CHAPTER 2 SELF-TRANSLATING MADNESS AND TRAUMA: GENDERING THE THERAPEUTIC ENCOUNTER AND ITS REPRESENTATION IN LEONORA CARRINGTON’S EN BAS NATHALIE SÉGERAL In her study of nineteenth-century madness in France, titled La Ronde des folles, Yannick Ripa highlights a fundamental difference between female and male madness in medical discourses: whereas men’s madness expresses itself through political and historical delusions, in women it tends to be reduced to a biological stage of life. By casting the female body at the centre of the narrative, Leonora Carrington’s madness memoir En Bas (first published in 1946 and translated as Down Below) is articulated around issues of gender in the therapeutic encounter and its representation, thus seemingly echoing Ripa’s findings. Ripa (1986) concludes her study with the following statement: [L]a folie féminine naît et se vit hors du siècle, dans le foyer auquel la femme est ancrée comme une religieuse à sa communauté; différence essentielle avec son compagnon d’infortune—sa folie, l’homme la vit dans le siècle. (89) Namely, as early as the nineteenth century, alienists considered that “il existe des âges propices à l’explosion des troubles mentaux féminins: 15 ans (la puberté et les premières règles), 30-35 ans (l’accouchement) et 50 ans (la ménopause). […] Changer de tranche d’âge sans adopter la condition familiale correspondante est en soi une anormalité” (Ripa 1986, 68). 1 Contrary to male madness, female madness is presented as intrinsically 1 In the nineteenth century, psychiatrists used to be called médecins aliénistes. This new medical category had been created by Pinel, generally thought to have been Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter : Psychoanalysis, Talking Therapies and Creative Practice, edited by Susan Bainbrigge, and Maren Scheurer, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action Created from ed on 2020-08-26 04:04:11. Copyright © 2020. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.