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Rachel Rosenblum is one of the rare French psychoanalysts who expresses herself as well in English as she does in French. The research that she has carried out over the last 20 years or so on the psychoanalysis of extreme traumas has been published in both English language and French language journals. They are gathered together and often expanded in her book Mourir d’écrire? Shoah, traumas extrêmes et psychanalyse des survivants.
This rich study had its origin in a trauma, the suicide in 1994 of a friend, philosopher and probable future psychoanalyst, Sarah Kofman. This suicide occurred on 5 October 1994, just after the publication of an autobiographical narrative, Rue Ordener, rue Labat (Ordener Street, Labat Street) (Kofman 1994) in which Sarah Kofman recounts, in direct style and in the first person, how, after being hidden by a neighbour at the moment when her father was taken from their home by the Nazis, she became attached to her to the point of repudiating her own mother. Did she commit suicide on account of what she had written? It is impossible to establish a certain causality between the publication of this book and her suicide, but Rachel Rosenblum was led to ask herself whether, far from having a cathartic effect as is often supposed, speaking or writing about an extreme trauma might itself result in death.
Can one die from writing? The question was all the more urgent in that, around the same time, several great writers who had survived the camps, or former hidden children who had survived the disappearance of their families, had committed suicide; these included Romain Gary, Piotr Rawicz, Primo Levi and Paul Célan. Other writers, like Robert Antelme, Michel del Castillo and Jorge Semprun, did not die after publishing their testimony about the camps, but told journalists that they felt writing was putting them at risk.
The question has considerable significance for psychoanalysts: do they risk involuntarily putting their patients at danger by asking them