Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival [The Limits of Medical Knowledge and Historical Memory in France]

Figure 4: Inversion

144 The Failure of“Liberation Psychiatry,”1944–1947 The French Resistance signified many things: a rallying point during the war for those who found the defeat of 1940 and the Nazi Occupation untenable ; the armed struggle against the Occupier; an internal political struggle between Gaullists and Communists; an opportunistic haven “after the Germans had left,” as one writer put it bitterly, for those of, at best, ambiguous allegiance (Rajsfus 2005: 13); and a utopian aspiration that five years of war and sacrifice surely had to see translated into a better, fundamentally more equitable society, whose institutions incarnated the “pure spirit” of the Resistance. One of the key figures to articulate in print the utopianism of the Resistance was the writer and editor-in-chief of the leading Resistance newspaper Combat, Albert Camus.1 Less well known was the impact of the Resistance spirit upon French psychiatric circles in the project of “Liberation psychiatry.” As psychiatrists Georges Daumézon and Lucien Bonafé put it, Liberation psychiatry was nothing less than “a revolutionary transformation of the problems of psychiatry in France” (1946, 584). The core of the project was to “transcend the idea of the hospital and the asylum” and break forever the institutional separation of the mentally alienated from the surrounding world (588). 4Inversion . . . is a genre [that] consists in the reversal or inverse of an arrangement of words, relative to the order in which ideas follow from one another in the analysis of thought. pierre fontanier, Les Figures du discours, 1827 Inversion fi g u r e I n v e r si o n 145 F i g u r e 4 As Daumézon and Bonafé indicated, the brutality of the war years had produced terrible suffering for asylum patients, with “over 25 establishments requisitioned [by the Germans], the expatriation of the sick, and around 40,000 patients left [abandoned], under-nourished and dying at a terrifying rate” (586).2 As well, the hardships endured by asylum medical personnel not only had led to a heightened consciousness of their own responsibilities, but also allowed them to “experience” what tens of thousands of patients had long felt: namely, that “the defense of humanity was indivisible” (586). The resulting ferment among doctors and patients had created “absolutely revolutionary perspectives” for the future of French psychiatry (584). For one thing, sociological perspectives were brought to bear upon psychiatric understanding of both madness and the social problems of the collectivity , as opposed to the traditional view blind to the complexities of “social facts.” More exactly, it was no longer sufficient to study these individuals simply as statistics but to approach them as dynamic phenomena. Second was the attempt to modify public attitudes towards madness by creating society-wide “psychiatric needs” (“un besoin psychiatrique”), since psychiatry had the knowledge resources to educate the population “with the elements necessary for the individual understanding of mental hygiene” (588). Third, recent British and American work in group psychotherapy made further great hopes possible. Here Daumézon and Bonafé referred to a lecture (no date provided) at the Sorbonne, given by the chief medical consulting psychiatrist to the British Army, which had “an exceptionally tonic effect on all French psychiatrists” (587).3 Even, they added, the “horrible efficiency” of certain collective actions upon human groups in the Fascist countries allowed one to envisage both the promise and the possibility of “more beneficent ” measures. They did not, however, spell out what might constitute such measures. But as the epigraph for this chapter suggests, one of the figural consequences was a profound turning inward upon itself by French psychiatry. Despite the enthusiasms of Bonafé and Daumézon (the latter subsequently the “big boss” at Sainte-Anne Hospital, with whom Michel Foucault studied in the early 1950s), and a number of other psychiatrists and psychoanalysts , it was clear by 1947 that the Resistance spirit of unity was beginning to rigidify and fracture: In the end, the Resistance spirit in psychiatry was merely “ephemeral” as the writer Jean Paulhan observed in 1952, although C a d a v e r l a n d 146 a later version resurged in the 1960s’ “antipsychiatry” movement with the work of Foucault and others in France, Thomas Szasz in the United States, and Ronald Laing in Britain. In 1975, historian of French psychiatry Jean Biéder looked back at “myths in the history of psychiatry” and Liberation psychiatry in particular. He argued...