Psychanalyse et lien social

Françoise Davoine is a psychoanalyst trained in the 1970s at Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris. With advanced degrees in the Classics and in French Literature, she obtained a doctorate in sociology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), at the Center d’étude des mouvements sociaux (Center for the Study of Social Movements), led by Alain Touraine. She and her husband, Jean-Max Gaudilliere, have led a weekly seminar (Madness and the social link) at that School for over thirty years.

They are convinced that psychosis is a field of research for both analyst and analysand, in which the events of History, or perhaps pieces of those events, which could not be processed by the individual or even by human beings as a group, can be identified, recognized, and finally put in a place where they can be fully experienced within a symbolic framework created by social links; i.e., with others, within a social world.