Finding Dora Maar by Brigitte Benkemoun

Author:Brigitte Benkemoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: J. Paul Getty Trust, The
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Michel

25 quai Bourbon

Ode 8644

I did not think I had to look into the case of “Michel.” After having identified her thanks to the 1952 phone book, I assigned a place to Doctor Hélène Michel-Wolfromm—and then forgot her—among the “various doctors,” convinced that her name would be no more useful to me than all the cardiologists, dentists, and generalists that clutter up our contact lists. But in searching for details on Lacan, I discovered the story of this amazing woman: fertility specialist, sexology pioneer, and postwar founder of a revolutionary new discipline: psychosomatic gynecology.

In a profile he did of Lacan, the writer Jérôme Peignot gave an amusing account of a dinner along the Eure river at the home of the Michel-Wolfromms in the 1960s. Hélène: a petite brunette, cheerful, warm, generous, a boozer and smoker. Her husband: a banker, older, rich, a bit of a snob, a bit gruff, an incorrigible womanizer. And that evening, a distinguished guest: Jacques Lacan. As expected, the “master” arrived late, then performed his show throughout dinner, dismissing his contradictions with great waves of his hand. A few days later, Hélène Michel-Wolfromm received a letter of thanks: “The charm of the place, your attentiveness and that of your guests allowed me to offer my best. Thus I would be greatly obliged if you would pay me the amount related to the evening, that is, the sum of six thousand francs. In anticipation of your prompt response, and with sincere affection, Jacques Lacan.”104

At ninety-two years old, Jérôme Peignot still remembered that dinner perfectly. On the other hand, he had forgotten if the check for six thousand francs had been “promptly” sent. Hélène preferred to smile at the foibles of the psychoanalyst, to whom she remained very close. While he was becoming the star of seminars, she became the great specialist in female sexuality, advocate for contraception, and cofounder of family planning. He regularly sent her patients suffering from sterility, frigidity, and lovesickness. From her revolutionary practice, all that remains is Cette chose-là, an extraordinarily modern and humane book published a few months after her death in 1969. Michel-Wolfromm died too soon to make a name for herself in the history of women’s liberation, where she deserves a place all her own.

In her book, she recounts in particular “the most vivid memory of a first foray into an obstetrics unit in 1936: … long talks with women having abortions. … They were scorned by the nurses, who also had abortions sometimes, but did it more carefully. In the unit, because of its sadistic director, the women were curetted awake, without anesthetics, in the false hope of deterring them from having this done again. Despite our efforts, before the era of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, many women died.” Doctor Wolfromm, who was just twenty-two years old, was the only one to linger at the bedsides of these victims, wipe their brows, worry about their suffering. “The story of those women obsessed me,” she wrote.105

Perhaps Dora was one of them.

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