric hospitals in France as an external consultant.  She was a professor for forty years at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where she and Jean-Max Gaudillière led a weekly seminar entitled “Madness and the Social Link” at the Center for the Study of Social Movements.  She was an Erikson Scholar at Austen Riggs Center in the summer of 2017.  She is the author of many articles and books, including History Beyond Trauma with Jean-Max Gaudillière (Other Press, 2004), Wittgenstein’s Folly (YBK, 2012), Mother Folly (Stanford University Press, 2014), Fighting Melancholia: Don Quixote’s Teaching (Karnac, 2016), A Word to the Wise: Don Quixote Returns to Fight Perversion with Jean-Max Gaudillière (Karnac, 2018). 

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