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  • Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival. The Limits of Medical Knowledge and Historical Memory in France
  • Michael A. Grodin
Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival. The Limits of Medical Knowledge and Historical Memory in France, Michael Dorland (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 2009), xi + 275 pp., cloth $45.00.

The publication of a new volume by the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry is an occasion of scholarly anticipation. The latest book in the series is no exception. Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival focuses on the nature, scope, and implications of the treatment of Holocaust survivors in post-World War II France. Professor Michael Dorland of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa is neither a historian nor a clinician, but is rather a journalist, film critic, and novelist. Yet, through his diverse experience he has acquired an exceptional depth of knowledge and insight. Professor Dorland's book, while not an easy read, is an engaging and unique exploration of how French doctors analyzed the impact of the concentration camps on Holocaust survivors. The author devoted ten years to writing this work, and the result is a nuanced combination of historical, cultural, political, sociological, and psychological approaches to the study of the Holocaust.

As a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I view Professor Dorland's work as a sophisticated psychoanalytic inquiry that crosses multiple dimensions. Psychoanalysis grapples with unconscious conflicts and recognizes the need to work through them, yielding new insights and awareness. All individuals experience a constant need to control emotional as well as intellectual inner conflicts. The analytic framework identifies and addresses defense mechanisms that may inhibit the resurfacing of repressed memories. Such defenses may take the form of displacement, condensation, inversion, or rationalization. All of these protective apparatuses may be used to shield the conscious mind from realities too difficult to accept. Nonetheless, such realities shape the past and affect the present and future.

Dorland's book, then, can be seen as a form of psychoanalytic free association connecting streams of discourse and dialogue. As such, the text is at times difficult to follow. Cadaverland explores how regression into the mind causes psychological censorship and internal editing, and engages with the process of [End Page 482] moving from the unconscious to the conscience mind. As I see it, the work is an analysis of Dorland himself. That is, Cadaverland is a means for the author to come to terms with his own complex Jewish identity. He notes in the introduction, entitled "My French 'Jewish Question,'" that he is "the son of a Jewish mother, or as she puts it, 'une française d'origine Israëlite [Frenchwoman of Jewish origin],' who had to wear the yellow star at the age of eighteen." Dorland is a member of the political left and an assimilated Jew, calling himself "both a citizen of France and a Jew of the Diaspora." Another layer of the analytic nature of this book is Dorland's discussion of the postwar French public response to Holocaust survivors. In grappling with this issue, Dorland recognizes the problem of memory and defense against. He understands how denial and repression can distort memory. The reader must "listen" to the complex threads of arguments and justifications in an attempt to work through this analysis.

In Cadaverland, Dorland explores the limits of medical knowledge and human historical memory. His focus is on the past sixty years of the field of medicine—especially psychiatry, neuropsychology, and psychoanalysis—and on attempts to describe and explain the effects of the concentration camp on Holocaust survivors. French researchers were among the first to attempt systematic research on this topic. The story of this research must be embedded within the social, political, and cultural history of France—particularly in regard to the period immediately following the fall of the Vichy government, when there was virtually no public acknowledgment of widespread French collaboration with the Nazis. Of the approximately 80,000 Jews who were deported from France to concentration camps during the Holocaust, only 3,500 (less than 5%) returned; yet, French society...

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