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The Physician and the Victims of Torture

The physician working in a care centre for torture victims cannot practice medicine in the same way as he/she would do elsewhere. He/she must listen to the ravages that are the result of the torture and try to understand the biological mechanisms that operate in the traumatic memory. Displaying an intelligent visual and manual listening of the body enables the treatment of the suffering implied in past and actual experiences of the patient. A multidisciplinary approach is indispensable in order to cope with fragmentation and to restore thought circulation.

The Clinic of Shame and Transmission: The Act of Writing as Support of Transference

In clinical experience with trauma as a result of political violence, shame reveals both the intimate and social intrusion of the individual subjected to the omnipotence of another and the attempt to fend off this intrusion. In this way, between veiling and unveiling, shame questions the psychoanalyst in the form of a silent cry, as a complaint without words. Interweaving clinical fragments and references to the work of cinematographers, this text explores the complexity of the affect of shame in the cure with adult and adolescent survivors of war massacres as well as the effects of political violence at the level of transference. Writing appears as the locus of transmission of the impossible and opens up the way to the field of speech.