Arrested Histories: A Response to Françoise Davoine

Abstract

This commentary examines the psychoanalytic drama narrated by Françoise Davoine in terms of the dream at its crossroads: a site within the analysis (and its dramatic narrative) in which the dead and the living change places and the untold stories of the patient's and analyst's mothers begin to emerge. Davoine's narrative recounts the emergence of a language in which the hidden stories become entangled with each other as well as the breakdown of signification in which an uninscribed history appears on the scene. Ultimately the analysis turns around an arrest of signification, a form of madness that reveals the violent history at the heart of the exchanges enacted in the analytic encounter. This is also the point, I suggest, at which the possibility of a new relation to history and a new form of address open up.

Notes

¹Davoine relies on René Sieffert (1979), who distinguishes different Noh forms, including the “no d'apparitions,” which includes a subdivision in which “spectres” of human beings appear often through a dream to the shite.

²The dream is a hinge in a number of ways: as a dream between the patient's and analyst's stories, as “act 2” between the first act in the narration of the drama and the third act, as the moment at which the analysis as an art of signification and interpretation shifts to the analysis as a mode of theatrical performance.

³It would take a much longer examination to develop the many possible entangled and figural doublings in the dream: For example, the pale child seems to recall both the paleness of the patient in the first act and the paleness of Davoine's mother after her release from the prison (which itself seems to echo the deathliness of the patient's mother); Davoine is both the child in the dream, whom she calls a double, and the mother who resuscitates him, and so on.

⁴Sieffert describes the three stages in the drama as three retellings of the hero's story; “si la première partie de la pièce est en quelque sorte un reflet dans un miroir,” he notes, “nous avons cette fois-ci [in part three] une image incertaine dans un miroir d'eau troublée à chaque instant par des remous surgis des profondeurs” (p. 15). Davoine also describes a movement from mirroring to something that could not be described in those terms. This shift away from a signifying/mirroring model is also the shift into a thinking of theater in the terms offered by Artaud.

⁵The distinction between living and not-living, between survival as “life” and as a kind of death, is not entirely clear in the lives of the mothers and daughters. One way to read the analytic encounter would be to understand how the blurring of life and death in the daughter's survival becomes a distinguishing or acknowledging of the difference in her new relation to her mother at the end of the analysis (in the new form of address that opens up as a possibility there). Such an analysis would need to take into account a crucial linguistic shift that occurs in the passage from act 1 to act 3 of the analytic drama that Davoine describes: the shift from language as signification to language as the kind of figuration called “prosopopoeia” (taken from the Greek), in which a face or mask is given to the dead so that they can speak (this is linked to the possibility of address). The capacity of language to provide a voice for the dead and the complex relation between death and life implied in this capacity is part of the underlying dynamic of the analysis.

⁶The words “let her out” also can be read as a cry to let the infant out of the womb. It should be noted that the figural dimension of the text, in which the child in the womb hears and suffers along with the mother (in the “we”), should not be confused with a literal assumption of ordinary sentience in an “unborn child.”

⁷See Davoine and Gaudillière (2004). Although the mother tongue of both Davoine and Gaudillière is French, their book was originally published in English in an American press and only later translated into French. The itinerary of the languages of the book is noted in the “passeport” at the front of the book, which notes that the book has had to “passer par les États-Unis pour revenir en France.” At the point of translation, notably, the book acquired a new subtitle: La folie des guerres.

⁸A fuller analysis of act 1 of the analytic drama might note that Davoine's clinical role at that point would seem to mirror that of her mother's work for the Resistance, carrying letters across a line—here the line of the unconscious (and of the break between signifier and signified). This heroic story of analytic interpretation and action is also altered along with that of the mother by act 3 (as the mirroring of both daughters in relation to their mothers, and the mothers in relation to each other, is also broken).

⁹Sieffert referred to the “carrefours des songes” in describing the No form of apparitions. The crossroads of the dream is thus, in this context, a specifically dramatic concept.