1. Cervantes, Don Quixote I, chapter 1, p. 410. References are to the French translation, Paris, Gallimard, La Pléiade, 2001. ‘The reason for the unreason that has come upon my reason so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.’

2. Ibid., ‘Prologue’, p. 391. ‘So what could a sterile, uncultivated mind like mine produce other than the story of a dried-up, leathery, fantastical son, full of changing thoughts never before imagined by anyone else, just like the one who was produced in a prison where every discomfort has its home and every sad sound makes its dwelling?’

3. Paulin Hountondji, Combats pour le sens, Cotonou, Editions du Flamboyant, 1997.

4. Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1958, and Nature and the Greeks, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1954.

5. ‘Il y a de l'eau dans le gaz’ (There's water in the gas) is a colloquial expression meaning ‘the atmosphere is tense’, a fight or quarrel is about to break out. (Translator's note)

6. Morgan R. O'Connell (Surgeon Commander, Royal Navy, Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar), The Falklands Experience, oral testimony, 1982.

7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Retford, Brynmill Press, 1993.

8. Françoise Davoine, Mère Folle, Strasbourg, Arcanes, 1998, p. 114.

Both the clinical histories presented in this article were recounted in the book from a different viewpoint, chapter 4, pp. 43-66, ‘La grande salle’, with the titles: L'enfant aux cheveux blancs, p. 57, and L'Afrique quantique, p. 59.

9. Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979, pp. 292-3.

10. Françoise Davoine, La Folie Wittgenstein, chapter 11, Paris, EPEL, 1992.

11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 41, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1958. ‘Now suppose that the tool with the name “N” is broken. Not knowing this, A gives B the sign “N”. Has this sign meaning now or not? What is B to do when he gives it? We have not settled anything about this. One might ask: what will he do? Well, perhaps he will stand at a loss or shew [author's italics] A the pieces. Here one might say: “N” has become meaningless, and this expression would mean that the sign “N” no longer had a use in our language-game (unless we gave it a new one).’

12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leçons et conversations, suivies de la Conférence sur l’éthique, 17 December 1930, Paris, Idées Gallimard, 1971, p. 158. ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Philosophical Review, LXXIV(1), January 1965. ‘At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person. I think that is absolutely essential. At this level nothing can be viewed objectively any more, I can only enter the arena as an individual and say “I”…. Am I up against the frontiers of language? Language is not a cage…. And here this must not be a sociological description, I must speak.’

13. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960, Paris, Seuil, 1986, p. 301. ‘In other words this field (of the gods) is now accessible for us only from the outside, from the viewpoint of science, objectivization, but for us Christians, formed by Christianity, is not part of the text in which the question is in fact posed. This area of the gods we Christians have swept it away, and the question here, in the light of psychoanalysis, is precisely what we have put in its place. In this area what is there left as a boundary? A boundary that has probably always been there, but is perhaps the only thing that is left with its bones sticking up out of this field which is deserted for us Christians. That is the question I am venturing to ask here.’

14. Robert Flacelière, Devins et oracles grecs, Paris, PUF, Que sais-je? no. 939, 1972, p. 18.

15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's ‘Golden Bough’, p. 20 in the French version.

16. Plato, Phaedrus 244 d, e, French edition Paris, Belles Lettres, 1983. ‘But that is not all: these very sicknesses, these tough challenges, coming from somewhere in certain families (genos), because of ancient divine angers (mènis), the prophetic raving (mania), when it occurs in those who need it, has found the way to get rid of them with ceremonies to the gods and cathartic rituals … allowing those who are rightly crazy (tô orthôs manenti) … to free themselves and their people from present ills.’

17. Gisela Pankow, L'Homme et sa psychose, Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1969.

18. Louis Renou, L'Inde fondamentale, Paris, Hermann, 1978, p. 59.

19. Charles Malamoud, Cuire le monde, Paris, La Découverte, 1989, p. 214. ‘In fact the person sacrificing tries to stress simultaneously that they are the victim and other than the victim. By offering the victim, it is themself they wish to offer and avoid offering … The poem can be the analogue of a victim: the poet cuts into the verbal material as the person sacrificing cuts into the animal's flesh.’

20. Sigmund Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva, in S.E. 9, 1-95, 1907; and The ‘Uncanny’, S.E. 17, 217-56, 1919. ‘Everything that is repressed is unconscious, but we cannot say that everything unconscious is repressed.’ French source: Le Délire et les rêves dans la Gradiva de Jensen (1907), Paris, Gallimard, 1983, p. 190.; and L'Inquiétante Etrangeté, Das Unheimliche, in Essais de psychanalyse appliquée (pp. 163-210), p. 205 (1919), Paris, Gallimard Idées, 1971.

21. Hergé, L'Etoile mystérieuse, Tournai/Paris, Casterman, 1947, p. 7.

22. F. Davoine, La Folie Wittgenstein, op. cit., p. 31.

23. The épuration, or ‘cleansing’, that followed the liberation of France was carried out both officially and unofficially; it was designed to punish collaborators but was also the occasion for settling private scores and exacting vengeance. (Translator's note)

24. Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-glass.

25. René Descartes, Olympiques, Paris, Garnier, 1963, p. 57. ‘He attributed this miracle to the divine nature of enthusiasm and the force of imagination that makes the seeds of wisdom spring up (which are in the minds of humans like sparks of fire in stones) far more easily and brilliantly than Reason can in Philosophers.’

26. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, Paris, Gallimard La Pléiade, 1953, pp. 136 and 148. See also a bilingual edition (London/USA 1994) by University of Notre Dame Press.

27. Sophocles, Antigone, v. 454, Paris, Belles Lettres, 1955.

28. Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond, chapter 3, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

29. F. Davoine, La Folie Wittgenstein, op. cit., chapters 9, 10, 11.

30. Gerald Mohatt and Joe Eagle Elk, The Price of a Gift: The Lakota Healer's Story, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

31. Lin Tsi, Entretiens, translated from the Chinese and with a commentary by Paul Demieville, Paris, Fayard, 1972.

32. Georges Bataille, La Part maudite, Paris, Minuit, 1967.

33. Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don’ (1923-1924), in Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF, 1968, pp. 144— 279.

34. Plato, Theaetetus, 202 b, ‘stoicheia aloga’. French edition, Théétète, Paris, Belles Lettres, 1976.

35. E. Schrödinger, L'Esprit et la matière: Tarner Lectures (Cambridge, 1958), La Nature et les Grecs: Shearman Lectures (London, University College, 1948), op. cit.

36. Walter Moore, Schrödinger, Life and Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

37. E. Schrödinger, La Nature et les Grecs, op. cit., pp. 130, 132.

38. E. Schrödinger, L'Esprit et la matière, op. cit., p. 187 & chapter 3 (pp. 183—95), Le principe d'objectivation; chapter 5 (pp. 211—25), Science et religion.

39. Lin Tsi, Entretiens de Lin Tsi, op. cit., p. 112 § 19.

40. E. Schrödinger, L'Esprit et la matière, op. cit., pp. 193, 194, 222.

41. Gaetano Benedetti, La Psychothérapie des psychoses comme défi existentiel, Ramonville Sainte Agne, Erès, 2002, p. 62 (Psychotherapie als existentielle Herausforderung, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992).

42. Gaetano Benedetti, La Mort dans l’âme, chapter 3, pp. 209—13: L’être avec comme réponse du thérapeute à l'existence negative, Erès, 1995 (Alienazione e personazione nella psicoterapia della malattia mentale, Turin, Einaudi, 1980).

43. Claude Barrois (former head of the department of psychiatry at Val de Grâce hospital in Paris), Les Névroses traumatiques, Paris, Dunod, 1988, p. 170. ‘The second way patients are abandoned (secondary trauma) is by people and society who, after an initial concern, are reassured in good conscience by a few weeks or months of various interventions, and unilaterally decide everything is sorted out … Which mean that a large number of traumatic neuroses are made more serious by this second purely societal break. Psychoanalysis has the virtue of being the only discipline that really does anything about it.’

Jonathan Shay (preface by Gregory Nagy), Achilles in Vietnam. Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, chapter 1, pp. 3—21. Betrayal of ‘themis’, what's right, New York, Touchstone Book, 1995.

Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History beyond Trauma, New York, Other Press, forthcoming.

44. Paulin J. Hountondji, op. cit., 1997.