Madness and the Social Link

The Jean-Max Gaudillière Seminars 1985 – 2000

Jean Max Gaudillière, Françoise Davoine, Françoise Davoine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000176636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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 containsseven of the "Madness and the Social Link" seminars given by psychoanalyst Jean-Max Gaudillière at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris between 1985 and 2000, transcribed by Françoise 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.

1 Seminar 1: 1985–1986

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–)

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

This seminar will examine two books: Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1977)¹ and The Silent Cry (1967).²

The first title is that of a collection of short stories, which in the Japanese original also contains other texts. The English translation contains four short stories. The second one, “Prize Stock,” earned Ōe, at the age of 23, the highest literary distinction in his country. The title of the third story is the one that was chosen for the book. The last story is called “Aghwee the Sky Monster,” and the first “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away.” In Japanese, the title of the second book is Football in the First Year of Man’en, the start of a new era (1860) just before Japan was opened to trade with foreign countries by Emperor Meiji, that is, a century before the time frame of the stories in the book. These facts were supplied by Akira Mizubayashi, who has had several books published in French translation by Gallimard, with the most recent being Un amour de mille ans (A Thousand-Year Love) in 2017.

I. TEACH US OUTGROW OUR MADNESS: AN ANALYSIS OF MADNESS AND TRAUMA

In “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away,” the narrator distinguishes several periods in the years of extreme poverty of his childhood. The shortest period is the one in which he accepts his father’s madness, calling it his “Happy Days,” after the title of an American song. After a violent scene between his parents, his father – whom his mother would call “a certain party” from then on – closes himself up in a storehouse, where the child joins him.

The war has just ended; Japan is on the brink of collapse. The boy’s father, who is obese and has bladder cancer, sprays the child with bloody urine. At the same time, the boy is made witness to his father’s madness. To be saved, the emperor must be killed. A delusion takes shape; the child never stops searching for its inscription. At the age of 10, he witnesses his father’s death, when the latter is killed by machine-gun fire on August 16, 1945, the only occasion on which he ventured out, with officers who had deserted, to bomb the imperial palace after the capitulation of Japan.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator thinks he will die of liver cancer at the age of 35. He dictates a “history of the age” to an “acting executor of the will,” who, at the end of the story, is revealed to be his wife. The writer highlights the political dimension of the delusion present in the psychoanalysis of madness and trauma, a process in which the patient and the analyst are co-researchers, in a field of historical catastrophes whose inscription is the aim of the therapeutic process. The writer provides tools designed to encourage what British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, based on his experiences in World War I, called “psychotic transference,” at work in madness and trauma.

This very particular transference brings into question the frame of reference of traditional psychoanalysis when benevolent neutrality is attacked by tempestuous outbursts. Recourse to family history is of no use since time has stopped in the zones of catastrophe; causality is irrelevant, since it needs the past for the cause and the future for the effect; the destruction of all otherness obliterates identity and leads to absolute loneliness. Unconscious processes such as repression are not expressed in words – signifiers in Lacan’s terms – since speech is no longer trustworthy; they are expressed through sensory images that survived the catastrophe.

The madness of Ōe’s characters is not an illness, but a strength which impels them to fight against the erasure of traces. This madness uses specific tools to explore the silent zones of catastrophe, at the crossroads of their subjective and historical origins, and to inscribe them by means of fictional creations. What is at stake here, the historical truth, is political in nature, as are the stakes in the psychoanalysis of psychoses and traumas. A catastrophe is a near-history, something which could have become History, but fell short. It could have been History. In January 1946, God came down from the sky. That day, the emperor spoke over the radio “in a mortal voice,” declaring that “he was of human essence.” The Japanese were devastated and cried as they listened to their radios. The emperor was no longer a god. History could instead have consisted of a bomb being dropped on the palace, and the catastrophe would have been averted. This is the father’s delusion in “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away.”

For the narrator, this near-history took shape at the moment when he became the puppet of this delusion in a space of arrested time he calls his “happy days.” This song title also made its appearance in my work as an analyst at the psychiatric hospital where I used to go every Monday.

Happy days at the psychiatric hospital

I had been seeing this delusional patient for twenty years. In the beginning, for several months, he did nothing but swear at me, or he refused to speak to me. At that time, he was very friendly with the intern, but he distrusted me greatly.

Suddenly, he started to tell me about his delusion. I can reconstitute some elements of his account. His father was a film projectionist, and his mother a cinema usherette. He had seen a great number of movies, and I presume that the segments he described afterwards to compose delusional stories were taken from various films. He dresses as a woman to play the heroine, using make-up. He creates images that he puts inside the television. The television then speaks to him by showing him these images.

The content of the delusion concerns some members of his mother’s family, who are Nazis. His uncle is Hitler or Mussolini. We can suppose this to be a metaphor, but it isn’t any longer. His suffering is real. He was letting himself die of hunger in his bed when I was asked to help him. That same day, when we talked again, he was critical of his delusion: “Everything I said was a lie. My uncle is not Hitler, all of that doesn’t exist, it was put in my head by someone else.”

A thought comes into my head. He has placed the origin of his delusion in another person, another madman. How will I be able to become this other madman in my work with him, to be truly in touch with his madness? He describes the moment when he stops identifying his own mind as the source of his delusion, but places this source in someone else. He has lent a record to his uncle’s family, when they came to visit him; it was a recording of the song “Happy Days.” Well, one may well be used to such coincidences, but they are still startling. What can I do with this particular coincidence? I relate the story written by Ōe, whom I happen to be reading at the time.

We start to talk. The other one – the mad one, who may still be positioned in the television or the radio – usually displays intense psychic activity. Since I don’t know what else to say, I ask myself out loud what I could be thinking of. He looks at me and says with great conviction: “Why, nothing at all, of course.” We stop there. He stops having delusions.

The coincidence created a social link at the place of a ruthless agency from which his delusion was trying to escape.

Making use of coincidences

Coincidences are one of the tools of transference when we work with those who are attempting to inscribe a cutaway history. They come from who knows where, and pull at the analyst, grabbing him by some particularity that ties him to the zone of catastrophe: in this case, two words: “happy days.”

In our youth, a stock phrase among psychoanalysts was: “It’s not by chance that …” Well, precisely, I see no determinism of any kind here, not even unconscious, unless I go mad myself. And I think that the old word “asylum,” once used to designate psychiatric hospitals, was not so preposterous, since these coincidences must be housed somewhere. In other cultures, ritual spaces exist to provide a locus for them, for otherwise they would be unbearable.

When I am tired, after months of work, I notice that patients who do not know each other use the same word or the same image as a connecting element between their sessions with me, as if they pass each other the word unknowingly.

The British anthropologist William Rivers,³ who worked as a psychoanalyst with officers returning from the trenches during World War I, said of this phenomenon that on such occasions, he functions like a “pipe.” Similarly, I find myself in the game of “the exquisite corpse” – “le jeu du cadaver exquis” – in which a paper is passed around, where everyone writes a sentence and folds the page before handing it to the next person. But here, so to speak, I am the paper which holds the impression of a word or thing. In the absence of a narrative that patients are at a loss to produce, they use me as their tool, in their attempt to tell a story.

Coincidences punctuate the moments of what could be called a “degree zero” of the encounter with the analyst, from which psychoanalysis may proceed. Is this the “objective chance” surrealists talked about? Hanged if I know! All I know is that the word “surrealism” was invented by Apollinaire, the poet “with a starry head,” wounded by a bullet in the trenches during World War I.

And so, when the patient and I – here, we could speak of Harry Sullivan’s concept of self, designating the space of our interaction – were talking about what I could possibly have in my head, something happened all at once: the coincidence of the American song, which produced a sudden encounter and put an abrupt end to the delusion, something that leaves one speechless.

In Lacanian terms, we can say that coincidences are an approach to the Real, described as “that which never stops not being written,” or the impossible-to-write. Lacan also says: “The Real is the impossible, it always returns to the same place.”⁴ Still, this impossible is not destiny.

Paradoxically, the absence of symbolic articulation leaves no void, but only a bottomless, compact pit filled with senseless productions, allowing no interplay. Coincidences create an unprecedented interval – uncanny, Unheimlich – which opens the possibility of an intermediary space, a time-space called ma or aida in Japanese, and a “potential space” in Winnicott’s writing.⁵ This time-space creates the possibility of otherness in the extreme solitude of madness, for which no Other answers – except a ruthless intruding agency.

In such a space, a chance encounter triggers an interference with a possible other. Our patients often ask us: “By what chance did I meet you?”

Conversion of a chance encounter with the witness of an unwitnessed event

“Aghwee the Sky Monster” recounts the fate of a poor student paid by a banker to accompany his delusional son on his walks. Designated by the initial “D,” the madman is a musician-composer whose problem, similar to that of the author, is the birth of an abnormal baby with a large lump on his head. But unlike Ōe’s baby, the composer’s baby did not survive.

D speaks to this infant, who has become a huge baby he alone can see when it comes down from the sky. His father has named him Aghwee, simply because between his birth and his death, he only spoke once, to say “aghwee” (p. 241). D makes the student the terrifyingly generous offer of changing places, by confiding his secret.

Ōe introduces this transformation in two stages: that of the gradual unfolding of transference, first in the literal sense, as they continue to take their walks, and then by writing the story more than ten years later. These two stages are punctuated by two accidents. First, on the road while the two young men are walking, D is struck and killed by a truck as he crosses the street. Ten years later, the narrator is blinded in one eye by children who throw stones at him for no reason. This is a recurrent theme in Ōe’s work, in which often the narrators write in this blind state, explicitly called at the end of the story “a gratuitous sacrifice” (p. 261).

As long as the student has two good eyes, imaginary stereoscopy can build fictions and resistances, as it does for each of us. The first is that of the diagnosis. “Depression? Schizophrenia?” the student asks himself, while listening to the objective description the banker gives him of his son’s case. This initial fiction sets the medical framework in which the disturbances caused by the madman in public places can be given a socially acceptable name. This diagnosis, always differential, answers the question: “Is there or is there not psychosis?”

At first, the narrator complies: “I was to be a moral sentinel guarding the family against a second contamination by the poisons of scandal” (p. 227). The second resistance comes in the form of well-meaning neutrality. The student waits for the patient’s nurse to tell him what to do. She advises him to “play dumb” and not “get involved” (p. 237). After this, the student keeps a sort of “clinical distance”: “I discovered that I was loving my job. Not loving my employer or his phantom baby the size of a kangaroo. Simply loving my job” (p. 244).

This reassuring distance can last forever, like psychoanalyses where nothing happens, where the patient and the analyst grow old together: the analyst likes his job. The composer, however, doesn’t want this distance to persist, although he shows great understanding regarding his companion’s difficulties. But he finds the situation very tiring.

Transformations of a relationship always take place when all forms of resistance and understanding have been exhausted – through seminars, supervisions, or comparisons with the stories of other patients. The tough hide softens little by little, until the process comes to resemble a striptease at the end of which the analyst finds himself naked.

The day when all imaginable limits are reached is a strange day. I don’t know if it’s a “happy day,” or a “day of anger,” a Dies Irae, quite unpredictable. On that day, the analyst faces what Raymond Devos calls “the hard reality of fiction,” since he is called upon to become “the witness of events without a witness,” an expression coined by the analyst Dori Laub, one of the creators of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. At the end of Ōe’s story, the student joins the composer in the sphere the latter inhabits “outside of time.”

Entering an anti-time

“I am a coded man of the anti-past.” These are the words with which I was greeted by the patient I mentioned, the first time I saw him in his hospital bed, where he seemed to be completely disoriented. I had introduced myself, telling him my name and saying that I was a psychoanalyst on the ward. The team had told me: “We don’t understand what he says.” This coding was not the result of some logical reasoning that could give him perspective on what was happening to him. It came to him directly from the sphere he inhabited, when he had to face me, as someone who was supposed to investigate his past. The problem was that past had not passed. So he was coded by this anti-past. This is how he identified himself. Recourse to anamnesis and family history was of no use. This is why, in our seminar and with our patients, we cannot do without literature, where this particular time-space unfolds.

In fact, Freud gave us this advice. At the start of his text Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, in which the madness of the young hero awakens the phantom of a young girl who had been buried in the ashes of Pompeii, Freud wrote in 1907 that “creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream.”⁶

The gigantic baby in Ōe’s short story moves betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Seminar 1: 1985–1986 Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–) Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
• Seminar 2: 1986–1987 Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013) Madness: an exploration of the zones of death
• Seminar 3: 1988–1989 Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) Madness in Pirandello’s work
• Seminar 4: 1989–1990 Toni Morrison (1931–2019) Beloved in dialogue with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann: psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
• Seminar 5: 1991–1992 August Strindberg (1849–1912) and Martii Siirala (1922–2008) The Inferno and From Transference to Transference
• Seminar 6: 1997–1998 Pat Barker The Regeneration Trilogy: objectivity degree zero
• Seminar 7: 1999–2000 Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Reading madness with Hannah Arendt: the production of freedom
• Conclusion
• Index