Fighting Melancholia : Don Quixote's Teaching Paperback / softback

Francoise Davoine has been investigating psychotic phenomena and trauma for over thirty years, in collaboration with Jean-Max Gaudilliere.

In this book, she draws on her literary background to take the reader on a fascinating voyage with an unexpected but most helpful guide: Don Quixote.In her work, Davoine approaches madness not as a symptom, but rather as a place, the place where the symbolic order and the social link have ruptured.

She sees the psychotic as a seeker, engaged in a form of exploration into the nature and history of this place.

This brings us to the seeker Don Quixote. Davoine takes the reader into the world of the knight-errant, to describe his adventures in a fascinating new light.Cervantes, the survivor of war trauma, captivity, and all manner of misfortunes, created this hero, first and foremost, so that the tale be told.

Moreover, he created a necessary dyad: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Davoine sees the latter as a "therapon", a second in combat and ritual double, Don Quixote's therapist.

Like Sancho, the therapist is a comrade-in-arms, confronting trauma with the patient.

Through transference, a significant relational bond develops.

In Don Quichote: Fighting Melancholia, Francoise Davoine offers a reading of Cervantes' novel from this perspective.

Scene after scene, battle after battle, the epic tale is retold as a story of healing.We live in times of world-wide violence, disruption, and disaster.

Trauma is unavoidable. But Davoine points to a way out, through the healing power of symbolic exchange within a human relationship.

Aside from being of great interest to all therapists working with psychosis and trauma, this book constitutes a brilliant reminder that all human beings, like knights-errant, aspire to "become valiant, generous, magnanimous, courteous, dauntless, gentle, patient", as Cervantes says.