Researching Embodiment and Intergenerational Trauma using the work of Davoine and Gaudilliere: History walked in the door

French psychoanalysis

Abstract

The work of French psychoanalysts Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière ecentres on the understanding of the ways in which large historical traumas associated with war are brought to life by descendants, often generations later, who carry an experience that they cannot understand and that erupts as psychosis. They have devised a unique clinical method in which, together with the patient, they research what they term as the missing "social link", a link broken within an earlier generation by a personal or family experience of an extreme situation. Their work, which draws upon a historical reframing and broadening of Lacan, is deeply resonant with implications for psychosocial enquiry within the social sciences. In this article, we show how we developed a method for engaging with interviews with women who were serial migrants. In paying attention to their story, we show how we attended to the complex manifestations in the material of the embodied experiences associated with a history of slavery, colonization, poverty and migration. Our aim was to develop a mode of working, which did not pathologize but still recognized the transmission of suffering and distress in complex ways and its twists and turns across generations. In doing this, we sought to provide a way of working that radically rejected any split between a psychic/personal and social/historical realm.