Verviers, the sleeping city – Marie Carlens, Christelle Paignac (only in french)

Verviers was once one of Belgium’s wealthiest towns, at its peak at the end of the 19th century. Today, it is one of Belgium’s poorest towns with a population of over fifty thousand…
When Jean-Jacques Andrien conducted research between 1985 and 1988 to write the screenplay for his film Australia, released in 1989, he was convinced that the vast majority of those involved in the Verviers textile industry had failed to recognise the warning signs of its irreversible decline. His intuition was that they were victims of a denial of reality, a psychological defence mechanism developed by the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni.
In order to develop this idea, he turned to a psychiatrist and a psychologist-psychoanalyst, who tried to shed some theoretical light on the subject.

Only in french.