Researching Embodiment and Intergenerational Trauma using the work of Davoine and Gaudilliere: History walked in the door

Abstract

The work of French psychoanalysts Françoise Davoine and Jean-MaxGaudillière centres on the understanding of the ways in which large historical traumas associated with war are brought to life by descendants, often generations later, who carry an experience that they cannot understand and that erupts as psychosis. They have devised a unique clinical method in which, together with the patient, they research what they term as the missing 'social link', a link broken within an earlier generation by a personal or family experience of an extreme situation. Their work, which draws upon a historical reframing and broadening of Lacan, is deeply resonant with implications for pychosocial enquiry within the social sciences. In this article, we show how we developed a method for engaging with interviews with women who were serial migrants. In paying attention to their story, we show how we attended to the complex manifestations in the material of the embodied experiences associated with a history of slavery, colonization, poverty and migration. Our aim was to develop a mode of working, which did not pathologize but still recognized the transmission of suffering and distress in complex ways and its twists and turns across generations. In doing this, we sought to provide a way of working that radically rejected any split between a psychic/personal and social/historical realm.

Valleys' girls: re-theorising bodies and agency in a semi-rural post-industrial locale

“…In interview accounts we specifically focused on vivid stories that revealed feelings, desire and intense connections (cf. Walkerdine, Olsvold, and Rudberg 2013;Probyn 1996;Young 2005). We present vignettes to illustrate the different ways that girls seemed to experience 'becomings' emergent within assemblages that involved their moving bodies.…”

‘Feel what I feel’: making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters

“…In one explosive moment, we are taken by surprise and surprise ourselves with how the ruler and its associations tumble out in ways that connect the immediate experience with deeper historical legacies of patriarchal forces. As Walkerdine, Olsvold, and Rudberg (2013), write about in their theorization of the intergenerational embodied transmission of trauma, this was a moment where 'history walked in the door' . And very quickly, we all wanted to bend the rules, rewrite the rules, and here was an object which could matter-realize (Braidotti, 2013) this vision.…”

Feeling ‘like a minority . . . a pathology’: interpreting race from research with African and Caribbean women on violence and abuse

“…Walkerdine et al (2013) have explored how recollections of difficult childhood experiences can be viscerally experienced as an almost supernatural force or emotive and powerful moment during the research situation to the extent that it feels as if 'history walks in the door'. My personal and collective history walked into the research process in a visceral and stigmatising manner.…”

“…I eventually felt compelled to sit with the discomforting feelings (Walkerdine et al, 2013;Watts, 2008). The more I turned away, the more the issues appeared to beckon me to linger with postcolonial theories of embodiment (Ahmed, 2007;Alcoff, 2006;Fanon, 2008Fanon, /1952.…”