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Reading History beyond Trauma by Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière brought back for one of us (D.L.) memories of his work as a psychiatrist treating Israeli soldiers who had decompensated on the battlefield during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Behind their disorganized narratives, fragmented by terror or only haltingly emerging from the depth of a depressive stupor, could be heard more and more clearly the resonance of the extreme violence their parents had been exposed to during the Holocaust. These Israeli soldiers became psychiatric casualties when the traumatic experience of loss and extinction their parents had gone through caught up with them during the violent warfare of the Yom Kippur War.
Davoine and Gaudillière's History beyond Trauma approaches the psychological complexities of history as it is enacted, “symptomatized,” and relived by their patients. The authors present materials from various contexts to illustrate compellingly how the traumatic past is kept alive through the life reenactments and psychotic symptomatology of succeeding generations; in their case presentations they illuminate how the transference and countertransference responses occurring in the therapeutic encounters perpetuate and reflect this dynamic.
The book keeps in focus a major discovery, which though quite selfevident tends to be overlooked and denied: The history we go through goes through us; the historic events we are exposed to, through previous generations and during our own lifetime, dramatically shape us. The fact that (auto)biography cannot occur in a vacuum but happens in context tends to be ignored, particularly by psychoanalysts. Natural disaster,