Francoise Davoine is a psychoanalyst, currently working mainly with patients with psychosis and trauma, and supervisning trainees. She has worked for over 30 years as an anlyst in public psychiatric hospitals and is also a faculty member of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, an institute of social sciences, for many years she led a weekly seminar entitled "Madness and the social link" with her late husband Jean Max Gaudilière. The seminar group focues on authors dealing directly with madness and traumas, like Wittgenstein, Cervantes, and Larence Stene's Tristram Shandy.