Cadaverland

by Dorland, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781584657842
• ISBN10: 1584657847
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-13
• Publisher: Brandeis Univ

Summary

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, where he investigates somatic and psychological or 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 non-medical 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.

Author Biography

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

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Abbreviations	p. xvii
Introduction: My French "Jewish Question"	p. 1
Writing History/Inventing History?
A Still Warm Corpse
Stükke/ Figüren/Rhetoric
The Limits of Knowledge and Memory
The Real	p. 14
Who Knew What and When Did They Know It?
The French Resistance and the "Jewish Question"
Military Planning for the Liberation of the Camps and Prisoner Repatriation
The Liberation of the Western Camps
Medical Liberation
Allied DP Policies
The Nazi A-Bomb: The Continuing Jewish Problem
Condensation	p. 55
The Return
The Lutetia Hotel
War Crimes Forensics, 1945-1947
From Testimony to Medical Discourse, 1945-1948
The Psychology of Captivity, 1945-1946
Medical Dissertations on Concentration Camps and Deportee Pathology, 1941-1946
A Medical Field in Search of Itself, 1945-1953
Displacement	p. 90
The Pathology of Catastrophe
The Somatologists, 1945-1948
The "Halakhists, " 1936-1948
International Congresses on the Pathology of Deportation and Related Issues, 1946-1952
The FIR Medical and Scientific Congresses, 1954-1981
Minkowski: Psychopathology in Psychiatry and Holocaust Research, 1952-1982
The Scandinavian School of kz Syndrome, 1952-1980
Polish Perspectives on kz Syndrome, 1945-1961
The Israeli Holocaust Problem and Early Research, 1948-1969
Inversion	p. 144
The Failure of "Liberation Psychiatry, " 1944-1947
The Impossible Profession: Aspects of French Psychoanalytic History, 1926-1980
Niederland, Krystal, and the Transformation of Concentration Camp Syndrome, 1963-1988
Vicissitudes of the Figure of the Survivor, 1976-2005
Dilemma	p. 175
Trauma and Traumato-Culture, 1945-1990
Memory, Remembering, Commemoration, and Witnessing, 1949-2004
Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 1945-?
Conclusion: Prosthesis	p. 201
Notes	p. 209
Bibliography	p. 231
Index	p. 263
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