IPhA’s Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma & Resilience Working Group
Invites You to a Virtual Live Conference:
Friday, November 14, 2025
(12-2pm ET/NYC; virtual room opens at 11:45am ET)
This event is free, but RSVP is required
Registration form
What Is This Event About?
Wars and social upheavals have always shaped the psychic landscape in which psychoanalysis emerges and evolves. This conference explores how conditions of armed conflict and collective trauma challenge, transform, and renew psychoanalytic practice and theory.
Our first presenter, Françoise Davoine, draws on decades of clinical work and a long engagement with the history of madness and trauma. In her talk, A New Paradigm of Psychoanalysis as Old as War, she revisits the origins of psychoanalysis in the aftermath of World War I and traces its enduring dialogue with catastrophe — from The Iliad to her present exchanges with Ukrainian analysts working under bombardment.
Suzanne LaLonde then turns to the Belle Époque, when new forms of “traumatic hysteria” at the Salpêtrière Hospital presaged psychoanalytic thought. Her presentation, The Dawn of Psychoanalysis: Belle Époque Paris, the Salpêtrière Hospital, and Traumatic Hysteria, reveals how Jean-Martin Charcot’s “clinical theatre” bridged neurology, performance, and early theories of trauma, laying the groundwork for modern understandings of dissociation, catharsis, and post-traumatic healing.
Together, these presentations illuminate how psychoanalysis continually arises “under conditions of war” — whether literal or symbolic — confronting the breakdown of meaning and the possibility of repair. They invite us to reflect on how, from the trenches of 1914 to the hospitals of today, the analytic encounter bears witness to history’s wounds and to the human capacity to re-enter time, life, and community.
1. Presentation by Françoise Davoine: A New Paradigm of Psychoanalysis as Old as War
The first psychoanalysts who worked with psychosis were forged in the crucible of the First World War — though, curiously, not in France. This moment inaugurated a paradigm of psychoanalysis under conditions of madness and trauma, one that must be continually rediscovered and renewed. Traces of this paradigm already appear in The Iliad, where war, loss, and the disintegration of meaning call for new ways of listening to human suffering.
In this presentation, we will revisit this enduring lineage of psychoanalytic practice, drawing from the monthly meetings Françoise Davoine has joined since 2022 — with Ukrainian analysts who continue their work amid bombardment. These conversations — recorded by the Freud Museum in Vienna under the title “Psychoanalysis under Conditions of War” — bear witness to the vitality of psychoanalysis that confronts violence not abstractly, but through living links between analysts and those they accompany.
2. Presentation by Suzanne Lalonde: The Dawn of Psychoanalysis: Belle Époque Paris, the Salpêtrière Hospital, and Traumatic Hysteria
This study situates the emergence of psychoanalytic thinking in the cultural and clinical networks of late-nineteenth-century Paris. Focusing on Jean-Martin Charcot’s lessons at the Salpêtrière Hospital, it interprets his practice to treat patients with traumatic hysteria as a form of clinical dramaturgy that prefigured psychoanalytic theories. For instance, the neurologist did not discourage patients from: playing roles of religious figures; tapping into unconscious material with and without hypnosis; and engaging in performances, such as dancing.
It is argued that this clinical dramaturgy laid the groundwork for the following foundational psychoanalytic concepts: Pierre Janet’s accounts of dissociation and idées fixes; Breuer’s and Freud’s abreaction and cathartic method; and Freud’s “acting out,” shifting to “working-through” and free association. This research project also traces reciprocities between clinic and stage: cabaret performer Jane Avril and theater star Sarah Bernhardt, both of whom spent time as a patient and a visitor to the hospital, and included material from the Salpêtrière into their productions.
These exchanges demonstrate that Charcot’s clinical theatre catalyzed both novel representational and therapeutic vocabularies and practices, bridging performance, neurology, and emergent psychoanalysis, while inviting interdisciplinary research on post-traumatic conditions, from PTSD to healing, today.
Short Bios of the Presenters:
Françoise Davoine is a French psychoanalyst and scholar whose work explores the deep connections between madness, trauma, and history. Formerly on the faculty of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, she led for forty years, together with Jean-Max Gaudillière, the influential seminar Madness and the Social Link. For three decades she also practiced psychoanalysis in public psychiatric hospitals, engaging directly with those marked by war, social rupture, and collective catastrophe. Her writings, including Mother Folly (Stanford University Press), History Beyond Trauma (The Other Press, 2004), Fighting Melancholia: Don Quixote’s Teaching (Karnac, 2016), and A Shandean Analysis Madness and Trauma in Tristram Shandy (Routledge, 2023), investigate how unassimilated historical violence resurfaces in clinical encounters. Davoine continues to teach internationally and to animate discussion groups devoted to the psychoanalytic approach to psychosis and trauma. Her lifelong work speaks to the central theme of this conference—psychoanalysis under conditions of war—where the personal and the historical meet in the analytic dialogue.
Suzanne LaLonde, Associate Professor of French Cultural Studies and Medical/Health Humanities at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, teaches French Literature, French Cultural History, and theater-informed courses to pre-med majors, while also directing the Medical/Health Humanities programs. Her research interests center on the cultural history of Paris and the intersection between post-traumatic conditions, from PTSD to resilience, and the creative arts. In 2021, she published Paris and It Revolutionary Ideas, while her other book, Trauma, Post-traumatic Growth, and World Literature, was published in 2022. She has also published over 15 peer-reviewed articles and two book chapters, “The Plague and Dr. Rieux’s Metaphysical and Narrative Chronicle” (in The Health Humanities and Camus’s The Plague, 2019) and “Healing and Post-Traumatic Growth” (in Trauma and Literature: Cambridge Critical Concepts, 2018). Her article “Cultural Trauma Studies and Post-traumatic Protests” is forthcoming in December 2025 in the journal Literature and Medicine.
Each presentation will be followed by a 15-min Q&A related to that presentation, and we will conclude with a general Q&A.
Please note that this event is free, but RSVP is required!
The Zoom link will be provided right after you fill out the short form below. The Zoom reminder will be emailed to you the day before the event. Please make sure to use the email that does not have spam blockers and which you are checking often.
For questions or clarifications, please contact us via email at internationalpsychohistory@gmail.com, with the subject line “11-14-25 Conference related.”
We look forward to your contributions and participation in this exciting event!
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