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Pandemics, Wars, Traumas and Literature: Echoes from the Front Lines

Author(s) : Francoise Davoine

Reviews and Endorsements

"A key word in this powerful book is 'frontlines.' But here the life-and-death agonies are happening not in wartime. We now see a different time of darkness - what Camus had called La Peste. This is the gripping story of the human mind's inner struggle to transcend such darkness." - Gregory Nagy, Harvard University.

"Freud asserted that 'no mortal can keep a secret', which, in turn, made '...the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind... quite possible to accomplish.' Unfortunately, few among us really know how to listen to others. Francoise Davoine's Pandemics, Wars, Trauma and Literature: Echoes from the Front Lines is a master class in listening to people individually and through their collective voice as expressed in history and literature in order to perceive deep truths which, once heard, inform effective response at every level of society." - Harold Kudler, MD, Associate Consultant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University.

"In this beautiful book, we hear the voices of frontline healthcare workers in the COVID pandemic who speak to us from the region between life and death, where they accompany their ill and dying patients and bear witness to our current catastrophe from within its unthinkable center. The therapeutic innovations of these caretakers and their techniques of listening and of story-telling become the starting point for Davoine's remarkable history of the psychiatric and psychoanalytic encounters with trauma and madness - has they emerged from social upheaval, war and plague-and of a Western literary tradition that has served both as therapy and testimony to centuries of disaster. Framing her account with her personal journey-and that of her late husband and co-author Jean-Max Gaudilliere-in the psychoanalysis of madness, Davoine reveals, through her analyses of therapists, writers, philosophers, and cultural rituals, the joint "transference" between patient and caretaker, sufferer and listener, as they guide each other through calamity and help pass on, to us, the histories most at risk of being lost." - Cathy Caruth, Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell and Professor in both English and Comparative Literature.