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This interesting, thought-provoking and moving collection of papers brought together by Andrés Gautier and Anna Sabatini Scalmati is based on the ongoing workshop of the EFPP (European Federation for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Public Sector) with victims of torture and state violence. In the foreword René Kaës states that the book ‘asks both psychoanalysts and politicians a question that goes right to the heart of their “impossible profession” … where two disasters come together: one which wrecks a legally-constituted state apparatus and the other which befalls certain individuals who are forced … to incorporate in their minds, a traumatic irruption originating in a different dimension from that of intra-psychic determinism: the political sphere’.
This is the guiding thread of the whole book, which challenges psychoanalysis both theoretically and technically to reach its borders, where subjectivity, inter-subjectivity and trans-subjectivity are deeply subverted and distorted. By underlining how working with people affected by torture and state violence means working at the interface between psychotherapy, human rights and politics, the Editors affirm that ‘the rule of abstinence in psychoanalytic treatment is necessary, but political neutrality is impossible’. The psychoanalyst's duty of providing words is in this respect dual as it concerns the effort to name the nameless in the individual on one side, and not to remain silent in the face of inhumanity and collective abuse on the other.
Abstinence, containment, representability, when accompanying the hardest working through in the individual, are intertwined with the need for particular attention and sensitivity as the most archaic layers of the mind are activated, and deep defences are necessary to survival. The existence of the individual, of his human nature, is endangered, and this requires the analyst's availability to continuously reformulate theoretical models and reinvent technical skills.