Overview

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""psy-science"" 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.

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9781584657842

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[A]n 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. Holocaust and Genocide Studies

The text is well written, scholarly, and authoritative. The book goes beyond the survivor to include the impact on families as well. Anyone interested in the psychological aspects of trauma will find this volume a worthwhile read. --Jewish Book World

Author Information

MICHAEL DORLAND is a professor in the School of Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa

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