ABSTRACT

After living in a state of high tension for so long, Riffaud had difficulty adjusting to the ordinariness of post-war Paris. The willed dissociation that had been a means of surviving interrogation by the Gestapo had become an automatic response over which she had no control. It left her quite unable to meet the demands of civilian life. In 1944, she was injected with the ‘truth serum’ (sodium pentothal) that was being used at the time to help survivors of torture let go of some of their repressed nightmares. The treatment was only partially successful. Through sessions with psychoanalysts like Serge Lebovici and Jean Kestemberg, on the other hand, Riffaud began to confront her wartime experience by processing it through narrative. Psychoanalysis is sometimes called the ‘talking cure’, and the capacity to convert trauma into narrative that she developed in the course of these sessions would be of vital importance in the profession for which she began training in 1945. Riffaud’s chosen field, war correspondence, often requires the verbalising of horrific events suffered by people who are unable to speak for themselves. Her earlier trauma of being forced to watch others suffer could in this new context be reconfigured as a conscious choice to ‘see’ and be a willing and vocal witness. Therefore, through a form of psychological transference came the inspiration to assume her rightful place in the community: as a teller of its stories.