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

Cover, Title Page, Copyright

CADA VER LAND Inventing aPathology ofCatastrophe forHolocaust Survival M i c h a e l D o r l a n d The Limits of Medical Knowledge & Historical Memory in France “Michael Dorland’s Cadaverland is the most important historical study dealing with the medical ramifications of the Holocaust. Focusing on the psychiatric and psychological literature dealing with the impact of the Shoah for the survivors and for their families, Dorland sketches the difficult, contradictory, often self-destructive struggle of psychological medicine with the horrors of the Shoah. Brilliantly written and ranging well beyond the confines of post-war France, this is a book that health care practitioners as well as all those dealing with trauma and its historical aftermath must read.” sander l. gilman, Director, Program in Psychoanalysis, Emory University “Michael Dorland has written an important and, in many ways, a strikingly original work that definitely ranks as superior scholarship. By choosing to examine how the figure of the Holocaust survivor has been studied, he has succeeded in uncovering new material and weaving this together with a critical review of a vast range of scholarship into a readable, yet subtle, and often eloquent, narrative.” toby gelfand, Jason A. Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Ottawa 978-1-58465-784-2 Michael Dorland Brandeis C A D A V E R L A N D A powerful look at how French medical science apprehended and described Holocaust survival In this extraordinary study, Michael Dorland explores sixty years of medical attempts by French doctors (mainly in the fields of neuropsychiatry and psychoanalysis) to describe the effects of concentration camp incarceration on Holocaust survivors. Dorland begins with a discussion of the liberation of concentration camp survivors, their stay in deportation camps, and eventual return to France, analyzing the circulation of mainly medical (neuropsychiatric) knowledge, its struggles to establish a symptomology of camp effects, and its broadening out into connected medical fields such as psychoanalysis. He then turns specifically to the French medical doctors who studied Holocaust survivors, and he investigates somatic, psychological, and holistic conceptions of survivors as patients and human beings. The final third of the book offers a comparative look at the “psyscience ” approach to Holocaust survival beyond France, particularly in the United States and Israel. He illuminates the peculiar journey of a medical discourse that began in France but took on new forms elsewhere, eventually expanding into nonmedical fields to create the basis of the “traumato-culture” with which we are familiar today. Embedding his analysis of different medical discourses in the sociopolitical history of France in the twentieth century, he also looks at the French Jewish Question as it affected French medicine, the effects of five years of Nazi Occupation, France’s enthusiastic collaboration, and the problems this would pose for postwar collective memory. michael dorland is a professor in the School of Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa. Cover image: Wall of Names at the Memorial of the Shoah. Photo courtesy of the author. Tom Perlmutter BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS Waltham, Massachusetts Published by UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND Hanover and London www.upne.com C A D A V E R L A N D TheTauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series C a d a v e r l a n d TheTauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series Jehuda Reinharz, General Editor Sylvia Fuks Fried, Associate Editor The Tauber Institute Series is dedicated to publishing compelling and innovative approaches to the study of modern European Jewish history, thought, culture, and society. The series features scholarly works related to the Enlightenment, modern Judaism and the struggle for emancipation, the rise of nationalism and the spread of antisemitism, the Holocaust and its aftermath, as well as the contemporary Jewish experience. The series is published under the auspices of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry—established by a gift to Brandeis University from Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber—and is supported, in part, by the Tauber Foundation and the Valya and Robert Shapiro Endowment. For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see www.upne.com Eugene M. Avrutin, Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Ivanov, Alexander Lvov, Harriet Murav, and Alla Sokolova, editors Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions Michael Dorland Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival Berel Lang Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence David N...