Mother folly : a tale / Françoise Davoine ; translated by Judith G. Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davoine, Françoise, author.

Contributor:

Miller, Judith Graves, translator.

Series:

Cultural memory in the present

Standardized Title:

Mère folle. English

Language:

English

French

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

xxiv, 218 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2014.

Summary:

If your mentally ill patient dies, are you to blame? For Dr. Françoise Davoine, a Parisian psychoanalyst, this question becomes disturbingly real when one of her patients commits suicide. In personal crisis, Davoine questions whether she should ever return to the hospital. In an attempt to make sense of things she begins 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. The author ultimately 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Buffoonery or Political Theatre

1 The Entrance 3

2 The Honor Court 14

3 Folly's Mirror 25

4 The Common Ward 31

5 Judgment 53

6 The Theatre of Cruelty 67

7 The Esplanade 75

8 The Clinic 97

Part II The Return of the Subject

1 Asphalt 107

2 School 113

3 Schrödinger's Call 120

4 The Transference Box 129

5 The Subject of Coincidence 152

Part III Big History and Little History

1 Which Science Can We Trust? 161

2 The Anti-dictator, One for All, and. All Are Rotten 176

3 The Erl King 185

4 Gaetano Benedetti 198

5 Morgestraich 210.

Notes:

"Originally published in French in 1998 under the title Mère folle."

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780804782777

0804782776

9780804782784

0804782784

OCLC:

865536915