Madness And The Social Link: The Jean-Max Gaudillière Seminars, 1985-2000. By Jean-Max Gaudillière, as transcribed by Françoise Davoine and translated by Agnès Jacob. London/New York:  Routledge, 2020.  197 pp.

Near the conclusion of “Moses and Monotheism,”1 Freud analogizes the effects of childhood traumata to historical upheavals, the traces of which have been effaced; these are liable to produce an idea that

…has a compulsive character: it must be believed. To the extent that it is distorted, it may be described as a delusion; in so far as it brings a return of the past, it must be called the truth. Psychiatric delusions, too, contain a small fragment of truth, and the patient’s conviction extends over from this truth onto its delusional wrappings. [p. 130, emphasis in original]

The readiness with which psychoanalysts will assent to the notion that delusions bear within them a kernel of truth perhaps serves to obfuscate a corollary within Freud’s statement: these truths have no place outside of delusion. Thus construed, delusion may be more truthful than the discourse of the ostensibly sober-minded.

It is to this paradox that the seminars of Jean-Max Gaudillière, collected in Madness and the Social Link, attend. In these lectures, delivered

with Françoise Davoine at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales between 1985 and 2000, drawing on more than three decades of psychoanalytic work with those suffering psychoses and traumata, Gaudillière asserts that the delusions that manifest in such cases are no deficit.2 They are rather extreme measures to contend against the erasure of the traces of historical catastrophes. With such traumata, it is not merely that an event is repressed, but that the very means of representing it have been destroyed. For those abandoned to such zones, time does not pass. The social link, assured by language, is cut. One thereby loses one’s rights as a speaking being.

As Gaudillière states, “An event becomes madness as soon as the sundry incident falls upon—incidere—an I that becomes a that, condemned to show the catastrophe on his face until he meets another who can recognize it” (p. 50). The