The Hysteric: Outline of a Figure [1 ed.] 0367552019, 9780367552015

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The Hysteric

Examining historical, clinical, and artistic material, in both written and visual form, this book traces the figure of the contemporary hysteric as she rebels against the impossible demands made upon her. Exploring five traits that commonly characterise the hysteric as an archetype – a specific body, mimetic abilities, a shroud of mystery, a propensity to disappear, and a particular relationship to voice – the authors shed light on what it means to be hysterical, as a form of rebellion and resistance. This is important reading for scholars of sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, and visual studies with interests in psychoanalysis, art, and the characterisation of mental illness. Eleanor Bowen is a visual artist and Associate Lecturer at the University of the Arts London, UK. Laura González is a performance artist and Professor and Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, UK.

Gender, Bodies and Transformation Series Editor: Meredith Jones, Brunel University London, UK

This series explores the intersection of two key themes in relation to scholarship on bodies: gender and transformation. Bodies are gendered via biology, culture, medicine and society, such that gender, so deeply and intimately connected to identity, is a crucial part of any thorough analysis of the body. At the same time, bodies are – and have always been – sites of transformation, whether through ‘natural’ processes such as pregnancy, illness and ageing, or the more eye-catching, ‘unnatural’ transformations of cosmetic surgery, violence, extreme bodybuilding or dieting, cross-species transplantation, elective amputation or tattooing. Interdisciplinary in scope and welcoming work from a range of approaches, including cultural and media studies, sociology, gender studies, feminist theory, phenomenology, queer studies and ethnography, Gender, Bodies and Transformation publishes scholarly examinations of contemporary cultural changes that are relevant to both gender and the transformation of bodies, whether in single bodies or between bodies. Also in the series Negotiating Thinness Online The Cultural Politics of Pro-anorexia Gemma Cobb Contentious Cities Design and the Gendered Production of Space Edited by Jess Berry, Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms and Gene Bawden Performing the Penis Phalluses in 21st Century Cultures Edited by Meredith Jones and Evelyn Callahan The Hysteric Outline of a Figure Eleanor Bowen and Laura González For more information about this series, please visit: https://www​.routledge​.com​/Gender​-Bodies​-and​-Transformation​/book​-series​/ ASHSER1393

The Hysteric

Outline of a Figure

Eleanor Bowen and Laura González

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Eleanor Bowen and Laura González The right of Eleanor Bowen and Laura González to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-55201-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-55202-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09240-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003092407 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Rosina, to Sharon. To Peggy, Betty, Meredith, and Mer. To our mothers, Pilar and Margaret. To those that awakened the hysteric within us.

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction: A history of hysteria (repli) References 15

1

Interlude 1

19

1 Body Image and figure  22 The crystal, the symptom  24 The definition of hysteria  27 What the body knows  35 The body of the other  41 References  42

21

2 Mimesis The doctors  46 Mimetic symptoms  50 Malingering 55 Photography as mimetic  63 References  70

46

3 Mystery The hysteric’s riddle  74 Lacan’s hysteric  77 What do you want from me?  85 Talking the hysteric  87 Case hystories 90 Writing the hysteric  94 References  97

74

viii Contents 4 Disappearance Reading the hysteric  102 Dora’s case  105 Fragments of analysis  109 A Case of Hysteria  114 The ontology of hysteria  118 Male hysteria  121 (Dis)appearance  124 References  125

101

5 Voice References 155

130

Interlude 2

160

6 Rebellion and persistence (envoi) References  174

162

Index

179

Acknowledgements

This book started with a conversation with Alison J Carr. We are immensely grateful for her positive words and her counsel. We would like to thank Meredith Jones and Neil Jordan at Routledge for their support and encouragement, for helping us to turn reviews to support our work, for allowing us to think and rethink, and for giving us a space in which writing a manuscript during a pandemic was made enjoyable. The Research and Knowledge Exchange department at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland was so supportive with their help in funding travel to Los Angeles for She Is Hysterical and to attend CARPA 7 online. But more importantly, we thank the exceptional people working there who, despite their own workloads, pandemic fatigue, and personal circumstances, offered words of encouragement throughout a process of writing that often felt like thick water. Especial thanks to Elaine Hook for her elegant finesse with words, her support, and her time, and to Neil Scott for questioning our patterns of thought. We extend gratitude to Johanna Braun and Elke Krasny for their conversations about the hysteric and our blindspots when tracing her outline. We offer warm thanks to the festivals that allowed us to try work and words – Acts Re-Acts at Wimbledon College, University of the Arts London; Glasgow Open House, Buzzcut, and Unfix in Glasgow – and to the Workroom for running an incredible residency programme and their willingness and courage to be led by creative art processes. The earliest seeds for this book started at the 2012 Making Sense of Madness conference (Oxford, Inter-disciplinary Press). There we delivered our first performative paper. The night before, we took many of the attendees to see Terry Johnson’s play Hysteria, featuring the late great Antony Sher as Sigmund Freud, at the Oxford Playhouse. We are grateful to the organisers and participants of that conference for their openness to see and hear, in our performed paratext, something slightly other than the accepted lecture form. We bow to the New Hysterics and the New Hystorians, many of whom we cite in the following pages, for continuing to reveal her mystery. Lastly, and more importantly, we thank each other. As you will see, we write together but separately, folding each other into our writing. This process of creation is one of constant trust and learning, something we have only found with each other. How lucky we are. When one of us is the river, the other is the riverbank.

Introduction A history of hysteria (repli)

We start by outlining the context in which we will place our hysteric figure. This is about the doctors and that with which the hysteric has to contend. A hysteric suffers from hysteria, a condition whose name is derived from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus, although the term is by no means exclusively applied to those possessing a womb. Yet it has been strongly associated with women, a link we explore throughout. The malady – as Elaine Showalter refers to it in her classic study (1985) – has a convoluted history since its first naming in Egyptian papyri (Veith, 1985), even though this origin is questioned (Binzer, 1997). Part of the vicissitudes comes from the fact that, as we will see in Chapter One, its definition is complex and contended. Hysteria is a neurosis – more on this in Chapter One – that involves physical symptoms in the body for which there is no physical cause. We centre our study from the nineteenth century onwards, aligning this with Jean-Martin Charcot’s reclassification of hysteria as a nervous disorder, thus turning away from the connection with the womb. However, we keep a seed of the earlier ancient and medieval recorded hysterics, which often relate to spirit possessions and witches in our writing. These are the figures that inform the rebel we see in the contemporary hysteric. Until Charcot’s time, the scientific paradigm of hysteria was mainly pathoanatomical. This meant that the disorder was caused by something in the body, a wandering womb or anatomical damage to the tissues of the brain, and was the position from the time of the papyri until around Theodore Meynert’s time as Professor of Psychiatry in Vienna. Meynert was Sigmund Freud’s teacher. With Charcot came the turn towards a neuro-physiological model, which understands that hysteria is caused by an inherited neuro-physiological condition predisposing the sufferer to form split-off states of consciousness or dissociations. When in such abnormal states of consciousness, symptoms can be formed by auto-hypnotic suggestion. But even at the time of Charcot, a new model began to form, a psychological understanding of hysteria seen as a condition characterised by dissociation of consciousness. It may be caused by traumatic stress or severe internal conflict. In this third understanding, we find doctors such as Hippolyte Bernheim or, later, Freud (Barrett, 2021). Charcot was a professor of anatomical pathology, and in 1882 he established the ground-breaking neurological clinic at the Salpêtrière hospital. When Paris DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-1

2 Introduction rounded up many undesirables in 1656, suffering women, including those with chronic or unidentified illnesses, were thrown into this former arsenal, which was turned into a charitable hospital (Foucault, 2006 [1961]: 48). Charcot wanted to develop the hospital into a research institution and its large population facilitated that. In the 1870s, he created a system for modern research which included detailed case histories followed over time and the training of many of his colleagues. He also developed visual imagery to accompany his research. This was enabled by the advent of photography and, as we will see in Chapter Two, shifted the medical gaze. Jonathan W Marshall writes, ‘the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1875–1880)’ – the archive of images Charcot created – is ‘a flip-book representation of performance itself’ (Marshall, 2016: 4), and upon this art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, who inspires the first two chapters of our book, also drew (2003). Many of the Salpêtrière patients died in the institution, so the doctors could conduct autopsies and link these to symptoms they observed. Thus, three kinds of evidence convinced Charcot that hysterical symptoms had a cause away from the body. First, no anatomical damage could be found in the brains of hysterical patients at autopsy. This was not conclusive in itself as it is always possible to argue that such damage was simply not detectable with the methods of the time. Second, the use of hypnosis, a treatment frequently used at the Salpêtrière at the time of Charcot, showed that hysterical symptoms could be produced and removed by hypnotic suggestion. But the last and third was the most decisive: careful and precise clinical observation showed that the pattern displayed by hysterics was quite different to that displayed by the symptoms of organic diseases of the nervous system (Schwartz, 1999: 42). With hysterics, there seemed to be an imagined distribution of the nerves in the body. Charcot not only had female patients at the Salpêtrière, with the help of whom he was able to classify the stages of la grande hysterie, the great hysterical attack, but he treated males too, for example for insurance claims, to ascertain whether their limb paralysis, although perfectly real, was organically caused or not. As Marshall writes, when referring to the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière of Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul Régnard: An initial shock or trauma generally brought on the patient’s first fits, and the case histories record a sorry history of largely working class subjects who survived animal attacks, industrial accidents, childhood encounters with corpses, as well as sexual assaults at the hands of employers and others. (Marshall, 2020: 71) Trauma created a separate, second, split-off state of consciousness, and any autosuggestion when in the split-off state continued when in their normal state. But Charcot also established that, apart from the trauma, an inherited neuro-physiological condition was necessary to make one vulnerable to the creation of a second consciousness, and thus predisposed to autosuggestion in this split-off state (Levin, 1978: 97). Nevertheless, Charcot’s radical view widened the understanding

Introduction  3 of who could develop symptoms without physical cause and brought hysteria closer to being recognised as part of the human condition. When Freud went to the Salpêtrière to study with Charcot, he was astounded by this work: Charcot, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the brain at the time, had established that symptoms of hysteria were not caused by brain damage. This reappearance of hysteria as ‘the characterisation of the nervous woman’, rather than a woman who had an unknown issue within her body, was also represented ‘over and against a figure understood as her opposite: the “savage” woman’ (Briggs, 2000: 249). Hysteria thus became a condition of the ‘overcivilised’. Charcot gave Freud the scientific focus on hysteria. But the Viennese doctor Joseph Breuer, who helped Freud set up his own practice, also shaped Freud’s understanding of hysteria. Breuer had treated the archetypal hysteric, Anna O – whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim – in 1882, before Freud went to Paris to study with Charcot. As can be imagined from the preceding description, Charcot viewed his patients as though they were specimens, and therefore it did not occur to him to listen to them. Breuer, however, who by all accounts was an empathetic figure, spent a long time listening to Anna O. Charcot’s work posited a degeneration of the nervous system in the hysteric, whereas Breuer described Anna O as a woman of strong character and penetrating intellect (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 21). This listening process, which Breuer undertook intuitively, gave rise to the therapeutic process of ‘chimney sweeping’, or the ‘talking cure’ as Anna O named it (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 30). Breuer discovered that, under hypnosis, as soon as Anna O remembered the scene giving rise to a particular symptom, the symptom vanished. We will look in more detail at Anna O and the features of the talking cure in Chapter Three, as we focus on the mystery of the hysteric. In 1893 Breuer and Freud published ‘On The Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication’ (1955 [1893]: 1–17), which shows where they advanced and differed from Charcot’s view of the hysteric. Charcot’s starting point was physical trauma, for example, an accident. Breuer and Freud thought hysteria concerned a form of psychological trauma, something frightening or disturbing expressed in physical symptoms. Charcot argues that there is a sequestering of a pathogenic idea in a special state of consciousness. Thus, a hysteric can go into a secondary state of consciousness through hypnosis and the doctor can then work on hypnotic counter-suggestion to resolve the symptom. For Freud and Breuer, this secondary state is the outcome of defence against trauma. In order to effect a cure – a problematic concept in relation to the hysteric, as we will see in Chapter Three – and to dispel the symptom, Freud and Breuer suggested that what was required was a re-living of the pathogenic event. They induced the patient to re-live that trauma and to express emotions, not simply to remember them. Breuer demonstrated through his work with Anna O that, for the hysteric, certain emotions cannot be expressed. Rather, they are lodged in the personality and expressed via the symptom. The hysteric is thus unaware of them, a state of unawareness referred to as la belle indifférence. The hysteric loses normal consciousness completely, which is why she becomes associated with a sense

4 Introduction of irrationality (see Chapter Two). This is in contrast with obsessional neurosis, which, involving excessive rationality, is the need to be in control. The cathartic method Breuer devised, which Anna O called the talking cure and later became psychoanalysis, would allow for the expression of the emotion and the release of the symptom. But for Charcot, Freud, and Breuer, at the root of hysteria was a split in the personality, a sense of dissociation. However, even as early as the time of the ‘Preliminary Communication’, Freud began to veer from both Charcot and Breuer in his understanding of hysteria. He began to place emphasis on sexuality, and Breuer did not accept this. In a way, Freud reversed Charcot’s approach which repudiated the idea that hysteria is rooted in sexuality and gender, in favour of a modern scientific study. In the ‘Preliminary Communication’, Freud and Breuer write that the problem of hysterics was that their feelings were not sufficiently expressed at the time of trauma, not sufficiently ‘abreacted’ (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 10). The reasons underlying this became the point at which Freud and Breuer would differ. For Breuer, this was due to the psychical state of the patient: trauma occurred when the hysteric is in an abnormal state of consciousness, a second or ‘twilight state’ (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]). For Freud, either the nature of the trauma excluded a reaction, the social circumstances made it impossible to react, or there was something the hysteric wanted to forget. He concluded that sexuality leads the patient to reject these feelings. Freud’s view was that the splitting of consciousness was an act of will on the part of the hysteric. This was to push an experience out of consciousness, but the result was a split of consciousness. He called this defence hysteria (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 167). When Freud and Breuer started drifting apart due to their disagreement over sexuality and hysteria, Freud became closer to Wilhelm Fliess, an ears, nose, and throat doctor who shared Freud’s interests and with whom he held a correspondence. It was Fliess who referred Miss Lucy R, one of his cases in Studies on Hysteria, to Freud (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 106–124). Freud was still using hypnosis in his therapy, but he was already moving away from it, as he was dissatisfied with the results – it did not work with many patients. He did not treat Lucy R with it but induced in her a relaxed state where he could have a mild degree of influence. This was the pressure technique. With her, he discovered that behind every symptom there is a traumatic event and that the conflict of her affect makes a scene traumatic. What was the justification for the conversion that occurred? Some idea was intentionally repressed and excluded from associative modification, from consciousness. With Katerina, his next case (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 125–134), he understood that traumas can be activated retrospectively and that traumas in hysteria were always sexual. This was the origin of his seduction theory, his first full theory of hysteria and the first of his two theories of neurosis, formulated in 1895 and published in 1896 (Freud, 1962 [1896]). In the seduction theory, neurotic symptoms may be related either to infantile sexual fantasies or to memories of real scenes of sexual abuse. In either case, the ultimate cause of the neurosis suffered by the adult lies in actual sexual abuse in early childhood. The sexual or emotional exploitation of the child by adults for

Introduction  5 their own gratification has dreadful, often life-long consequences for the child, preventing its development into a fully healthy adult. In order to effect a cure, the physician and the patient work back through a series of scenes to early childhood. This was an important step forward for Freud, as he was confident that, in premature sexual experience, he discovered the source, the ultimate cause of hysteria. The seduction theory answered many questions. The tracing back of psychical traumas often led to mild experiences. To explain the abreaction, Breuer linked this to the state of consciousness leading to the split, rather than the content of the trauma. But Freud was not satisfied with this because for him the splitting comes as an act of defence. Here, the seduction theory offered an immediate explanation: sexual experiences in puberty might be relatively trivial but hysterics suffered sexual trauma in early childhood so any sexual experience would activate this, retrospectively. Hysterics defend themselves against that. For Freud, people react with defence to sexual experiences, as they have a unique distressing power and ability. He also highlighted how sexual experiences in childhood are not understood, something that would direct his later work. Despite how complete the seduction theory felt, Freud controversially abandoned it in what has been seen by many as turning his back on the victims of sexual abuse (Masson, 1985). The reason for Freud’s abandonment is that the seduction theory could never be proved. He could not obtain objective confirmation of the seduction through witnesses and he did not obtain a significant success rate with his therapy (Barrett, 2021). The seduction theory claims that all cases of hysteria are rooted in infantile sexual abuse but, in reality, it is just one of the factors that result in neuroses in adulthood. The problem is not the abandonment itself but what Freud replaced it with, as we will see in Chapter Four when we discuss Dora’s case. His second, and mature, theory of the neuroses is the Oedipal theory. In this, neurosis results when infantile sexual wishes and impulses remain powerfully active in the adult but are repressed by the demands of conscience. The neurotic is fixated erotically on the important figures of their early childhood. The child’s own sexual wishes are the cause of their neurotic illness in adulthood. The criticism of Freud’s Oedipal theory is that it is essentially a child-blaming theory (Barrett, 2021). Whereas the seduction theory provided a traumatic paradigm based on Breuer’s model, the Oedipal theory of hysteria took on a developmental paradigm: the ultimate cause of neurosis is a fixation in development occurring in the early stage. Yet, the seduction theory could be seen as part of a developmental model if the fixation was attributed to trauma, as this model just implies that factors other than abuse cause neuroses. Yet, Freud did not integrate the theories and instead opposed them to each other. He went as far as disavowing the seduction theory, alluding to it as a terrible mistake that almost ruined his work in ‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’ (1957 [1914]: 17–18) and ‘An Autobiographical Study’(1959 [1925]: 33–35), texts that reconstruct Freud, but not his patients. He had advocated for the seduction theory so confidently that he was open to attack for the unreliability of his clinical methods so, with the Oedipal theory, he took the emphasis away from these and into the patients’ stories. As we will see in Chapter Four, ‘Fragment

6 Introduction of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1953 [1905]), his Dora case, illustrates the Oedipal theory and is very different from the earlier hysteria cases – Miss Lucy R and Katerina, for example – which show very sensitive identification. In Dora, seven years later, the sensitivity is overlaid by his new theory into which he wants to fit her. He wants her to be the truth of the Oedipal theory (Barrett, 2021). Freud’s thinking radically changed when he abandoned the seduction theory and by extension, abandoned trauma, making the hysteric symptom an expression of wishes in the Oedipal model. In the 1920s, he had a fundamental rethink of his theory in the light of shell shock, or what he called the war neurosis, and was forced again to recognise the importance of trauma (Freud, 1955 [1920]: 32–33). Even though shell shock raised the notoriety of psychoanalysis as a therapy, Freud never theorised it or worked further on trauma. That was left to Bessel Van der Kolk (2015) and Elaine Showalter (1997), among others. After Freud, the next big leap in the thinking of hysteria was arguably taken by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in his conceptualisation of the discourse of the hysteric. We will explore this in detail in Chapter Three. Followers of Lacan, including Slavoj Žižek, have then applied his thinking to popular culture. Recently, new books have been published on the subject of hysteria in culture (Braun, 2020; Braun, 2021; Cole, 2021; Schuilenburg, 2021) and this is just a small example of current scholarship, or what Johanna Braun calls the ‘New Hystorians’ (2020: 15). The fascination with hysterics is something that can be traced throughout the history of consulting rooms, exhibition spaces, and stages: such authors as Gustave Flaubert, who insisted on calling himself a hysteric, and from the surrealist poets Aragon and Breton, who praised hysteria for being the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century – contemporary popular culture celebrities have embraced this seductive and deceptive manner of self-performance. (Bronfren, 1998: xi–xii) The hysteric continues to demand our attention to this day, despite the disappearance of the condition from diagnostic manuals, which we will consider in Chapter Four. However, the expansion of the term created in the adoption of the hysteric by the arts has produced ‘concept creep’, a ‘relentless colloquialization of an utterly complicated term’ (Zechner, 2020: 88) with the consequence that it is applied to situations and contexts less severe than those intended by the original medical term. Although not exclusively feminine, hysteria as a condition is, and has been strongly associated with, women and women’s sexuality. As stated earlier, the name itself refers to the female reproductive organ, the womb, which, in the early stages of hysteria’s history, was imagined as though wandering around the woman’s body. The womb is an organ of transition in which things grow, but from which things are eventually ejected. Charcot tried hard to disassociate the hysteric from the womb, but the pull was too strong. Pierre Janet acknowledges that:

Introduction  7 The word ‘hysteria’ should be preserved, although its primitive meaning has much changed. It would be very difficult to modify it nowadays, and, truly, it has so grand and so beautiful a history that it would be painful to give it up. However, since every epoch has given to it a different meaning, let us try to find out what meaning it has today. (Janet, 1901: 527) There are significant blindspots in the historical and current thinking on the hysteric, which, even if they are not within the scope of this book, are worth raising. They relate to wider views of gender, race, and class: The refusal to associate black women with hysteria and neurasthenia further stigmatized black bodies. […] Complexly bound with issues of gender, class, and race, the process of diagnosing hysteria was simultaneously an authoritative demonstration of clinical control and a confusing, unregulated act that could be either helpful or damaging for those experiencing illness. (Delchamps, 2020: 109) The history of the hysteric and her destiny ‘has been shaped in part by the projected fears, fantasies and curiosities of those who study it’ (Evans, 1991: 2), which of course includes us. We hope, in time, to address some of those blindspots as our thinking evolves. For women to write about hysteria is challenging. Elaine Showalter gives a chilling reflection on the reception of her monograph Hystories, which involved audience threats and press hostility. ‘Writing Hystories taught me that it is much safer and calmer to write about hysteria in Charcot, Freud, and Ibsen’ (Showalter, 2020: 32). However, we do not wish to do that, and to write about an imperfectly understood figure would be reckless, so we are starting here with simply an outline. We aim to trace rather than paint her picture or make an in-depth analysis of the hysteric form. However, through indexing hysteria and its traits, we hope to see beyond the medicalisation and beyond concept creep. The hysteric and her history are controversial, convoluted, and confusing. Moustapha Safouan observes that ‘wherever the hysteric goes, she brings war with her’ (Safouan, 1980: 59). In Chapter Two, we look at potential interpretations of this statement: the hysteric as malingerer, troublemaker. The aim of this book, however, is to welcome the war that the hysteric brings, as with this figure comes change. Julia Borossa places hysteria between handicap and empowerment, the flip side of feminism and the result of patriarchal oppression, between the pathological effect of patriarchy and its subversion. This is primarily because of the ambiguity and contradiction of the hysteric’s position. Borossa writes: ‘Hysterical symptoms are caused by the contradiction between two impulses: a wanting which accepts no limits, and a desire to conform to the limits imposed by society’ (2001: 41). Throughout this book, we question the clinical disappearance of hysteria and put forward our central idea that her reappearance in culture is as a figure of resistance, precisely because of this

8 Introduction particular impasse in which she finds herself. She does not try to overthrow but to expand the boundaries of what we know. We are not the first ones to see ‘the inherent intelligence of the psychoanalytic symptom’ of hysteria (Grose, 2020: 14): It is here that the hysteric appears on the scene with what Lacan calls her typical love of truth. The role of hysteria in undermining social relations has been common knowledge for a long time. [Lucien] Israël remarks that it is possible to recognise hysteria as the common thread in many different revolutionary movements. The psychiatrist knows the commotion one hysterical patient can cause in an entire ward. (Verhaeghe, 1999: 202) Even the fact that the hysteric is sick is open to questioning and has received no clear answer (Hunter, 1983: 485), just as many of the conditions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the DSM – are objectionable at worst and at best simply strong character traits, showing how much of this is about power and fashion, and not just about science or alleviating human suffering (Grose, 2020: 13). As Eli Clare argues, ‘care’ – and cure – are ‘laced with violence, which [prompts] resistance, which in turn [is] met with more violence, all of it sustained by diagnosis’ (Clare, 2017: 47); Luce Irigaray reminds us in a section of Speculum of the Other Woman titled ‘That Necessary Remainder: Hysteria’ that ‘Hysteria is all she has left’ (1985: 71). In placing her as a figure of resistance and rebellion, we question the idea that passivity is a key characteristic of the hysteric (Krohn, 1978). She is not passive, but caught in a conflict, in an impasse. Why is the hysteric, as a figure symptomatic of societal conditions, still not exhausted, and who benefits from her persistence? Showalter’s Hystories is precisely about the persistence of hysteria as a recognisable etiological complex even after its abandonment as a diagnostic label (Marshall, 2020). As we will see, this is in part rooted in what Johanna Braun terms ‘the hysteric’s ongoing highly politically relevant performance repertoire’ (Braun, 2020: 22). We will unravel this throughout the book. The main intellectual territory of our work is psychoanalytic praxis, in which the traditional background of hysteria lies. We also address more recent post-structural concerns about performativity and becomings, referencing Deleuze’s fold and the writings of Henri Bergson, Jean-François Lyotard, and Rosi Braidotti. While historical examples of the hysteric’s imagery tend to be by male artists (see the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière), the majority of the works we draw on are by women, including Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego, Francesca Woodman, Pina Bausch, La Ribot, Victoria Glendinning, Sam Taylor-Johnson (Sam Taylor-Wood), Virginia Woolf, Pipilotti Rist, Claire Pajaczkowska, and Sharon Kivland. Such a list counteracts the historic, clinicotheoretical weight of males in the position of doctors, and thus of power. It brings women – within ‘a masculine signifying system’ which, for Diane Price Herndl, means visible but without a representation of the self – to the fore:

Introduction  9 Strangely enough, despite this dangerous system, most women manage to accept the dual role of subject/object within the symbolic. As is often true of psychoanalytic theory, it is much clearer why some become ill than why the majority do not. Somehow, for the ‘normal’ woman, this lack of representations never comes to much of a crisis. Femininity is assumed as something of a masquerade within the symbolic system; the ‘normal’ woman takes up her place without embodying it. (Price Herndl, 1988: 61) Imagining the form of our writing as a repli (withdrawal or fold), we position ourselves on a kind of battlefield, embodying that foldedness which we hope will open ways for the hysteric to appear. *** This book is not about hysteria. It is about the hysteric. Her figure. We are not considering portraiture, for she distances herself from our view. We do not gaze, but rather glance, and the figure we see is an outline, maybe a blur as she exits our frame. What we glimpse is the space she occupies, an inscription of the present. We do this in part by considering her as an artwork, or rather, a movement of becoming, evident in the works of art we discuss and the internal dialogue we have within ourselves. Here the artist and artwork are self-reflexive and interactive. Through long exposure and blurring, she folds and doubles. She repeats, mimics, and traces. She creates spatial fields and pockets, submitting these to frames, revealing to herself her own returned glance and, she imagines, that of unknown beholders. Acting out (in) space, she acts space out. The text we offer here is also not an analysis. We do not offer data, answers, or unravel mystery, ‘mystery’ being a hysteric trait explored in Chapter Three. Instead, we present and unpack aspects of an ambiguous and multiplicitous figure. We do not reveal truth. Instead, we interrogate her self and her role in contemporary culture. A look at newspapers or media on any given day can demonstrate that hysteria is still around us, in its individual or collective expression as mass hysteria. Our writing is in some respects like drawing. In parts, it traces; in parts, it creates a collage as diverse thoughts are joined, severed, and juxtaposed. It assembles and positions. It is additive, reductive, repetitive, argumentative, ruptured, and interrupted. In the making, it intends to be formally rigorous and meticulously built, although this can only be apparent in the reading. The drawing we make is one of those folded-over ones, so we cannot (or should not) see what has just been or what comes next. We operate in the present, the surface on which we find ourselves at the time. The writing in this book is fictocritical and embodied. Fictocriticism, according to Anna Gibbs, enacts a structure that ‘uses fictional and poetic strategies

10 Introduction to stage theoretical questions and … reads theoretical texts in any discipline in the light of their rhetorical strategies and figures’ (Gibbs, 2003). For her, fictocriticism is a form of resistance, while at the same time a way to make and critique. It is ‘a way of writing for which there is no blueprint and which must be constantly invented anew in the face of the singular problems that arise in the course of engagement with what is researched’ (Gibbs, 2005). She outlines the main characteristics of this mode of writing in an article titled ‘Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences’ (2005). Fictocriticism mixes registers and mimics genres. It is performative. It is multidisciplinary and methodologically impure. It is singular and tactical, a response to a specific set of problems. It is haunted writing – after Avital Ronell – which Gibbs relates to many texts we will encounter in the following pages, including those of Sigmund Freud (Gibbs, 2003). And, as the voices of the dead have a particular part to play, this writing can be discordant, dissonant, and often revealing. We will see how these attributes typically characterise the hysteric figure. The form has pitfalls, of course, which we, the writers, must ‘offset by a commitment to attention, openness and reflexivity about questions of the politics of poiesis’ (Gibbs, 2005). The process of constructing a fictocritical text must be self-critical and self-reflexive as well as intervene actively in the field in which it is located. We have sought not only to cite but to make use of our sources. To focus as much on the saying as on what we say – a characteristic of fictocriticism – we investigate a specific form of writing. Through words, we create a folded structure which we imagine as a repli, a French word meaning fold. We crafted this book initially by means of dialogue. Instead of answering each other’s questions and those posed by the hysteric, we folded these questions into the structure, and in this way ‘plied’ them again. A repli is reminiscent of the Victorian parlour game exquisite corpse, a drawing game of visual consequences in which players (with some kind of a body in mind) continue the drawing guided only by the fragment left visible. In so doing, we revisit, perform, or form previous work of ours, which itself performs a re-visiting of our initial dialogue on hysteria. ‘The hysteric as mad: unfolding an exquisite corpse’ was first delivered at the conference Making Sense of Madness in Oxford in 2012 and later published in an e-book titled Beyond These Walls: Confronting Madness in Society, Literature and Art (Bowen and González, 2013). Here we aim to create a non-linear structure within the linear construct of our argument, much as the hysteric responds within the linear narrative of expertise or the knowledge of doctors, to rebel and disturb, not seeking answers but revealing questions. Our repli has all the characteristics of the fictocritical form and, as we have found, the hysterical form. First, in its haunted nature, our writing is full of echoes, repetitions, and citations, which are performed – re-cited – even when referenced, in order not to reproduce what is established and has power, but ‘to do something differently, to undo something, to make a difference’ (Gibbs, 2005), through simulation, dissimulation, mimicry (as we will see in the following), and ventriloquism. Secondly, our writing is interrupted, digressing, and wandering – like the womb of the hysteric – détourned, ‘the turning around or undoing of something

Introduction  11 by turning it on itself’ (Gibbs, 2005). In short, it is folded. This, as Anna Gibbs mentions in relation to Luce Irigaray, is to undo the classical references we repeat – Freud, Lacan, Didi-Huberman – from the inside, interrupting [it] not only with comments and asides, but above all with questions, which come to form the basis of an interrogative mode of writing which aims to open up spaces of debate rather than to close them down with assertions. (Gibbs, 2005) In fact, Jacques Lacan, who is at the core of Chapter Three on mystery, was playful with his language and, through form – puns, alliterations, double entendres – allowed himself to be derailed by his own language. This produced beautiful accidental discoveries in his work. His own form of writing shaped his thought. Thirdly, like the hysteric symptom, our writing is fragmented, as this enables the creation of commentary from juxtaposition and facilitates the formation of relations between things that previously had none. It allows for gaps and discontinuities, and for the use of silence. One might think of it as a verbal form of montage. (Gibbs, 2005) For us, as visual artists, instead of a montage of filmic quality, our writing is a collage, a form of making favoured by, amongst others, cubist painters and surrealist artists (visual and literary), and anyone interested in structures of displacement and juxtaposition and the implications of perspectival difference. Collage is an ancient form involving imagery from various sources which is detached, torn, cut, pierced, and rearranged by superimposition, juxtaposition, assemblage, and other means. Fourth, having learned from the hysteric – see Chapters Two and Five – we use what Anna Gibbs calls mimicry, which we refer to as mimesis. When relating to voice, it also shows as ventriloquism. According to Roger Caillois, on whom both Lacan and Gibbs draw, mimicry is a disturbance in the relationship of an organism to its environment and to space. It is a form of collage representing something within its context, in which the junctures can be smooth or rough, seamless or abrupt – thus demonstrating the interrelatedness and interdependence of everything. We don’t want to use this as a disclaimer, but failure is, according to Gibbs, inherent in mimicry: ‘the very success of mimicry lies in its failure, for out of failure comes unanticipated innovation’ (Gibbs, 2005). The mimetic impulse we have as human beings is what enables us to perceive correspondences and, in order to allow the imagination to find these links, we watch and listen to the hysteric, miming her. This is the critical aspect of fictocriticism, and at the same time ‘the collapse of critical distance’ (Gibbs, 2005). When discussing the work of Laleen Jayamanne (2001), Gibbs encapsulates very well what mimesis, mime, and mimicry can do:

12 Introduction She attempts a kind of writing about film which mimes the original ‘in a new modality’, so that the ‘double that emerges is not a copy or an imitation of the object, but a mimetic double of it’. This implies that an excess or difference is produced which contributes something new to the work discussed. In Adorno's words, what the writer produces is ‘an exact fantasy’. (Gibbs, 2005) Questions of exactitude do indeed underpin our fantasy, which, as the fifth and last category of fictocriticism acknowledges, manifests as writing that is anchored in the body. Thoughts and ideas are important, but only as equals with the knowledge we gather through our senses and emotions. These often lead us to our ideas, correspondences between ideas, miming abilities, and the form these will take in words. Like the hysteric, we start with the body. It all takes place in this embodiment. ‘It allows us to find a place in the world, or in words, rather than being, simply, subjected to it, or them’ (Gibbs, 2005). Our embodiment identifies as female and we take this as our epistemological starting point. All the fictocritical strategies connect to the hysteric but the last two, mimesis and body, are two of the five key traits we will develop into chapters. In our attempt to unmask what is thought of as universal by showing possibilities of thinking, seeing, writing, and feeling otherwise, our process has led us to develop an alert attention to the object and to the affects and sensations it produces in her, sharp observation, detailed and accurate description, and a capacity for acts of imagination – all predicated on a wide-ranging knowledge of the various disciplinary, generic or discursive territories inhabited by the object, without it ever completely belonging to any of them. (Gibbs, 2005) Our home space is in the visual and performing arts, but through our process, we have engaged with psychoanalysis, art history, post-structural thought, feminism, medical humanities, clinical manuscripts, and the various manifestations of hysteria around us, in particular as the #MeToo movement and covid-19 crisis developed. Yet we keep returning home. As we fold our writing into a fictocritical repli, we connect it to an image, at the same time producing an image through our writing. This reliance on the visual is something we see as intrinsic to the hysteric, as we will explore in the first chapter. Elisabeth Bronfen writes, ‘Art historians and literary scholars such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Sander Gilman’ – whom we will discuss – ‘have emphasized the issue of visualization in medical representations of this ailment’ (1998: xi). As we are engaged in constructing visual work, we write as artists and also as scholars and researchers. We perhaps oppose the writing we do to that of the doctors of the hysterics, even if, with Jean-Martin Charcot, the boundary between hospital and theatre was blurred. At that time, the ‘relationship between theatre and medicine was paradoxical – one might say

Introduction  13 dialectical – not only because theatre and medicine are usually seen as discrete practices’ (Marshall, 2016: 3). Even Freud’s writing has been likened to Victorian and detective novels. We will explore these issues throughout the book. In the following chapters, we trace the complex path of this diagnosis with reference to Andrew Scull’s biography of hysteria (2009). Known since Egyptian times, when a papyrus recorded an illness in which the womb wandered in the woman’s body, we explore the pathology before Charcot (Veitz), to continue with his périodes and his tenure at the Salpêtrière (Charcot, 1881; Hustvedt, 2011; Evans, 1991). We then study Freud – Charcot’s pupil – Breuer, and the birth of psychoanalysis (Freud and Breuer, 1974; Nasio, 1998). Moving on to more philosophical ground, Jacques Lacan’s theory of the discourse of the hysteric (one of his four discourses) will enable us to engage with the question of what the hysteric knows, and how she knows, something Lacan’s follower Slavoj Žižek has also conceptualised, for example, in his 2014 book The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. In addition, we examine the clinical, cultural, and historical accounts of Mark Micale (1990, 1993, 1995, 2008), Sander Gilman (1993), Christopher Bollas (2000), and Lisa Appignanesi (2009) and consider contemporary hysteria, looking at Jon Stone’s work on its disappearance from medical manuals (2008) and Anouchka Grose’s study of hysteria in the contemporary clinic (2016, 2020). Outlining the five traits delineating the figure of the hysteric, we challenge traditional perceptions such as Victorian understandings of the hysteric and examine issues addressed by feminist and post-structural writers (Luce Irigaray, Juliet Mitchell, Hélène Cixous, Jean-François Lyotard, Roland Barthes, and others). We make a case for its continued relevance in art and literature, re-emerging as a form of resistance and rebellion in cultural forms (Kahane, 1995; Showalter, 1997). In our engagement with the hysteric, through the voice of the doctor, the artworks, novels, films, performances, and other cultural manifestations, we have identified five constant traits, each of which we develop as a chapter. These are body, mimesis, mystery, disappearance, and voice. These traits are the key characteristics of this disappearing/appearing hysteric, and their purpose is to help us identify hysteria in the artworks around us. In the first chapter on the hysteric trait of embodiment (body), we explore how psychological trauma manifests in the body of the hysteric and how this anchors her in performance. We examine the problem of the definition of hysteria as a condition and look at the image of the hysteric, the most common manifestation of which is the arch of hysteria, at least during a particular historical period. We put forward the argument that the body of the hysteric knows something but that knowledge is not discernible, understandable, or translatable, and we link her body to the body of the other – perhaps all of ourselves? Within this context, we reference the works of Francesca Woodman, Paula Rego, Louise Bourgeois, Pina Bausch, and Sam Taylor-Johnson. Chapter Two, on mimesis, examines the capacity to mutate the characteristics of hysterical symptoms, and how this has been taken by those in proximity to the hysteric. For this, we study the different conceptions of hysteria and its cure, as advanced by Charcot, Freud, and Jung in particular. Our image for this chapter is

14 Introduction the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, the photographic and drawing archive created by Charcot. We make the case that the technique of photography itself is mimetic and had a part to play in the development of hysterical symptoms. We turn to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan for Chapter Three, which circles around the mystery of the hysteric. We look at her riddle, and through Lacan’s mathematical equation called the discourse of the hysteric, we unpack what Che vuoi? – What do you want from me? – the question he attributed to her, means and whom she is asking. We explore Freud’s idea of the talking cure, what it means when the hysteric speaks and also when she is written into case histories. We ground our discussion through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The Yellow Wallpaper and return to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film Hysteria. Chapter Four questions the disappearance of hysteria as a medical diagnosis by examining the case of Dora, or Ida Bauer, who disappeared from her treatment with Sigmund Freud. Dora is his most famous case history, even though it is only a fragment of writing. We consider what it means to read a case and, outlining some of the details and recent scholarship around Dora, we question Freud’s role within it. Our visual foundations for this section come from Sharon Kivland’s artistic re-writing of Dora in A Case of Hysteria, the 1979 film Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity, directed by Claire Pajaczkowska, Anthony McCall, and Andrew Tyndall, and echoes of The Yellow Wallpaper from the previous chapter. We finish our writing by approaching an elusive subject, that of male hysteria. Going more deeply into our fictocritical writing in the fifth and last chapter, we explore voice and vocalisation in all its manifestations and suppressions. Here we come back to Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits, seeing them alongside Victoria Glendinning’s written portrayal of her aunt Winnie Seebohm, a student who died of asthma in 1895. These five chapters progress from the supposedly concrete body to the supposedly abstract voice, but in fact, it could be said that it is the other way around. From body to voice, we go from general to most particular. In this book we perform a lay analysis, as Grose puts it, ‘clinical psychoanalysis performed by someone who isn’t a medical doctor’ (Grose, 2020: 11). This is something that Freud himself encouraged (1959 [1926]), assuming that a lay person might be better placed than a psychoanalyst to respond to accounts of human suffering. As we only pose questions around the hysteric, we do not have a conclusion or closure. Instead, we offer an envoi, a send-off or a re-opening of new territory, a new, provisional, and tentative folding for the ideas developed in the course of this book. We reflect on the implications, extensions, and challenges of the book’s concluding chapter on voice, the most fictocritical of our chapters. If the reader would like a conclusion, then this chapter could act as one. In the envoi, we look at the hysteric through concepts of rebellion, resistance, persistence, and transformation. These four notions, together with others – for example, wandering, as Sander Gilman points out (1993) – are some we could have chosen as traits. Perhaps they will be marks on the hysteric’s body, as we get closer to her.

Introduction  15 But from our vantage point, we orient ourselves with the five we can see clearly from where we are. The suffering of the hysteric, the suffering of no self-representation, is sisterly suffering. We go forward into the secreting fold.

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Introduction  17 Janet, Pierre (1901) The Mental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental Accidents. New York: Putnam. Jayamanne, Laleen (2001) Towards the Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis (Arts and Politics of the Everyday). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kahane, Claire (1995) Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Krohn, Alan (1978) Hysteria: The Elusive Neurosis. New York: International Universities Press. Levin, Kenneth (1978) Freud’s Early Theory of the Neuroses. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburg Press. Marshall, Jonathan W (2016) Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marshall, Jonathan W (2020) ‘Traumatic Dances Of “The Non-Self”. Bodily Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited By Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 61–83. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.7 Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff (1985) The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. London: Penguin. Micale, Mark S (1990) ‘Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: Gender, Mental Science, and Medical Diagnosis in Late Nineteenth-Century France’. Medical History, 34. 363–411. Micale, Mark S (1993) ‘On the “Disappearance” of Hysteria: A Study in the Clinical Deconstruction of a Diagnosis’. Isis, 84.3 (Sept.). 496–526. Micale, Mark S (1995) Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9780691194486 Micale, Mark S (2008) Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Price Herndl, Diane (1988) ‘The Writing Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna O, and “Hysterical” Writing’. NWSA Journal, 1.1 (Autumn). 52–74. Safouan, Moustapha (1980) ‘In Praise of Hysteria’. Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Edited and translated by Stuart Schneiderman. London: Yale University Press. 55–60. Schuilenburg, Marc (2021) Hysteria. Crime, Media, and Politics. London: Routledge. https://doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9781003035022 Schwartz, Joseph (1999) Cassandra’s Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis in Europe and America. London: Allen Lane. Showalter, Elaine (1985) The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon Books. Showalter, Elaine (1997) Hystories. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Showalter, Elaine (2020) ‘Hystories Revisited. Hysterical Epidemics and Social Media’. Performing Hysteria. Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited By Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 27–37. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​ .ctv18dvt2d.5 Van der Kolk, Bessel (2015) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. London: Penguin.

18 Introduction Veith, Ilza (1965) Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Verhaeghe, Paul (1999) Does the Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan's Feminine. Translated by Marc du Ry. New York: Other Press. Zechner, Dominik (2020) ‘The Phantom Erection: Freud’s Dora and Hysteria’s Unreadabilities’. Performing Hysteria. Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 87–101. https:// doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.8 Žižek, Slavoj (2014) The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton. Cambridge: Polity Press.



Interlude 0.1 Eleanor Bowen, ‘Blueprint for a Ghost i’, silver print photograph, 2002. DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-2

Interlude 0.2 Laura González, ‘Double’, silver print photograph, 1999.

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1

Body

This chapter introduces the first trait of the hysterical figure: her relation to her own body, considering how this manifests in specific works of art, through clinical materials, and in contemporary culture. Mapping the body against endless descriptions of the hysterical symptom has rendered hysteria’s definition problematic, and out of this the arc de cercle emerges as a key image: A tendency towards spasmodic fluctuations which leap from extreme contraction (clonic gesture) versus muscular extension (tonic, tetanic, opisthotonic). These oscillations between clonic and tonic states are unevenly distributed throughout the body, generating asymmetry, facial grimaces, and the distortion of lines, limbs, and poses. There is consequently a tendency towards twisting. These distortions often elicit comparisons with animals and non-human beings. Between the clonic and the tonic, the body is at times supine and relaxed. (Marshall, 2020: 68) This image of a body is itinerant and dancing, traversing countries and centuries of hysterical performance practices (Braun, 2020: 19). However, like all the contortions, gestures, and poses of hysteria, the arc is unable to reveal what the hysteric’s body knows, even if doctors tried to document and categorise the body’s choreography in a ‘hysteriform archive’ (Marshall, 2020: 63) constituting a set of bodily gestures and actions that recur across history, crossing from early modern demonical possession, exorcism, and religious ecstasy to medical studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in order subsequently to become a significant resource for international performing artists in the last two centuries. (Braun, 2020: 19) Neither can it tell us how the hysteric links her body to that of the other, or how hysteria makes use of theatre and performance. How can we look at the hysteric’s body and, when we look, do we know what it is we see? DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-3

22 Body We start with the understanding that such knowledge can’t teach us anything if we’re looking in the wrong places, for example, documentation, categorisation, or archive. We learn nothing from the hysterical arched body unless we look elsewhere. Somatised knowledge is legible less in the spectacular grand gesture, such as the arc, than in, perhaps more authentically, small movements of for example pressure, gesture, repetition, pattern, and sound. These are movements of intuition and apprehension, not subject to the gaze. In that, such small movements can denote the body/self, as understood for example by such writers and artists as Virginia Woolf, Sam Taylor-Johnson (Sam Taylor-Wood), Paula Rego, Francesca Woodman, and Samuel Beckett. These movements, albeit articulate, do not constitute a preconceived or stable figure, but rather a figure apprehended from within. Here we are looking at the representation of a seeing that counters the ‘common sense’ gaze (Bryson, 1983), one that can be described as subversive, random, disorderly (Bryson 1983: 93), perhaps a figure whose frequently doubled, twisted, or disappearing position manifests a pull between positions – a turning away, a fading, a sinking into inwardness. Glance. Tracing. Such a figure we consider manifest in certain contemporary works, not necessarily those for whom the medical term ‘hysteria’ has been applied, our point being that the principles discussed here can be thought relevant in terms of contemporary experience, whereas for many in the past such experience was medically or mythologically othered as hysteria.

Image and figure ‘On Being an Angel’ is a black-and-white photograph by the young American artist Francesca Woodman (1958–1981). If you search for it, you are likely to see a version of the self-portrait in which her eyes are close to the top of the image and her mouth is closed. I am thinking of the lesser-known version, taken in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1976 (Woodman, 2015) a year before the perhaps more well-known version. In this one, her open mouth is near the bottom of the photograph, a folded umbrella appears on the right-hand side and the juncture between the wall and the floor in the space depicted runs parallel to the top of the image. She is in a backward bend, much like Régnard’s cataleptic image of Augustine in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (DidiHuberman, 2003: 195), the woman held by the physician Jean-Martin Charcot in the painting by André Brouillet, Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière [1887]), or the most iconic pose of hysteria, the arc de cercle, an extended backward arch representing the full hystero-epileptic attack, (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 267). The hysteric’s body is never presented straight on; it is always twisted, contracted, jolted, shaking, rigid, abandoned, cramped, jumping, or bending backwards. It is ‘divided, fractured, and barely legible’ (Marshall, 2020: 62). To write of the hysteric’s body is to write of the symptom itself. The body is the symptom, the state and the image of hysteria, all at once. ‘Every organ of the hysterical body had its own pain’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 177), wounded somehow, suffering,

Body  23 feeling too much or too little, and this body was often co-opted by doctors who, fascinated by the spectacle, mapped and divided it. So the body of the hysteric became an experimental surface for symptoms. ‘The nosographical category of hysteria dates back to ancient Greek medicine, which conceived of it as a female disease caused by the womb wandering throughout the body (in Greek hysteron means womb)’ (Evans, 1996: 79). The Greek word hystérikè can be translated as ‘she who is always delayed, she who is intermittent’ (Bronfen, 1998: 230) – intermittent, perhaps, in relation to her body. Dylan Evans reminds us that Lacan uses the idea of the fragmented body to explain certain typical symptoms of hysteria. When a hysterical paralysis affects a limb, it does not respect the physiological structure of the nervous system, but instead reflects the way the body is divided up by an ‘imaginary anatomy’. (1996: 68) This anatomy ‘bears no relation to the real structure of the nervous system’ (Evans, 1996: 79). ‘But this form turns out to be tangible even at the organic level, in the lines of “fragilization” that define the hysteric’s fantasmatic anatomy, which is manifested in schizoid and spasmodic symptoms’ (Lacan, 2006 [1966]: 78). Francesca Woodman is one of several contemporary artists for whom the body/ self, as conceptualised by Amelia Jones (1998), becomes a symptomatic site and point of reference for hysteria. In her discussion of body art, Jones defines the body as a self rather than as ‘a receptacle’, or container, ‘for the mind and will’ (Jones, 1998: 39). As an elusive condition whose symptoms have been fanatically researched and represented for public consumption (Didi-Huberman, 2003) but not fully diagnosed anymore, hysteria remains articulate. Woodman’s body/self in ‘On Being an Angel’ is intermittent, fragmented across boundaries, part space, part object, part symptom. In her images, she ‘becomes a part of the wall or the house […] she is becoming part of the tree and of nature’ (Tellgren, 2015: 11). But there is a proviso here because there are only speculative references linking Woodman’s imagery directly to hysteria. An example is Anna McNay’s review of the exhibition Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel (2016), and even though we can assume she knew what she was doing in performing the arc, sadly, due to her early death, we will never know for sure. In Woodman’s hands, ‘On Being an Angel’ (1977) is a trademark selfie pose embodying and signifying the familiar stance of les grandes hystériques, those female patients publicly performing hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital in the nineteenth century (Didi-Huberman, 2003). Equally eloquent, but formally and conceptually quite different from this work, is Woodman’s first version of ‘On Being an Angel’. Here, the figure is also bent backwards so that her upside-down face is at the base of the image with the breasts above. However, unlike the ‘in your face’ selfie face of the later version, which serves to anchor the image and commands our gaze, this half-obscured face is articulated only by the partially visible black hole of the mouth with breasts above echoing the serrated shape of

24 Body a nearby umbrella. The truncated figure rises up from the base of the image, but here takes up less than one-third, being positioned to one side of a large, almost empty room, sparsely furnished above and beyond the figure with what looks like a few pieces of photographic equipment, a clock and a loosely folded umbrella propped against the wall. Woodman has ensured that the exposure creates two starkly contrasting and simultaneously echoing shapes, in that the white body like a paper cut-out (apart from the black gash of the mouth) stands out against the silhouetted black umbrella. Who would have thought it: an umbrella like a pair of breasts, and a body part – reminiscent of the surrealist artist Hans Bellmer’s dismembered dolls – represented by a girl with an angel in mind? We know from Woodman (Tellgren, 2015) that she was deeply committed to ideas generated by the surrealist manifesto and its dreamlike imagery. In an era of ethical, social, and cultural re-evaluation in Europe following the First World War, surrealism advocated expressions of emotional and sexual freedom through the arts (painting, film, literature, poetry, music) by offering visual, verbal, and sonic ambiguities, puns, and absurdities. Sometimes these incorporated images of, and references to, hysteria. One of surrealism’s founders, André Breton, expressed the condition of art as ‘beauty’. In Mad Love (Breton, 1987) he describes a moment of congruence (spring morning in Paris, small restaurant, depressing flower display, faceless clock, planet occlusion, cemetery, moonstone pendant, white collar with red polka dots) into which comes an exchange between two restaurant staff, a ‘really good looking’ dishwasher and a ‘quite pretty’ waitress (‘poetic-rather’). Breton experiences this particular coming together as a poetic event, as if staged, and yet the performance is completely of his own making, a singular perception experienced by nobody but himself, for only he is in a position to encounter and make sense of this convulsion of elements. ‘Convulsive beauty’, he observes, ‘will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial – or it will not be’ (Breton, 1987: 19). Thus surrealism’s dream image. Breton suggests that art, like hysteria, should be a state of pure expression, one untainted or uninhibited by cultural or other conventions. Francesca Woodman habitually performed alone for her camera, meticulously staging each image – scenographically, in terms of location, lighting, and exposure, and conceptually, with a premeditated sense of signification. In all her photographs she is almost there, intermittent, slowed down, and made transparent by a slow shutter. Emerging, submerging. Partially seen.

The crystal, the symptom Didi-Huberman relates the turning upside down of the body to the bending, pulling, and twisting movements of an instrument of torture known as the torque. In the nineteenth century, ‘most attempts to perform cures generally involved at least some degree of “torture” of bodies and minds’ (Delchamps, 2020: 111). Such torquing movements follow the same fragmenting principles of the hysteric’s body ‘turning until it twists, testing through torment’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 273). But, we argue, the hysteric resists the torture, the torquing gestures, by moving with,

Body  25 rather than against, the attack. The Italian phenomenon of tarantismo incorporates an ecstatic dance in which the bite of a spider seemingly provokes spirit possession, mainly aimed at avoiding death, and this manifests in a shaking trance. From this dance emerges the more subdued tarantella, but the original tarantismo is believed to be the basis for a form of mass hysteria – clinically known as mass psychogenic phenomena or collective hysterical disorder (Bogousslavsky, 2014: 39). Dancing manias were common forms of mass hysteria in the Middle Ages (Lanska, 2018). Thus, the image of the arching-back attitude becomes a symbol of resistance. Hysteria sometimes manifests in surrealist practice (Foster, 2000: xviii) by means of collage, a visual medium in which material from elsewhere such as paper, ripped, torn, or cut, fragments of fabric, and sometimes whole objects are brought together, juxtaposed, and re-positioned with a gluing agent. Examples that can be said to reference the hysterical subject include Max Ernst’s collage novel, Une semaine de bonté, in which the appropriation and re-organisation of illustration fragments from Victorian novels create a sense of repression and unease. Other examples are Hans Bellmer’s sculptural dolls, created from ‘reorganised’ body parts, and Salvador Dalí’s photographic work The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933), which depicts various states of rapture on the faces of women in close-up, these resembling details from Charcot’s attitudes passionelles, one of the phases of his great hysterical attack. Why was the hysteric not represented in the surreally inspired drawing/folding game exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis)? Perhaps she was, for often she appears as a hybrid animal-human-monster figure, as given body parts (head, shoulders, knees, etc.) were drawn and folded under/over for different hands to continue, obliviously, sketching the body part they were given (Foster, 2000: 152). The hysteric figure in the world of surrealism also makes her appearance as a dismembered doll, or in the equally violent imagery of collage works such as Hannah Hoch’s or, more contemporarily, John Stezaker’s. A key property of surrealist collage, as opposed to, for example, cubist collage, is that, rather than emphasise the juxtaposing seam, it creepily hides the joins. Just as a dream can be experienced as terrifyingly real, here we do not/are not able to suspend our disbelief. What is secreted within a fold is hidden and normally impossible to see. The folded/cut/torn/juxtaposed structure of the collage can thus be said to echo what was going on at the Salpêtrière: Something was constructed at the Salpêtrière, something resembling a great optical machine to decipher the invisible lineaments of a crystal: the great, territorial, experimental, magical machine of hysteria. And in order to decipher the crystal, one had to break it, be fascinated by its fall, then break it again and invent machines permitting an even more visible, regimented fall, and then break it once again – just to see. (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 9–10) Structurally, it must be said, a crystal is unlike a collage, being a symmetrical ordering of similar pieces arranged beside each other. However, like a collage,

26 Body a crystal can be seen as a means of organising multiplicity and of displaying multiple perspectives. Didi-Huberman’s imagined ‘seeing machine’ is designed to decipher that other machine, hysteria, a multiplicitous structure whose facets reflect a thousand shifting perspectives. The metaphor works, in that it was only to be by breaking and re-breaking that machine – a vehicle for the efforts of men who grasped at answers to the irrational (in this case, manifest in the bodies and behaviours of a few female patients) – that it became possible to re-organise and collage the pieces in order to see more clearly. And yet still we do not. The symptom – arc, hysteric convulsion, rapture – is all made into an image. Its aestheticisation into Breton’s (and others’) convulsive beauty is problematic. ‘The feminine subject is objectified through the analogy of surrealist image and hysterical symptom’ (Foster, 2000: 191) and, thus, women are either victims, muses, or hysterics (Hutchison, 2003: 215). But the hysteric is visibly suffering, rebelling against these labels and their impossible demands. Breton, who worked in a psychiatric ward for a time, condemns Nadja in the celebrated words already alluded to: ‘beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all’ (1960: 160, capitals in the original). In Mad Love, he expands on this paroxysm: ‘The word “convulsive,” which I use to describe the only beauty which should concern us, would lose any meaning in my eyes were it to be conceived in motion and not at the exact expiration of this motion’ (Breton, 1987: 10). Clearly the demands are on the outward sign and the symptom takes precedence over the suffering, the mystery over the work needed to understand. Yet, if one listens to the hysteric, one can at least hear the contradiction. So, what is the outward sign and what is the symptom? How can we hear the voice of a sign? The outward sign is embodied, symptom without voice a shape in space whole body movement backward flip arc of the spine facial expression whole body expression (like the picture on the wall) gesture this is what the world sees wants to see pays to see makes other the suffering listening is the work needed to understand it the ear begins to see In On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820, as part of a section dedicated to ‘The Construction of Secrets’ (2015: 195–202), Sabine Arnaud observes how ‘to cure is to find the story’ (195). Francesca

Body  27 Woodman uses the camera’s lens and photographic darkroom to portray the body/ self as a thing in motion. She makes she-her-self visually elusive by means of a rigorous process – long exposure, double exposure, and real-time performance. Self suspended in mid-leap, self pressed into a wall or floorboards, sweat marking the floor. Now she merges into the walls and floors that encompass her, now becomes a transparent amorphous shape in flight, now a flat white cut-out, now a lovely young woman curled up in a bowl of live eels from the Trastevere market. Now an angel.

The definition of hysteria The only consistency we have in our recognition of hysteria is in its image. These include images drawn from the medieval imagination, images made a century ago in the pursuit of clinical knowledge, images in Victorian literature, and those we continue to make in film, theatre, literature, dance, poetry, and painting. Until now, it has only been possible to comprehend hysteria with any clarity as an image. Clinically, it is much less intelligible. For example, Laura Briggs recounts how ‘one physician, George Beard, wrote a catalogue of symptoms that ran to seventy-five pages, and he counted it incomplete’ (2000: 247). It is a malady without a seat, as Georges Didi-Huberman puts it, ungrounded, nowhere to be found in anatomical dissections, with no material basis and without apparent cause. Its history is full of attempts at finding this seat, at holding tightly onto it, stabilising and making it visible. Hysteria resists this. There came a point when these attempts were abandoned and, in the 1990s, the term, as a diagnostic category at least, slipped into history (Ávila and Terra, 2012: 28). Nonetheless, two observations are agreed upon in relation to hysteria. Firstly, hysteria is a neurosis, one of the three principal psychic structures – the other two being psychosis and perversion, in Jacques Lacan’s categorisation. Neurosis refers to the psychic structure where the basic mechanism of negation is repression. Neurosis is also the main structure we may call normal (Fink, 1997: 77) and is a spectrum that, as well as hysteria, includes obsession and phobia as its subcategories. Secondly, it is manifest in the body: ‘it is commonplace to say that obsession is characterized by the return of the repressed in the mind, whereas hysteria is characterized by the return of the repressed in the body’ (Fink, 1997: 115). This manifestation is often abundant in terms of the symptom, which is porous, generous, plastic, and prodigious, ‘a total spectacle of all illnesses at once’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 75). But Charcot saw this generosity as a betrayal of the body, a lie, an acting out of the symptom, which is but a double of something else that we must learn how to unmask (DidiHuberman, 2003: 75), a travelling ‘to another place and time, imagined or past’ (Bowlby, 2004: viii). The symptom read by Charcot and his colleagues as a sign of a neurological disorder is a double negative, an empty sign demonstrating a confusion of desires never formed, felt, or voiced. Prohibition was built into the hysteric’s context, her worldview. Thus her symptom, the pose, displays an opacity that is transparent (Hustvedt, 2011: 6), in that it is not a coded attempt on the part of the patient to transmit secret knowledge or to instigate a guessing game.

28 Body The knowledge signified is conflict itself, and the pose is an illegible sign (Bowen and González, 2013: 215). Hysteria has inspired ‘a large and far-ranging body of commentary’ (Micale, 1995: 13), boasting the most ‘extravagant mythopoetic heritage’ of any nonfatal disease (14). Yet, one of its most troubling features is its lack of definition. At least one chapter within each book we reviewed focuses on the ways in which it has been understood throughout time. Examples include the monographs of Sabine Arnaud (2015), Ilza Veith (1965), and Mark Micale (1995), chapters from Andrew Scull (‘Mysteria’, 2009: 6–23), Elisabeth Bronfen (‘Medicine’s Hysteria Romance: Is It History or Legend?’, 1998: 101–138), and Rachel P Maines (‘Hysteria as a disease paradigm’, 1999: 7–10). Attempts to add clarity to the jumble of listed clinical symptoms that can be found in earlier editions of the current DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), include, for example, Nitza Yarom’s Matrix of Hysteria (2005). Why is there such orbiting around the substance of hysteria? In the course of its long medical history, hysteria – that infamously resilient somatic illness without organic lesions – has stubbornly remained elusive to any precise definition and has thus proved itself a useful screen on which to project the diagnostic fantasies of doctors faced with their own impotence and helplessness. (Bronfen, 1998: xi) The few attempted definitions are open, poetic, and culturally interesting but clinically useless because they encompass a vast number of possibilities, interpretations, and therefore treatments. ‘[H]ysteria and its medical discourse are mutually constitutive’ (Bronfen, 1998: 102). It is dependent on medical, religious, and aesthetic discourses (Micale, 1995) but, at the same time, shows blind spots in the representational structures of those discourses. The symptoms are in flux and ephemeral, much like the nature of the body in which they are displayed. Hysteria is a ‘diagnosis of exclusion’, applicable only when all other possibilities have been ruled out (Micale, 1993: 510). Didi-Huberman observes that ‘it is impossible to give a precise nosological definition of hysteria, as this neurosis has neither known lesions nor constant and pathognomonic symptoms’ (2003: 32). The difficulty of finding common indicators to understand hysteria gave rise to a language of metaphors, categories, and equivalences (hysteric vapours, the wandering womb, Proteus, the chameleon, Hydra, etc.). Doctors found it impossible to differentiate it from other umbrella conditions such as neurasthenia and ‘the two conditions were intertwined while the medical community struggled to define its diagnostic boundaries’ (Schuster, 2011: 5). Furthermore, Lucien Israël argues that hysteria’s symptoms are consistently shown as cheating the rules of the medical game and that no precise definition will ever be found by a physician (1976). The present work does not aim to augment the already rigorous examinations of this issue, for we are not discussing hysteria as a condition, but rather the hysteric who suffers that condition, and the broad traits defining her. The unclear

Body  29 distinction between hysteria as a condition and the suffering hysteric creates an uncertainty, a gap that is the substance of its definition, the engine of debate, for this condition presents as symptomatically visible. It is its own figure, and for this reason, we consider the hysteric as a figure, an embodied condition here filtered through the lens of creative practice. We therefore need to establish some common ground in order to examine the hysteric as it manifests in culture and society. This figure is gender-specific in our writing because we are dealing with her as a historical construction. Because of its ever-increasing list of symptoms, hysteria as a specified condition has disappeared from the current diagnostic manuals. Its mimetic qualities and its ability to take on culturally permissible expressions of distress make it complicated to define, as we will see in the next chapter. Apart from the consensus that it is a neurosis presenting in the body, hysteria is broadly understood as the manifestation of psychological trauma in physical symptoms, these being without any underlying physiological condition (see Freud and Breuer’s preliminary statement ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’, 1955 [1893]: 3–17). Alluding to Pierre Janet, psychoanalysis scholar Juan-David Nasio refers to hysteria as ‘an illness via representation’ (Nasio, 1998: 43). Following Freud’s first theory, which we outlined in our introduction, he relates it to trauma, an excess of unconscious affect in the absence of the necessary anxiety that, at the time of the incident, would have allowed the child’s ego to absorb and tolerate the surplus tension. If trauma occurred, it is because the anxiety that should have arisen was lacking. (Nasio, 1998: 43–44) For hysteria to arise, an overload of affect which charges an imprinted, isolated (that is, repressed), painful-to-the-ego, and overactivated image is needed. This excessive affect becomes represented or converted in the body, the soma, instead of in thought – which would be obsession – or the external world – which is characteristic of phobia. ‘Thus conversion is defined, from an economic point of view, as the transformation of a constant energic excess as it passes from a psychic to a somatic state’ (Nasio, 1998: 51). Hysteria is thus a physical response to an emotional conflict in which the body takes over, a way for the self to rebel against what is perceived to be an unreasonable demand. In the nineteenth century, it was common for hysterical attacks to take place in public and, according to Charcot, they were presented in the form of poses that he was able to categorise into four phases or périodes. These are known as the synoptic table or la grande hystérie, the great hysterical attack. A hysteric attack was preceded by an ‘auratic prodrome’, an early warning symptom that, often included melancholia, over-excitement, vomiting, and lack of appetite. The four phases of the attack were said to be: •

Période epileptoide, convulsions and stertorous (noisy or laboured) movement, loss of breath and consciousness, paleness followed by redness

30 Body •

• •

Période de clownisme, big contortions, exaggerated muscular strength, flexibility and agility. Spinal flexion and extension, often repeated. The arc de cercle or arch of hysteria, an extreme backward bend, is characteristic of this phase Période des attitudes passionelles, hallucinations both happy and sad, including eroticism, fires, war, revolutions, assassinations, religious tableaux Période terminale or delirium, hallucinations and trouble with movement slowly give space to equilibrium

These four phases, predominantly manifest in the body, were recorded as drawings and photographs that were placed in the archive known as the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. The project was overseen by Paul Richer, Charcot’s appointee, himself a professor of artistic anatomy at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (we will elaborate on this archive in the next chapter). Richer published the Études Cliniques sur l’Hystéro-Épilepsie ou Grande Hysterie (1881), which contained the synoptic table. Contributing were doctors who, credited with the supposition of knowledge, had none, while the female patients who awaited their expert knowledge in fact possessed it themselves (Bowen and González, 2013: 210). Freud eventually pursued this by means of ‘the talking cure’ (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 30). More technically, hysteria is a conversion disorder, or functional neurological symptom disorder – as named in the DSM (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) – in which patients experience symptoms such as weakness or numbness, movement disorders such as paralysis or fits, and sensory events such as blindness or blackouts. These symptoms are not consistent with a well-established organic cause, although they generate significant distress and can often be traced to a psychological trigger. Didi-Huberman explains how the naming of hysteria as a conversion disorder (converting what into what?) withdraws clarity and veils the hysteric even further: The same recess of her body played a double role, as Freud says, in an intolerable intermittence of pleasure and displeasure that no one was ever in a position to elucidate. Freud calls it conversion (adding that this clears up nothing, and its very obscurity nearly encourages one to flee since, he says, it ‘affords us a good reason for quitting such an unproductive field of enquiry without delay’). As for Charcot, he called the same phenomenon suggestibility, imitation. (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 261) Freud’s idea of converted/somatised psychic energy (anxiety, desire, etc.) is easily understood by anyone who has experienced the physical symptoms of stress, for example, horizontal lines of blindness suddenly manifesting when in an unexpectedly worrying situation. However, perhaps Charcot’s ‘suggestibility’, ‘imitation’, and conversion bring us closer to the hysterical figure we’re trying to draw out. A dissociation between mind and body is common, in that the body takes

Body  31 over, as in the case of the so-called arc de cercle made famous by Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (1887). But that’s as far as a lay definition goes. Fend et al. warn us about the inconsistency in diagnosing hysteria: ‘The term hysteria is therefore being used in two ways. First, as a disorder doctors were willing and able to diagnose using positive signs, and second as a hysterical trait, a label applied in judgement of personality’ (2020: 1280). So one could be a hysteric based on character traits alone, albeit in the absence of neurological symptoms. Elaine Showalter, who looked into recent forms of mass hysteria, links psychiatric diagnostics, theatre, and feminism: I had started to look at performance and the relation of hysteria and histrionic … In 1980, this theatrical subtext was officially codified when the third edition of DSM-III (1980) renamed what had previously been ‘hysterical personality disorder’ as ‘histrionic personality disorder’. In 1977, two psychiatrists indeed recommended acting as the ideal career choice of the female hysteric […] Many contemporary women artists and performers reframed the histrionic elements of hysteria for a feminist art and theater. (Showalter, 2020: 29) For Freud, a central characteristic of the hysteric is their ‘inability to give an ordered history of their life’ (1953 [1905]: 16), a narrative gone awry which shows up as mysterious symptoms forming a body language. The task of psychoanalysis is then to interpret this, translate it into words, and create a coherent narrative from the patient’s story. In addition to being adopted by literature, performance, and feminism, the problem of definition in hysteria has brought an extra layer of complexity in the form of ‘concept creep … severing its relation to a reliably diagnosable medical or psychic phenomenon’ and expanding its meaning so much that it is now perceived as ‘any challenge to a collectively perceived “norm” by an upsetting circumstance that impacts a larger number of people’ (Zechner, 2020: 88). Thus, the term hysteria has now more cultural than medical implications. Hysteria happens, clearly, in the body, and its symptoms do not leave any confusion about the rebellion taking place. ‘What is written is like a visible alphabet of the body’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 26). But we need to learn how to read, how to piece the letters together into the message, for, without that, the symptoms are just a bunch of squiggles and gestures, leading nowhere. ‘Viewed in material and corporeal terms, gestures do not categorically identify the performer as “hysterical” as such’, especially when ‘examining the choreography of historical subjects who exhibit hysterical motions, and the context within which such corporeal forms arise – the discursive and historical mise en scène’ (Marshall, 2020: 64). The hysteric’s body asks the difficult questions and offers no answers: The hysterical body – not ‘the body’ – once again raises and rehashes its exhausting question. It is the question of a language of gestures, a hundred spontaneous gestures mixing love and aggression, the question of the

32 Body multiple presentation – Darstellung – of an object of anxiety in the gestures of a jouissance – the jouissance in which everything is there – presented, open, offered. Inaccessible. (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 263) This inaccessible manifestation is not only confined to the nineteenth century studied by Didi-Huberman; it is present in our culture and our clinics (Grose, 2016), although perhaps its outward display is less florid (Micale, 1994: 4). As we will see in the next chapter, the mimetic qualities of the hysteric’s body have mutated the symptoms from a wandering womb, suffocation, melancholia, nervousness, and epileptic fits into, for example, eating disorders, personality disorders, pain disorders, and some forms of dissociation. This means that not only is the body of the hysteric fragmented, but the category of hysteria has been broken up too. The hysteric runs the risk of becoming anachronistic (Micale, 1994: 4). Yet, even though psychiatric interest in hysteria has declined, its presence in the neurological wards – although not translated into research – is evident (Stone et al., 2008). Culturally, it is made manifest as ‘emotionally excessive behaviour’ (Micale, 1994: 108), perhaps in the reactions to political events, pop bands (think Beatlemania, Justin Bieber, or the death of Princess Diana, as discussed in Blackman and Walkerdine [2001]), love betrayals, or grief. In these expressions, the hysterical figure portrays herself (and is therefore portrayed) in a position of ambivalence, an in-between state, for example, between laughter and crying, or physically folding forwards and backwards. With the advent of modern technology in the nineteenth century, and the apparent ability to stop time and space through photography, the back bend, the arc, was presented as an image of hysteria, an image that transcends its twisted history. L’arc de cercle The position of Francesca Woodman’s body in her photograph ‘On Being an Angel’ (1976) creates a well-known image, the backwards-arching ‘C’ that, for les grandes hystériques presenting (and imaged) as such for Charcot and other researchers, is the key letter in their alphabet. Much has been written about this often-repeated position, especially as to its veracity or social construction after Charcot’s death (Luauté, Saladini, and Walusinski, 2015). Hysteria comes with other imagery too, for example, in Western literature, the white gown, long hair worn down, and half or fully closed eyes. It is normally depicted as racially white, although doubly ‘othered’ in Jane Eyre’s violent Mrs Rochester whose background is intimated as colonial (her story developed by Jean Rhys in the novel Wide Sargasso Sea). It is often but not always female (all five cases in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria are women), and usually middle class (although none of the Salpêtrière patients could be considered anything other than working class). Such images can be seen in art, for example in Pina Bausch’s dance theatre work Café Müller, first performed by Tanztheater Wuppertal on 20 May 1978 in

Body  33 the city’s Opera House, or the intense U-Bahn scene in Andrzej Zulawski’s film Possession (1981). Set to Henry Purcell’s music, Café Müller relates Bausch’s memories as a child in Germany before the Second World War. The piece lasts 45 minutes and features six dancers, three male and three female. In the gendered sets, there is a pair (males wearing suits, females long white gowns) and one odd one (the male wearing a loose white shirt and trousers and the female a dress, overcoat, and high heels). The themes of the work are memory, nostalgia, and the search for an impossible intimacy, especially in the awkward interactions between sleepwalking and wakeful characters: ‘There are brief moments of tenderness amidst movement passages that border on hysteria, but no plot is proposed, nor is there any sense of resolution as the dancers gradually exit the darkening set’ (Weir, 2018: 70). This impossibility of connection also raises themes of dependence and manipulation. Hysterical sleep is ‘the royal road to “knowledge” of hysteria’ with somnambulism (sleepwalking) and vigilambulism (sleepwalking in a waking state) as the two key phenomena in the hysteric’s performance (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 184). The repetitive movement of arranging chairs while the female dancers wearing long white gowns – one of them Bausch herself – run across the stage with their eyes closed and their feet bare, or a female dancer tightly hugging a male who slowly and with effort frees himself of the embrace, only for it to happen again, shows the momentariness of any connection they establish. The wakeful and sleepwalking characters faintly echo hysterics and doctors, and both shape-shift and morph. There is no timeline, no narrative, only repeated patterns of self-destructive behaviour by the sleepwalkers – getting faster, more violent, and more exhausting with each repetition (Weir, 2018: 73) – and futile palliative actions by the wakeful characters. This trance, the varying states of awareness, is a rift between the characters, as if they lived in separate, yet touching, universes. Possession is a psychological horror film set in Berlin, with two main characters, Anna and Mark, played by Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill. On his return home from an espionage mission, Mark finds Anna wants a divorce for reasons she does not disclose. Both display increasingly erratic behaviour, which the film portrays with doubles (their child’s teacher, Helen, is played by Adjani with green eyes; Mark turns out to have a doppelgänger too) and strange creatures (a loveroctopus), ending up in various deaths. In the three-and-a-half-minute scene staging a possession, Anna recounts to Mark how after coming out of a train and walking through a U-Bahn station with some shopping, she starts laughing to herself. Her body takes over in the convulsing action and the laughter soon turns to anguished cries as she throws herself against the walls, the milk and eggs in the shopping she carries spreading everywhere and mingling with the secretions of her own body. The scene represents Anna’s abject miscarriage (Olivier, 2020: 19) and is a turning point in all the characters’ behaviour in the film. The critique in Variety notes that ‘Possession starts on a hysterical note, stays there and surpasses it as the film progresses. There are excesses on all fronts’ (Elley, 2000: 980). Although their trances are different and the representation of the hysteric has variations (Pina’s hair is tied back, Isabelle Adjani’s character Anna wears a blue

34 Body dress), tonic rigidity alternating with folding of the body characterises the movement of the dancers and the actress. The arc de cercle is still discernible. This position, which in Charcot’s system occurs in the period of clownism, or acrobatics, is called opisthotonos when present in other maladies such as severe tetanus, some kinds of meningitis, and strychnine poisoning. In hysteria, the semi-circular position has its own distinctive moniker, translated from French as the ‘arc of a circle’: Even if the description of hysteria does not hark from the earliest times, that of the ‘arc de cercle’ has been found in a text dating from the second century A.D. and its first known iconographic representation also dates from antiquity. (Luauté, Saladini, and Walusinski, 2015) This pose was also observed as a manifestation of epilepsy and, as Lisa Appignanesi observes, at the Salpêtrière hysterics shared their ward with epileptics, from whom they learned to internalise and mime their symptoms (Appignanesi, 2009: 149, 152), as we will see in Chapter Two. This arched shape is emphasised in Louise Bourgeois’s suspended sculpture, Arch of Hysteria (1993), a hanging headless bronze human figure, seemingly a male one this time. The figure was cast from Bourgeois’s long-term assistant Jerry Gorovoy’s body (MoMA, 2020), and demonstrates the body’s instability, as evidenced in the hysterical attack. The bent-back arc also occasionally represented cases of possession, a condition once closely related to that of hysteria. Mark Micale (1995) offers substantial research on this link. This leaves the person, as shown in the dances of Mary Wigman or the Japanese performance practice butoh – which Jonathan W Marshall links to hysteria – ‘battling for space within the body itself’ (Marshall, 2020: 79). In hysteria, the body appears to become malleable, able to perform things that are inconceivable when anchored to rationality. Dissociated from the mind, the body seems to speak with a voice of its own. This is a voice which could be triggered, and also ‘articulated at will, endowed as it was with an incredible plastic submission’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 192). The surface of Bourgeois’s sculpture is shiny, allowing us to see ourselves reflected as we gaze at – and into – the pleasing, shapely, hanging human form, draped as it is over the supporting arc of what we imagine might be an invisible ball, so that to us the form appears to be perfect. Although the arc de cercle represented in Bourgeois’s work Arch of Hysteria suggests control and harmony, perhaps it also intimates the unseen – a reality not wholly represented in the well-timed and perfectly balanced performance. Possibly the artist’s point is the implication in this piece of the diagnostic perspective as a fait accompli, a decoy from the actuality of hysteria that leaves to the imagination the raggedly fragmented reality of the person, and the compartmentalisation of their mind and personality. Hysteria is a cypher, a sign to be read. It looks away from itself. From a contemporary perspective, we might read figures in the past as hysterical because

Body  35 we apply current knowledge. They may point towards something else. So, for example, Grunewald’s panel for the Heller Altarpiece (1510) depicts a figure whose hands we can read as bent back and twisted in the classic contracture of the hysteric, as depicted by Richer in the synoptic table (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 118) but, in the sixteenth century, this being-done-to girl is demon-possessed, the convulsed subject of an exorcism.​ I am looking at the kneeling figure of a girl in a drawing I made many years ago. The bent-back figure derives from an altarpiece by Grunewald and is of such violence that I am riveted. I call my drawing ‘Possession’, asking whose? Now I’m looking again and discover online that this image (which I took to be that of an exorcism) in fact depicts the saint healing a young girl of what we would now call epilepsy, a condition that, like hysteria, possesses the whole person through the body, and must therefore be itself possessed, cast out. The saint’s thumb locks over the girl’s lower jaw, jerking the mouth open and pushing the head back in a whiplash motion to release the demon. Her hands fly open, distorted and disempowered as the demon convulses heavenward. The demon itself will be disempowered by a face-off with light as it emerges from the dark cavern of her mouth, smashing into daylight. The girl’s eyes twist back and sideways, as though something in her mind is convulsing also, turning inward (Bowen and González, 2013: 205). The body of the hysteric was known to perform feats that were baffling, impossible to achieve when not in the midst of an attack, defying flexibility, stamina, and even gravity. But how did the body know how to do this?

What the body knows In her seminal book Hystories, Elaine Showalter recognises that ‘all medical practice depends on narrative – the “doctor’s story,” which both shapes the formal case study and determines practical treatment’ (Showalter, 1997: 82). Patients are the ones who usually have to modify their stories, re-write them, and fully assimilate them into their lives. And yet, using body and voice, the hysteric is miming something beyond the capture of medical images, or the words of Freud, Charcot, and other doctors. Moustapha Safouan singles out knowledge over other contributory factors in the construction of hysteria, thus placing the possession of knowledge (and the possessor) in a privileged position: We can do our work, and well, without knowing what the transference is; and we can obtain appreciable modifications in the cure of an obsessional neurosis without being able to say exactly how we have obtained them; but it is out of the question to introduce significant modifications in a case of hysteria without knowing. (Safouan, 1980: 55) He attributes knowledge to the doctor, but, as we will explore in a later chapter on mystery, it is commonly the hysteric who produces knowledge. Yet in the

36 Body

Figure 1.1  Eleanor Bowen, ‘Possession’, mixed-media drawing (graphite, print, collage), 1992.

Body  37 diagnostic manuals, hysteria marks women’s bodies pathologically, symptomatically manifesting as a wandering womb, for example, or in the arching of a body. Hysteria intensifies the perceived attributes of ‘woman’, historically woman as other, woman as dis-ease. The diagnosis itself is marked by a denial of the visceral and a failure to know. To be ill is a feminine verb. (Dr S Weir Mitchell, 1881, cited in Birnbaum, 1999: 7) Diagnosis, which Vivian Delchamps identifies as the first of five key processes towards a cure (the other four being treatment, management, rehabilitation, and prevention), ‘is part of a system that always involves the violent removal of something from a body’ (Delchamps, 2020: 107). It identifies, but does not change; it normalises bodies understood as defective. It is contradictory, complicated, somewhat subjective, and imperfect. A diagnosis is a bond between doctor and patient (through the classification system), which will help both to understand what is going on and determine the next steps towards the unpredictable journey to a cure through prescribing treatments that impact bodies and minds. As a process towards a conclusion about a state of health, it can be done ‘well or poorly, hastily or carefully’ (Albert, Munson, and Resnik, 1988: 181). As an outcome, it becomes a label, a classification, and an explanation which narrows possibilities and leads to prognosis. According to Clare, diagnosis can be trustworthy, suspect, a tool, a weapon, useful, dangerous; diagnosis wields immense power and it unleashes political and cultural forces (2017: 41) In diagnosis or in its absence, the hysteric’s body knows. What does it know? Such knowledge is impossible to articulate verbally, and thus the body performs, in so doing generates its own language. Superficially, the body knows that the demands placed on the hysteric are impossible to meet. But there is more, and this more is sought after and exploited. After all, possession does not necessarily signify inhabitation by a spirit; it can also indicate ownership and custody, perhaps of knowledge. The folds of the hysteric’s body hold something precious, forced to be discharged, even though the doctors are looking in the wrong place and with the wrong instruments: The obvious converse of secretion was commonly exploited, in the thousand treatments of hysteria that consisted in fully exudating the body (curing an ill with the ill), pushing its propensity to seep to its extreme. The body that secretes everything also secretes the secret of its ill, its matter. (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 272) Didi-Huberman’s text can be read as obsessed with details of ‘secretions’, breasts spilling out of bodices, glimpses of vulvae, as that of Charcot and his male colleagues who, gazing on the writhing bodies, research with barely concealed enthusiasm the cries and crises of human beings acceptable as such only while unable to demonstrate an agency of their own. However, this impression is countered

38 Body because, being a philosopher and art historian, Didi-Huberman’s dissecting gaze in The Invention of Hysteria is not upon the image but upon the gaze itself that frames – that of ‘the experts’, and of a public whose preconceptions of ‘woman’ are those by which she is framed, and by which she also frames herself. For those whose socialisation and status impress upon them their place in society – obedient or you don’t get paid, or indeed accepted as a woman in the world of men – you are framed as passive, articulating only through silent expressions of the body including ‘hysterical moisture’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 271), ‘multiple secretions’ of ‘saliva, drool, foam, milky secretions, urine’ (Bertillon citing Landouzy, in DidiHuberman, 2003: 272). Didi-Huberman’s text reveals the potentially misogynistic roots of this view, the foundation of the great crystal that reflects and remakes ‘the medieval theme … of a “capacity of women [fames]” – “femina, fex Sathanae, rosa fetens, dulce venenum” (woman, feces of Satan, foul rose, sweet poison) – the moist and hot woman, and pre-eminently the hysteric’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 271). It could be said that the problem is one of intersemiotic translation (González, 2019). The hysteric’s body and medical language are two different semiotic systems, non-verbal and verbal. The response to what one asks for (knowledge, attention, a stop to the demands) is not wanted because the response is not aligned with the question. The problem comes when the verbal system is given primacy over the body: The doctor does not so much translate the transformation of the body as make the patient’s biography the key to the body’s belonging to the subject. The ruptures originated by the sick body allow the doctor to reconstruct the subject as story; as its interpreter, the doctor reasserts the sovereignty of the story over the body, of the gaze over the act, of writing over the sensitive manifestation. (Arnaud, 2015: 202) The form followed at the Salpêtrière involved exhaustive descriptions of everything seen as the hysteric displayed ‘what is written […] like a visible alphabet of the body’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 26). In a way, the hysteric secretes twice from her folds: a real ooze or discharge, part of a symptomatic excess produced in her body, and knowledge, veiled, encoded, concealed, the crystal doctors were after. Secretion as the imagined construct created by the hysteria machine, as a means of breaking the crystal of hysteria at the Salpêtrière, produced very little results. Peggy Phelan, offering a model of knowledge embodied in writing, articulates how ‘suturing consciousness into bodily “truth”’, the domain of performance, for example, might not be recognised as knowledge: The body does not experience the world the same way consciousness does: the gap between these two ways of ‘processing’ experiences punctuates the formation of the unconscious. The function of the analysis then is to repair this join, to find a way to suture the body into time’s order. The equally logical task of suturing consciousness into bodily ‘truth’ remains outside the

Body  39 official domains of mainstream science and thrives in new-age philosophy and alternative medicine. (Phelan, 1995: 90–91) The answer the hysteric gives to her own and the doctor’s questions, her symptom in her body, is seen as a second-rate, dubious answer, unrigorous, perhaps detached from reality, made up. But translating the hysteric’s code is not translating into words, as if we were able to find equivalents (LaRue, 2017). The hysteric is not this discrete entity. Instead, we need to follow Kate Briggs who, in This Little Art, compares the act of translation to Robinson Crusoe making a table on his island. He is not inventing the concept of a table, but has for the first time to navigate the making of one from trees. ‘When it comes to translation […] there’s never a question of what to write […] because the work has already been written. What matters is how to write it again’ (Briggs, 2017: 252). But this ‘how’ has not been found. At best, some parts of the hieroglyph have perhaps been deciphered, but the message remains concealed. Coup de théâtre Following in the footsteps of psychoanalyst Stavros Mentzos, Elisabeth Bronfen characterises the hysteric as ‘a noncoincidence between her self-representations and the being she really is, such that she not only plays roles but also her existence resides in the performance of these roles’ (1998: 298). Didi-Huberman claims that the hysteria found in Charcot’s Salpêtrière hospital at the end of the nineteenth century was theatre. He makes a case for hysterics and doctors to be linked in a performance of ‘psychiatric theatricality’ (2003: 244), starting with a ‘coup de théâtre’, a sudden loss of consciousness (2003: 111). These performances involved public attacks and poses categorised into the four famous phases of la grande hystérie. Freud explains how the hysteric ‘was acting her part in the dramatic reproduction of some incident in her life’ (Freud, 2001 [1912]: 262) and Christopher Bollas dedicates a whole chapter to the hysteric’s self as theatre (Bollas, 2000: 125–134). It should not come as a surprise that the beginnings of psychoanalysis are linked to hysteria and that hysteria has found its way onto the stage. Psychoanalysis, the practice of lying down on a couch and talking, has theatrical qualities. Phelan (1995) describes psychoanalysis as a mode of psychic choreography, in that the body performs specific gestures and movements. Bollas goes further when he comments that ‘it is common to portray a hysteric as theatrical without giving it much further thought’ (2000: 125). Marshall acknowledges that [c]ommentators also regularly classified hysterical spasms as ‘choretic’, resembling chorea, yet another disease whose title marked it as a condition characterized by movements which were dance-like, but which vexed the clarity and repeatability of dance proper – a non-choreography if you will. (Marshall, 2020: 65)

40 Body But what is happening in the hysteric’s performance? What is being represented, acted, danced, and played out? For most authors, from Bollas (2000) and Scull (2009) to Yarom (2005) and Goldstein (2011), the answer is sexuality. ‘Hysterical theatre is always polymorphous as the self releases its sexual history in the devolution to becoming an event’ (Bollas, 2000: 134). Les attitudes passionelles, a phase that can combine both eroticism and religious fervour, is one of Charcot’s périodes. Moreover, hysteria, sexuality, and psychoanalysis are narratively linked in an episode marking the birth of psychoanalysis, and with a plot close to theatrical. In his 1896 letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud explains his discovery of childhood seduction instances in most of the hysterical and obsessionally neurotic cases he treated, thus finding a possible causal link for such afflictions (Freud, 2001 [1950]: 238– 239). He referred to his theory as Neurotica, although it later came to be known as the seduction theory, to which we referred in the introduction. However, a few years later on 14 August 1897, he writes ‘I no longer believe in my neurotica’ (Freud, 2001 [1950]: 259–260), describing how he had understood that the seductions recounted by his patients were fantasies. This, known as the abandonment of the seduction theory, allowed the emergence of psychoanalytic practice as we know it today, although it cost Freud his friendship with Fliess (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973; Nelson Garner, 1989). The body imposes a sexual logic on the hysteric against which she rebels because she is troubled by the demands it makes, and thus she attempts to repress sexual ideas. This, in a nutshell, is the classic explanation of the hysteric’s drama. So how does this fit with the background of the manifold symptoms, the difficulty in finding a cure, and the enigma of the hysteric? Jean-François Lyotard’s conception of hysteria and performativity updates the classic understanding of the hysteric’s body. In The Postmodern Condition, he defines performativity as the optimisation of the relationship between input and output (1984: 11) where an unexpected move (and, in this, we could also read ‘movement’), supplies ‘the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes’ (1984: 15). Even though he explains the concept in a cultural and economic sense, it can be applied to what Didi-Huberman claims the hysteric does: that is, to perform in the theatrical sense, optimising the relation between the demand placed on her – input – and the rebellion of her symptom – output – making the unexpected movement of the attack meet the requirements of performativity. The result is compelling, commanding our gaze and asking us questions. Lyotard, however, is ambivalent about the notion of the hysteric theatre, the performative difference being the role of ourselves as an audience gazing on the symptoms we see: The women whose photos we see are not ill, in the process of betraying or exhibiting their symptoms. They are not savages, prey to the trances of divination or exorcism. They are not even actresses caught live at the high-point of their performance. They teach us a sort of theatre of corporeal elements. (Lyotard, 1991: 132)

Body  41 The hysterical theatre of the body was performed live in the Tuesday lectures of Charcot, Freud’s consulting room, and various other stages, documented through drawings and photographs, which, as we will see in the next chapter, have a specific relation to the act of seeing. These representations show a quality which presumably was shared by the performances themselves: what happens when the body’s state is allowed to be, in the way John Cage’s music compositions let sound be (Lyotard, 1991: 133). In the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre of playwright and director Richard Foreman, what is happening is allowed to happen, instead of imagined, charged, reinforced, or invented (Foreman, 1976: 76), and, as Lyotard ascertained, ‘it is as though we were hearing today what Charcot’s patients want’ (1991: 133). Hearing what Charcot’s patients want is precisely what Dianne Hunter, in her project Charcot’s Hysteria Shows (1998), attempts by performing readings of hysteria through re-stagings of the synoptic table. Her work shows the profound ambivalence of hysteria: the clear suffering and distress of the patients, physically and emotionally retrained by the doctors who attempt to control them. Incorporated into these readings is the compromised position of the viewer who, although sympathetic, was also complicit. As Martha Noel Evans writes in the introduction, this documentation demonstrates ‘the paradoxical and dangerous result of controlling rather than confronting the thrill of disorder’, by which she means not only clinical disorders but insurrections and rebellions (Hunter, 1998: xv). The method used by Hunter and her team in researching hysteria by means of performance was to adopt the body position and expressions of the synoptic table and decode them through projection and subjective identification, using the table to awaken the hysteric within through the call of the body.

The body of the other Lyotard asks: ‘Do you think you are going to save these sick women by making works of art, or artists, out of them? (And at the cost of what torture inflicted on art?)’ (1991: 134). Dianne Hunter, Pina Bausch, Louise Bourgeois, and Francesca Woodman show that this is not about saving women or inflicting any torture on art but forcing us to stop, look, and listen. The hysteric is an affront; she refuses to submit, even down to her organs, which do not respect the function assigned to them (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 74). Her body is ‘a stage for the body of the other’ (Phelan, 1995: 97), and who this other is or can be will become clear in the next chapters. Her body does not conform to rules, whether clinical, spatial, or temporal: The body of the hysteric, finally, exists in an always stupefying temporality, composed of intermissions, ‘propagations’, influences, acute crises; it resists all attempted treatment for years, and then one day, without anyone knowing why, the hysteric recovers all by herself. (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 74–75) The hysteric mimes the other, converting psychic trauma into her own body’s language. The suggestibility of an other, the imitations and conversions the

42 Body symptoms go through, will be our next inroad to the hysteric and the next trait upon which we draw. The tracing of the hysteric’s body in the throes of her attack tells us that the body is the site of conflict. This body is presented as intermittent, fragmented, partial, and theatrical. This body knows and does not want/is unable to tell. It is misheard, plastic, beautiful, and accomplished in its symptoms. It is an image with the open mouth blacked out, bent back and upside down. It is also, as we will see in the next fold, fully alert.

References Albert, Daniel, Ronald Munson and Michael D Resnik (1988) Reasoning in Medicine: An Introduction to Clinical Inference. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: Author. https://doi​.org​/10​.1176​/appi​.books​ .9780890425596​.x00​diag​nost​iccl​assi​fication Appignanesi, Lisa (2009) Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800. London: Virago Press. Arnaud, Sabine (2015) On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press. https://doi​.org​/10​ .7208​/chicago​/9780226275680​.001​.0001 Ávila, Lazslo Antônio and João Ricardo Terra (2012) ‘Hysteria and Its Metamorphoses’. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatología Fundamental, 15.1 (March). 27–41. https://doi​.org​/10​.1590​/s1415​-47142012000100003 Birnbaum, Michele (1999) ‘Racial Hysteria: Female Pathology and Race Politics in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and W D Howells’s An Imperative Duty’. African American Review, 33.1 (Spring). 7–23. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/2901298 Blackman, Lisa and Valerie Walkerdine (2001) Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bogousslavsky, Julien, ed. (2014) ‘Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma’. Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, vol. 35. Basel: Karger. https://doi​.org​/10​.1159​/isbn​.978​-3​-318​-02647-4 Bollas, Christopher (2000) Hysteria. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi​.org​/10​ .4324​/9780203361085 Bowen, Eleanor and Laura González (2013) ‘Between Laughter and Crying’. Madness, Women and the Power of Art. Edited by Frances Davies and Laura González. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. 197–234. https://doi​.org​/10​.1163​/9789004371637 Bowlby, Rachel (2004) ‘Introduction: Never Done, Never to Return’. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies in Hysteria. London: Penguin. Vii–xxxiii. Braun, Johanna (2020) ‘Introduction’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 11–24. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.4 Breton, André (1960) Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press. Breton, André (1987) Mad Love. Translated by Mary Ann Cawes. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Briggs, Kate (2017) This Little Art. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Briggs, Laura (2000) ‘The Race of Hysteria: “Overcivilization” and the “Savage” Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology’. American Quarterly, 52.2. 246–73. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/aq​.2000​.0013

Body  43 Bronfen, Elisabeth (1998) The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9781400864737 Bryson, Norman (1983) Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Clare, Eli (2017) Brilliant Imperfection. Grappling with Cure. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​/9780822373520 Delchamps, Vivian (2020) ‘“A Slight Hysterical Tendency”. Performing Diagnosis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 105–122. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.9 Didi-Huberman, Georges (2003) The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Elley, Derek (2000) Variety Portable Movie Guide. New York: Penguin Putnam. Evans, Dylan (1996) An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. https://doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9780203135570 Fend, Max, Louise Williams, Alan J Carson and Jon Stone (2020) ‘The Art de Siècle: Functional neurological disorder during the “forgotten” years of the 20th century’. Brain, 143.4 (April). 1278–1284. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/brain​/awaa037 Fink, Bruce (1997) A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foreman, Richard (1976) ‘Ontological-Hysteric: Manifesto I’. Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos. Edited by Kate Davy. New York: New York University Press. 67–80. Foster, Hal (2000) Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Freud, Sigmund (1953 [1905]) ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press. 1–122. Freud, Sigmund (2001 [1912]) ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911–1913): Case History of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage. 260–266. Freud, Sigmund (2001 [1950]) ‘Letter 52, Extracts from the Fliess Papers’ (in Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse, ed. By Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud and Ernst Kris [1950]). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I (1861–1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage. 173–280. Freud, Sigmund and Joseph Breuer (1955 [1893]) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893–1895) Studies on Hysteria. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press. Goldstein, Jan (2011) Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9781400833719 González, Laura (2019) ‘Hosting Hysteria’. Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media. Edited by Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 167–184.

44 Body Grose, Anouchka, ed. (2016) Hysteria Today. London: Karnac. Hunter, Dianne, ed. (1998) The Makings of Dr Charcot’s Hysteria Shows: Research through Performance. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Hustvedt, Asti (2011) Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. New York: W W Norton. Hutchison, Sharla (2003) ‘Convulsive Beauty: Images of Hysteria and Transgressive Sexuality Claude Cahun and Djuna Barnes’. Symploken, 11.1–2 Theory Trouble. 212– 226. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/sym​.2003​.0012 Israël, Lucien (1976) L’hysterique, le sexe, et le medecin. Paris: Masson. Jones, Amelia (1998) Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lacan, Jacques (2006 [1966]) ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York and London: W W Norton. 75–81. Lanska, Douglas J (2018) ‘The Dancing Manias: Psychogenic Illness as a Social Phenomenon’. Neurologic-Psychiatric Syndromes in Focus. Part II – From Psychiatry to Neurology. Edited by Julien Bogousslavsky. Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience 42. Basel, Karger, 132–141. https://doi​.org​/10​.1159​/000475719 Laplanche, Jean and Jean Bertrand Pontalis (1973) The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. LaRue, Madeleine (2017) Waiting Translations: A Conversation With Kate Briggs. Available from http://musicandliterature​.org​/features​/2017​/11​/20​/a​-conversation​-with​ -kate​-briggs. Accessed 18 June 2020. Luauté, Jean-Pierre, Olivier Saladini and Olivier Walusinski (2015) ‘The “arc de cercle” of Hysteria: History, Interpretations’. Annales Médico-Psychologiques, 173. 391–398. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.amp​.2014​.06​.002 Lyotard, Jean François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press Lyotard, Jean François (1991) ‘Speech Snapshot’. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 129–134. Maines, Rachel P (1999) The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Marshall, Jonathan W (2020) ‘Traumatic Dances Of “The Non-Self”. Bodily Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 61–83. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.7 McNay, Anna (2016) Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel. Available from https:// www​. studiointernational​. com​/ index​. php​/ francesca​- woodman​- on​- being​- an​- angel​ -review​-foam​-amsterdam. Accessed 06 January 2022. Micale, Mark S (1993) ‘On the “Disappearance” of Hysteria: A Study in the Clinical Deconstruction of a Diagnosis’. Isis, 84.3 (September). 496–526. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1086​/356549 Micale, Mark S (1995) Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9780691194486 MoMA (2020) Louise Bourgeois: Arch of Hysteria 1993. Available from https://www​ .moma​.org​/audio​/playlist​/42​/681. Accessed 05 August 2020.

Body  45 Nasio, Juan-David (1998) Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis. Edited and Translated by Susan Fairfield. New York: The Other Press. Nelson Garner, Shirley (1989) ‘Freud and Fliess: Homophobia and Seduction’. Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation and Rhetoric. Edited by Dianne Hunter, Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. 86–109. Olivier, Mark (2020) Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctvx8b7sz Phelan, Peggy (1995) ‘Dance and the History of Hysteria’. Corporealities Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power. Edited by Susan Leigh Foster. London: Routledge. 90–105. Richer, Paul (1881) Études Cliniques sur l’Hystéro-Épilepsie ou Grande Hystérie. Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier. Available from https://wellcomecollection​.org​/works​/ m3sfzk33. Accessed 27 January 2022. Safouan, Moustapha (1980) ‘In Praise of Hysteria’. Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Edited and translated by Stuart Schneiderman. London: Yale University Press. 55–60. Schuster, David G (2011) Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869–1920. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​ .36019​/9780813552224 Scull, Andrew (2009) Hysteria: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Showalter, Elaine (1997) Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Showalter, Elaine (2020) ‘Hystories Revisited. Hysterical Epidemics and Social Media’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 27–37. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​ .ctv18dvt2d.5 Stone, Jon, Russell Hewett, Alan Carson, Charles Warlow and Michael Sharpe (2008) ‘The “disappearance” of Hysteria: Historical Mystery or Illusion?’. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 101.1 (January). 12–18. https://doi​.org​/10​.1258​/jrsm​.2007​.070129 Tellgren, Anne (2015) ‘Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel’. On Being an Angel. Edited by Anna Tellgren. London: Thames & Hudson. 9–16. Veith, Ilza (1965) Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press. Weir, Lucy (2018) Pina Bausch’s Dance Theatre: Tracing the Evolution of Tanztheater. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Woodman, Francesca (2015) On Being an Angel. Edited by Anna Tellgren. London: Thames & Hudson. Yarom, Nitza (2005) Matrix of Hysteria: Psychoanalysis of the Struggle between the Sexes as Enacted in the Body. Hove: Routledge. https://doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9780203015407 Zechner, Dominik (2020) ‘The Phantom Erection: Freud’s Dora and Hysteria’s Unreadabilities’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 87–101. https:// doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.8

2

Mimesis

Studying the symptoms of the hysteric helps us to outline her figure. Through the manifestation of the conflict she is experiencing, we are able to hear and understand what she is rebelling against. Anouchka Grose ascertains that A symptom is something that provides some kind of solution to the subject – gives them a way out of a problem (although it then tends to cause problems of its own). It’s an action or an affect that helps a person find a way to articulate something in the face of enormous social and personal/subjective resistance. […] a hysterical symptom is a way to reclaim a little bit of power. (Grose, 2020: 14) But in this remarkable stance (yes, a stance, not a condition, illness, or malady), the symptom itself is far from providing ‘a neat solution to the dilemma of what to include in the hysterical universe’ (Scull, 2009: 8). Didi-Huberman cites Gilles de la Tourette at the Salpêtrière: ‘Nothing that is the symptom of hysteria itself can imitate hysteria’ (2003: 164). This can be read as reverse metonymy, where the part cannot stand for the whole and one symptom alone is in no way representative of hysteria. Although, taken literally rather than semiotically, this could be said of any symptom; for example, a sneeze is not wholly representative of a cold, nor is the inability to walk representative of a broken ankle. De la Tourette’s point was that no hysterical symptom was anything like hysteria itself, indicating that the essential nature of hysteria was unknown and that, whatever hysteria was, its symptoms offered no clues. Hysterical symptoms, like decoys, give nothing away, and they are innumerable. The only recourse is, thus, to examine the unifying quality of these symptoms, namely mimesis, which Didi-Huberman terms ‘the hysterical symptom par excellence’ (2003: 164). But what is this mimetic tendency of the hysteric?

The doctors In her study of mimesis, hysteria, and the phenomenological imaginary, Jan Campbell defines mimesis as both imitative behaviour and a retreat into ideal fantasies to protect the hysteric against a present that is affectively too fluid DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-4

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(Campbell, 2005: 336). It is ‘a more creative imitation or copy of human behaviour and nature’ (2005: 334). This makes the hysteric’s symptoms borrowed, adopted from those imitated. They continuously change throughout the convoluted history of hysterical manifestation, taking the form, for example, of epileptic convulsions in the nineteenth century, devil or spirit possession in the Middle Ages, eating disorders in the 1980s, and also hallucinatory delirium, sexual voracity, paralysis, amnesia, the inability to speak, or, as in the case of Bertha Pappenheim, Joseph Breuer’s Anna O, speaking in tongues. Thus the many ways in which hysteria shows in the body change with the times – with social, cultural, or personal context – and whoever the hysteric chooses unconsciously to mimic tends to reflect the subject of her mimetic act. It is not only the hysterical symptom that changes with the times; so does the doctors’ understanding of the condition. Campbell traces this from Charcot, Freud, and Jung to Lacan. For Charcot, the hysteric’s trauma is an emotional moment which becomes fixated or blocked and causes the will to become paralysed (Campbell, 2005: 332). Freud and Breuer followed Charcot and saw hysteria as a dissociation, or a split in consciousness, and thought that the ‘[c]ure for the hysteric was not via representation but through abreaction of affect’ (Campbell, 2005: 332), which is a release of repressed emotion through reliving experience. Freud’s view of hysteria changed over time. In his first of ‘Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis’, he equates hysterical symptoms with the Monument to the Fire of London and hysterics to contemporary Londoners still weeping for the fire, thereby unable to see the current splendour of the city. In a slightly naive and paternalistic way, Freud highlights how hysteria’s mimetic qualities are rendered impractical, misplaced, or inappropriate: These monuments, then, resemble hysterical symptoms in being mnemic symbols […] But what should we think of a Londoner who paused to-day in deep melancholy before the memorial to Queen Eleanor’s funeral instead of going about his business in the hurry that modern working conditions demand or instead of feeling joy over the youthful queen of his own heart? Or again what should we think of a Londoner who shed tears before the Monument that commemorates the reduction of his beloved metropolis to ashes although it has long since risen again in far greater brilliance? Yet every single hysteric and neurotic behaves like these two unpractical Londoners. (Freud, 2001 [1910]: 16–17) Although Carl Jung is not strictly considered a psychoanalyst due to the end of his friendship with Freud in 1913, he developed a view of hysteria in his early work, interesting because of its relation to theatre, which we explored in the previous chapter. Like early Freud, Jung sees hysteria as a symbol of past trauma that makes the hysteric escape the present. He considers the pains to be real, but he still refers to hysteria as a ‘mise-en-scène’ that appears as a reality, ‘staged’ in such a way that benefits are obtained from the hysteric’s environment (1954: 161–162). Grounded in a dissociative split from reality, Jung’s hysteria is ‘not

48 Mimesis Model

Symptom

Hysteric

Rebellion/ Resistance (Object)

Figure 2.1  Triangular model of the hysteric.

a return of the repressed from the past, but a regression of the libido to infantile states in the present’ (Campbell, 2005: 332). Thus the inner child acts out. Later on in his career, Freud diverged from Charcot, his former mentor, in the understanding of auto-suggestion as a response to trauma and, instead, offered his innovation, the Oedipal explanation, which we explored in the introduction. This ‘frames hysteria as the conversion into bodily symptoms of a repressed fantasy or wish’ (Campbell, 2005: 332). In the Oedipal drama, the cure would happen through a representation of the repressed and identification with the paternal, the law. The move from Charcot to Freud, thus, is characterised by a change of understanding from blocked emotions which require abreaction to repressed wishes which need representation. Jacques Lacan, in his return to Freud à la lettre, provided a major change in understanding the hysteric, which we will explore fully in Chapter Three when we examine the mystery at the heart of the figure. For now, we remain in the territory between emotion, repression, and representation. In his concept of mimetic desire, French philosopher and literary critic Réné Girard proposes that human beings have a propensity to desire other people’s desires (Girard, 1966) and therefore our relations to our objects of desire are always mediated by a model that is what is in fact sought. Adapting Girard offers us a triangular view of the hysteric (Figure 2.1), in which her relations are mediated by the symptom. The hysteric manifests her mimetic desire, as she seeks to be (like), not to have (to enjoy): ‘mimesis of the other is a relation to someone we do not wish to have but to be’ (Campbell 2005: 335). Campbell argues that, in fact, ‘desire and identification are an indissoluble mimesis from the beginning’ (Campbell, 2005: 344). Through the study of characters in literature and their motivations, Girard distinguishes between imitation, which he sees as the positive side, and mimesis, which leads to negative effects and rivalries. In relation to psychoanalysis, he writes: To the orthodox Freudian, it must be possible to distribute mimetic phenomena between the Oedipus complex and narcissism. I was never told how. To the Lacanian, whatever I call mimetic, in human interaction, must correspond to the vaunted but mysterious ‘capture par l’imaginaire’ and be rooted

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– where else? – in ‘le stade du miroir.’ No one ever told me how the ‘capture par l’imaginaire’ can really operate. (Girard, 1978: 32) While the Freudian concepts he mentions are perhaps more understandable, the Lacanian ones need further explanation. Girard is referring to a fundamental classification system of psychoanalytic experience Lacan developed from 1953 onwards, and around which all of his theories turn. It is known as the three ‘orders’ or ‘registers’: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic (Evans, 1996: 133–134). Slavoj Žižek explains these three orders with recourse to a game of chess: the Symbolic order is the rules of the game, the way the pieces are allowed to move; the Imaginary is represented by how the pieces appear – as a knight instead of a messenger, for example – and the Real are the contingent circumstances affecting the game being played at a particular time (Žižek, 2006: 8–9). Lacan’s Imaginary is rooted in the subject’s relationship to the body in its image, to how it appears. This image of itself imprisons the subject, fixing it forever. Lacan develops his infamous theory of the mirror stage as an answer to Freud’s problem of how the ego is created and narcissism arises. This mirror stage is crucial in the construction of subjectivity and happens as a developmental phase. It takes place when an infant sees itself externally – the paradigm of a ‘mirror experience’ (Nobus, 1999: 106) – for the first time and recognises its own image in an illusion of wholeness and coherence. for the mirror image gives the child an impression of relative physical maturity long before it has reached that stage. In the mirror, the child is able to see itself as a unity before it is actually capable of acting in an independent manner. For this reason, the child is eager to adopt its reflection in the mirror as an image of itself. (Nobus, 1999: 108) In the mirror stage, the child sees itself in space, and in relation to others, as well as objects. It recognises itself in the image and, at the same time, sees itself as others see it. And the act does not need to be purely visual: ‘the inclination of the plane mirror is governed by the voice of the other’ (Lacan, 1991 [1975]: 140). The mirror stage develops the child’s Imaginary realm, which for Lacan has ‘connotations of illusion, fascination and seduction’ (Evans, 1996: 82). This moment of recognition is not only narcissistic – a fascination with the child’s own image – since the infant also makes a connection, through the reflection, to others, from where a struggle ensues. Resistance and rebellion, as well as aggression, start here. The mirror stage is ‘decisive for the installation and maintenance of self-consciousness’, a fundamental ontological experience contributing to the human fascination with images in general: image fascination has neurological roots also, for example, in attraction to colour and pattern-making. In the mirror stage, the image constitutes the child, rather than the other way around (Nobus, 1999: 103–104, 114). This is what Girard’s ‘capture par l’imaginaire’ is.

50 Mimesis In our writing, we use the terms mimesis, mimicry, and mime. We refer to mimicry as the ability to simulate the appearance of someone or something, often thought to be a deceptive imitation in order to reach a certain aim. This term is used in a biological context. Lacan approaches mimicry in his Seminar XI, through the work of Roger Caillois, linking it to adaptation and mutation (Lacan, 1981 [1973]). He discusses the difference in the function between the eye and the gaze, and the nature of painting, which Caillois likens to mimicry. In Lacan, this further ties mimicry to the image and, thus, to the mirror stage. Mimesis is mimicry but made wider: a representation or imitation in art and literature of aspects of the real world, particularly human actions and models of social and political organisation. Aristotle equated mimesis to imitation (Trench, 1933). Yet, this needed to contain some differences from the original. He considered imitation as naturally human, something later validated through the discovery of mirror neurons. Mimesis in art is linked to medicine, where it is taken to refer to the appearance of symptoms of a disease not actually present. We consider mime a theatrical technique of suggestion without words, using gesture, expression, and movement. Girardian psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian studies hysteria, possession, and hypnosis in relation to desire and mimesis (1991). For him, the hysteric denies the other, but also tries to master otherness by making a part of herself, her symptom, precisely other. He describes hysteria as a possession in which the spirit does not manifest (Oughourlian, 1991: 145) and hypnosis as a state in which hysteria is prevented because a denial of the other – who is actually represented in the physical body of the hypnotist – takes place. It follows that, if the mimetic desire relation is turned from a triangle into a figure with four points (a foldedout triangle), and the model is linked to a clear, tangible other (spirit, hypnotist), perhaps hysteria would not occur. Or perhaps, since this four-point model exists in Lacan’s discourse of the hysteric – which we will discuss in Chapter Three – mimesis and the mimetic desire of the hysteric still cannot explain her. Whatever the schema for mimesis, René Girard and Jean-Michel Oughourlian suggest ‘the need to move beyond mimesis as repression, rivalry or obstacle and submit to the mimetic process’ (Campbell, 2005: 345). Campbell liberates the idea of mimesis, relating it not only to hysteria but to embodied, psychic, and social difference, seeing it ‘as a series of phenomenological identifications and acts which can travel beyond fixed, hysterical sexual difference and be acknowledged in their multiplicity’ (2005: 346).

Mimetic symptoms Charcot used the term neuromimesis to show the hysterical body’s ability to faithfully reproduce other conditions, and the names of his phases – epileptoid, clownism – carry on this representational trace (Micale, 1995: 127). ‘Hysteria could be recognized by its corporeal similitude to, but non-identity with, epilepsy’ (Marshall, 2020: 64), a fact acknowledged in the title under which Paul Richer published the synoptic table of drawings, Études Cliniques sur l'HystéroÉpilepsie ou Grande Hystérie (1881). In 1987, 100 years after the publication of

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the second edition of Richer’s study, a group of performers at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, used performative means to explore and analyse the symptoms of hysteria as shown in his drawings (Hunter, 1998). The researchers sought to read each drawing as an embodied sign, understanding each pose through enactment. Acting out the drawings comprising ‘Row J’ (attitudes passionelles), the performers detected a confusion of purpose in each pose. Each seemed to have been performed with an unseen spectator in mind, embodying a double movement that was simultaneously both a movement towards and a withdrawal from this unseen figure. Effecting, like an undertow, the scraping back of a great tide of feeling. duplicity you don’t know whether you’re coming or going anger contempt fear ridicule desire We saw … a tension between spirituality and sexuality expressed in a contradiction between upper and lower body. In Pose 1 the attitude is one of prayer, but the petitioner has her body arranged as if she is searching uncertainly for the addressee of her prayer, while her lower body pulls in a different direction; her knees point one way, her torso and arms in another. [In another] the figure looks towards and pulls her body away from a fixed point in space, as if in response to someone who has come into the space where the figure reclines. (Hunter, 1998: 3–4) These readings of the body through re-description seem to support the notion that ‘hysteria [manifests] itself as both a pathological effect of patriarchy and its subversion’ (Borossa, 2001: 54). The mimetic quality of the hysteric symptom is an expression of rebellion and resistance to impossible demands put on her. Hunter describes how research through performance brought ‘the conclusion that grand hysteria mimes profoundly disorganising emotions in order to communicate these emotions to a spectator perceived as powerful’ (Hunter, 1998: 9). The double movement of the synoptic table and the relation to an unseen addressee or spectator is also present in works of contemporary art. Fainting is a recurrent theme in the work of the artist Marianna Simnett. In her case, the addressee is her Croatian grandfather who escaped from a Holocaust firing squad, which resulted for him in a loss of consciousness and collapse. Through hyperventilation and the tightening of her airway, Simnett induces her body to faint repeatedly in the installation Faint with Light (2016). The sound of her struggling breath is synchronised with the bright lights rising and falling on a wall. The work provokes an empathic response in the audience, with reports of fainting due to an unconscious mirroring of her stressed breath (FACT, n.d.). We too, mimic her. The fainting fit, historically labelled a symptom in the construction of hysteria, is transformed here into a powerful act of reclamation. Denying us any

52 Mimesis image of her body, Simnett de-glamorises the feminine swoon associated with passivity and weakness in a male dominated world. Instead, we witness the rawness of an untamed body as a dizzying intervention which threatens to sabotage repressive codes of behaviour. (FACT, n.d.) The opposite visual strategy is employed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Sam TaylorWood) in her video Hysteria (1997). This eight-minute work (originally 16 mm colour film transferred to digital video) closely frames a woman’s face without sound. She appears at first to be laughing, but this gradually transforms into something that can be read as crying, a boundary that wavers between what appears to be laughing and crying, showing a disjunction between what is apparent on the outside and what is felt on the inside. The voice, rather than the body, is suppressed this time and, together with the intimacy of the close framing, provokes an ambivalent response: from concern and empathy to a detachment provoked by the inability to decipher what is happening to her. She laughs until she cries. The track is silent so we don’t know what kind of sound (if any) is emitted. Sustaining this activity clearly strains the actor, and this shows in her physiognomy. Forehead, mouth, and neck muscles clench and at times she lifts her hands as if to hold her head in place. As in previous works, Taylor-Johnson extends the photographic image, making it temporal. So, laugh becomes laughing, cry crying. In so doing, she elicits state from stasis. Ek-stasis. This is not a progression because it goes nowhere. This is also no commonplace piece of theatre. It is ecstatic Dionysian enactment. The god of wine and theatre is also the god of death, taking us out of ourselves temporarily, but returning us in the end. However, for many acting out at the Saltpêtrière there was no return. The drawings in the Études Cliniques (1885) graphically depict desire and repulsion, positioned adjacently in the same body, side-by-side, or end-to-end. As in Taylor-Johnson’s Hysteria, the image is breached, cut off as if the pose is a resignation of the self to the director’s instruction and the demands of the role. One notices a turnaround in the woman’s demeanour, an entropic inwardness corresponding with the exhaustion of the actor. She is swallowing her impulse, making one move forward and two back. Broken in two, the actor finds that she is beside herself. The hysterical body is infinitely adaptable, as is its mimetic ability. Mimesis could be thought of as a contagion (Wakeford, 2020). ‘Emotional identification or mimesis with the object is an earlier declaration of love, and is expressed in Freud’s writings in relation to numerous ideas of imitation, sympathy and mental contagion’ (Campbell, 2005: 334). Mimesis is also double, doppelgänger and automaton (Foster, 2000), even citation. Sabine Arnaud refers to Antoine Compagnon’s definition of citation as ‘a repeated enunciation and a repeating enunciation’ (Arnaud, 2015: 67) which has the curious and uneven effect, as he observed, of ‘replacing the meaning of a word with the meaning of the repetition of that word’ (Arnaud, 2015: 51). Similarly, in hysteria, mimesis overtakes the symptoms, which are paid less attention than their ability to mutate.

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However, it is in Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman becomings that hysterical mimesis is most grounded. In Metamorphoses, Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Braidotti revisits Luce Irigaray’s idea of mimesis as a strategy for Woman to work through representations that Man, the ‘knowing subject’, has created of her as Other. Braidotti considers mimesis an act of repossession (Braidotti, 2002: 25), possessing again the stolen body, enabling the hysteric to gain some distance from the models imposed upon her (Braidotti, 2002: 41), perhaps through mimetic desire (Figure 2.1). Staccato images like a strip of freeze-frames. My grandmother blows raspberries during conversations. Incessantly repeats her husband’s words. American housewife in The Hours reads Mrs Dalloway in 1955. In her perfect kitchen, she bins her small son’s birthday cake. Wife of angry guy in American Beauty stares ahead. Says nothing. The hysteric’s symptoms are flexible, plastic, malleable, and moveable, which is why the shape-shifting of mimesis is possible. They show potential for new configurations of the body, alternative expressions, and hybrid ways of becoming who she wants to be. The ability to transform and to become are intrinsically connected to rebellion and resistance. For Braidotti (2002: 8), who builds her understanding from Irigaray’s emphasis on embodiment, Gilles Deleuze’s concept of becoming, and Henry Bergson’s duration, the ability to transform is related to repetition, affinity, communication, and contamination of states of experience. It is neither reproduction nor imitation, but rather empathic proximity and intensive interconnectedness, at times and violent (Braidotti, 2002: 8). Becoming is not a movement but a disposition. One to one. A form of fold. In repli we enact folds. A repli is a fold. Re-turn. face-off beside one’s self To mimic or mime is to draw on an other (figure/entity) – but it is not to become the other. Equally, to draw on the past is not necessarily to remember. Mime is a form of becoming, neither reproduction nor imitation (Braidotti, 2014: 182). becoming can be imagined as the mutual exchange of two moments a newly formed structure for now one present(ed) figure in time becoming folded, shadowed, overlain as the still figure is cut from time, freeze-framed the autonomous image cuts (and is cut from) movement (Bracewell, 2005, cited in Bowen, 2013: 13). In a similar way (to illustrate) an imagined tac operates in the performance of mime. The inner tac makes thinking visible and visibly shifts perception. The palms or soles make contact – tac – and without a word, the surface of a world appears (a wall, a glass of water, the handle on a door, a flight of stairs). Tac is a mental

54 Mimesis sound, a note for the body, a small explosion creating ‘some form of enlargement or exaggeration, not necessarily elaborate’ (Bowen, 2013: 13, from notes made during a performance workshop with the mime artist Geoffrey Stevenson).​ The enlarging gesture can be almost imperceptibly slight. The act, mime’s embodiment of the world’s surface, can be imagined for all the world to see, ‘like a small tear in the surface of the world, as though we have been pulled through from our own to some vaster space’ (philosopher Simone Weil cited in Scarry, 1998: 77) ‘through a sort of death’ (Bowen, 2013). The repli we imagine refers to a folding-back, withdrawal, or embedding of one moment with another. To draw on the past is not necessarily to remember, but can be imagined as the mutual exchange of two moments, a newly formed now, a structure comprising one conscious figure in time, the other not. The present(ed) figure is thus shadowed, overlain, and unformed. Campbell suggests, when writing about French feminist Luce Irigaray, that mimesis is ‘not only an unconscious expression but also a conscious and playful strategy for revealing the place of the feminine within language’ (2005: 345). So if mimesis is a strategy for revealing the overlooked figure/body/self and if, in this case, archiving by the gaze is a means of subjugating or objectifying the figure/ body/self, how can we understand the notion of repertoire, countering archive, as a means of revealing the overlooked? Diana Taylor proposes ‘a nonarchival system of transfer that [she comes to call] the repertoire’ (2003: xvii). Working in the context of performance as ‘that which disappears’ (2003: xvii) and Latin American studies in which, through colonialism, dictatorship, or exclusion by the United States of America, the lives of many have been overlooked, erased, or disappeared, Taylor explores the potential of a repertoire. This, she proposes, may be ‘performed through dance, theatre, song, ritual, witnessing, healing practices, memory paths, and the many other forms of repeatable behaviours as something that cannot be housed or contained in the archive’ (Taylor, 2003: 36–37). Of interest here, apart from the performative mode of communication, are the ‘repeatable’ behaviours, those passed on as mimesis or repetition, verbal or non-verbal, the unspeakable in memory, the long-gone. how to archive a body find the parts and put them in a box sort them out archive: that which is organised, arranged systematically repertoire: a treasury or inventory the repertoire draws on the personal in order to offset the institutional, perhaps suggesting a protean shadow, the inverse of something highly structured (Bowen, 2016: 22) Braidotti translates the core of her subject into her writing, privileging a more poetic and allusive expression over coherence, ‘joining the call for a renewal of the language and the textual apparatus of academic writing but also of public political discussions’ (Braidotti, 2002: 8). The linear, self-transparent language

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Figure 2.2  Eleanor Bowen, ‘Tac’, DV stills (from text/image paratext).

we are used to is not fit to render the process of becoming (change made apparent though difference), or of hysteric mimesis, as it does not call into question its very articulation and the performance of that articulation. We need to pull the writing ‘away from the attraction of logocentrism’ (Braidotti, 2002: 8). In choosing to write in the form of a repli, we also join this call and assume the risks that come with it.

Malingering Hysteria’s outward appearance is one of mimicry, imitation, and copy, and it is this that intimates an association between the hysteric and performance or theatre. ‘Hysteria is considered to be “a whole art,” the art and manner of “theatricalism,” as is always said in psychiatry, and which no theatricality is strong enough to equal in its swaggers’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 164). Sander L Gilman writes that ‘hysteria, from the eighteenth century, is a disease of the imagination, not a disease of the womb’ (1993: 359). Jonathan W Marshall writes about how the externalisation of hysteria deceives, making its internal workings unclear, ‘moving through those same parts of the body affected by other “real” illnesses, but not necessarily residing in these regions’. The mimetic capacity of the hysteric is artistic (not necessarily in a good way), recreating their bodies as ‘automatons, marionettes, music boxes, and impressionable balls of wax or clay’ (Marshall 2020: 69). Néstor Braunstein recounts how, in his paper ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious’ (Lacan, 2006 [1966]), Lacan makes reference to the ‘disbelieving side of the hysterical intrigue’, a ‘doubling that permits her to be simultaneously in the play and among the spectators, participant and subject to the dramatic play’ (Braunstein, 1995: 74). One of the Lacanian hysteric’s traits is that she gives up her desire in order to become the object of desire for an other, often the analyst. Yet the hysteric’s ability to perform and act is also seen, differently, as deceit and manipulation; what s(he) suffers from is only the appearance of disease, a delusion (Scull, 2009). Her powerful mimetic ability earned the hysteric a reputation for inventing symptoms, lying, and malingering. Freud commented on what this perception means to the relationship between doctors and hysterics. In Volume XI of his Standard Edition of Complete Works, he writes:

56 Mimesis Thus the recognition of the illness as hysteria makes little difference to the patient; but to the doctor quite the reverse. It is noticeable that his attitude towards hysterical patients is quite other than towards sufferers from organic diseases. He does not have the same sympathy for the former as for the latter. Through his studies the doctor has learned many things that remain a sealed book to the layman. … But all his knowledge – his training in anatomy, in physiology, and in pathology – leaves him in the lurch when he is confronted by the details of hysterical phenomena. He cannot understand hysteria, and in the face of it he is himself a layman. This is not a pleasant situation for anyone who as a rule sets so much store by his knowledge. So it comes about that hysterical patients forfeit his sympathy. He regards them as people who are transgressing the laws of his science – like heretics in the eyes of the orthodox. He attributes every kind of wickedness to them, accuses them of exaggeration, of deliberate deceit, of malingering. And he punishes them by withdrawing his interest from them. (Freud, 2001 [1910]: 11–12) Whether malady or maladjustment, hysteria appears as ‘irrational, untrustworthy, and difficult to control’ (Borossa, 2001: 5) if not altogether made up. British psychiatrist Eliot Slater writes: No evidence has yet been offered that the patients diagnosed as suffering from ‘hysteria’ are in medically significant terms anything more than a random selection … The only thing that hysterical patients can be shown to have in common is that they are all patients. The malady of the wandering womb began as a myth, and a myth it yet survives. But like all unwarranted beliefs which still attract credence, it is dangerous. The diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ is a disguise for ignorance and a fertile source of clinical error. It is in fact not only a delusion but a snare. (Slater, cited in Stone et al., 2005: 547) Part of this perception is the association between hysterics and mesmerists through visual representations. Mesmerists were seen as quack doctors, simultaneously ‘madmen and devils’ as Gilman shows in an analysis of cartoons from the 1780s depicting mesmerists and their patients, who were considered the precursors of the classic hysterics of the Salpêtrière (Gilman, 1993: 359–362). Despite attempts at distancing aliénistes such as Pinel and new doctors such as Charcot from the blurred physician–patient relation of the mesmerists, something of the ‘essential image of deviance’ (Gilman, 1993: 362) lingered on in the hysteric. Martha Noel Evans calls the hysteric ‘iatrogenic monsters’, monsters created by the examination and treatment of doctors (1991: 41). Apart from derision, contempt, scorn, and moral opprobrium (Scull, 2009), the consequence of this view of hysteria as simulation and fakery is that the suffering of the hysterics lost its credibility. ‘They were so “successful” as subjects of mimesis that, in the eyes of the physicians who had become the directors of their fantasies, they entirely lost their status as subjects of distress’ (Didi-Huberman,

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2003: 229). Perhaps part of this is also due to Charcot’s insistence on public ­displays, which involved the repetition of symptoms. As Lucy Weir explains when exploring Pina Bausch’s dance work Café Müller, ‘the continued repetition of an action undermines its authenticity, estranging the viewer from the events on stage and reinforcing the artificiality of the action and surrounding set’ (Weir, 2018: 73). Jan Campbell agrees and portrays the hysteric as a ‘soap opera star forced to play the same role, over and over again’ (Campbell 2005: 346). The concept creep of hysteria is evident in Degeneration, Max Nordau’s controversial book. Nordau was a student of Charcot, whom he criticised. He examined the society he lived in and diagnosed the decadence of the fin-de-siècle, achieved through modernisation, as pathological and in need of treatment. He writes: Among the hysterical, as among the degenerate, the first thing which strikes us is extraordinary emotionalism. ‘The leading characteristic of the hysterical,’ says Colin, ‘is the disproportionate impressionability of their psychic centres … They are, above all things, impressionable’ … The hysterical subject does not consciously lie. He believes in the truth of his craziest inventions. The morbid mobility of his mind, the excessive excitability of his imagination, conveys to his consciousness all sorts of queer and senseless ideas … A result of the susceptibility of the hysterical subject to suggestion is his irresistible passion for imitation, and the eagerness with which he yields to all the suggestions of writers and artists. When he sees a picture, he wants to become like it in attitude and dress. (Nordau, 1895: 25–26) Charcot developed an idea that hysteria is caused by trauma, making the hysteric biologically predisposed to it. He was met by counterarguments, mainly those of John Hughlings Jackson, who saw hysteria as damage to the higher psychic functions, returning the hysteric to a more primitive mind (Gilman, 1993: 365). But as the treatment for hysteria moved from wards at the Salpêtrière to the Viennese couch, hysterics deployed ‘their charms in the field of hearing and not in the initial field of vision. They appeared formerly as a Charcotian spectacle that was melted under hypnosis; today it is through language that we recognize them’ (Braunstein, 1995: 71). Thus, the malingering accusations bandied against the hysteric changed to accusations of being excessive, overemotional, obstructive, and difficult. In the analytic room, this appeared as, in Christopher Bollas’s term, the ‘Malignant Hysteric’ (2000: 135–153). She is one who demands ‘care and reparation from the environment’ (2000: 135) and who insists on keeping a level of dependency on the analyst until this care has been achieved. This malignancy comes in the form of begging for acceptance, compliance with instructions, and agreement with the authority of the analyst, and is shown in transference, the transformative and therapeutic relationship between analyst and patient, which develops during treatment and repeats aspects of past (especially childhood) relations. Transference is always analysed. Its purpose is to provide the force for progress in analysis. Transference is not remembering

58 Mimesis a —— A (-Φ) Figure 2.3  Lacan’s hysteria equation from Seminar VIII (2015 [1991]: 246).

relations, but reliving and acting them again, interpersonally, through the analyst. Transference is also a modality of resistance (Braunstein, 1995: 72), and a good analyst (for there must also be malignant ones) refuses the power given to him with a resisting countertransference, declining the roles the patient has assigned to him. In the presence of a malignant hysteric, the analyst feels overinvolved with the patient and therefore countertransference is difficult. Transference and hysteria are bound. As we will see in Chapter Four, Freud defined the concept in the case history of his famous hysteric patient Dora (Freud, 1953 [1905]), and Lacan wrote an equation for hysteria in his seminar on transference, Seminar VIII (2015 [1991]: 246) and left it unexplored thereafter (Figure 2.3). Here a, referring to an other (autre in French), which Lacan calls the substitutional or metaphorical object (Lacan, 2015 [1991]: 246) – also object a, the object cause of desire, as we will see in Chapter Three – is placed over minus phi. Placing over something in Lacan’s mathemes means that what is underneath, in this case, one’s own imaginary castration, is hidden. This whole side of the equation is then put in relation to the Other (A). This relation, signified by the lozenge, is to be read as ‘desire for’ (Lacan, 2006 [1962]: 653). In this matheme – which links to the equation of fantasy (S a, barred subject in relation to object a) and that of perversion, its direct inversion as a S (Lacan, 2006 [1962]: 653) – the hysteric makes herself indispensable to the Other (Braunstein, 1995: 75), a position both uncertain and impossible, and which tends to end in disappointment until a new Other is found and the drama repeats again. [S]he is the one who is the obstacle. She derives jouissance from blocking desire. This is one of the fundamental functions of hysterical subjects in the situations they fabricate: stopping desire from being satisfied so that they themselves can remain what is at stake in desire. (Lacan, 2019: 427) Here are represented what Braunstein calls the four beauties of hysteria (1995: 75–77), all showing malingering aspects: • •

The beautiful soul: ‘a plaintiff, a victim, an object of humiliation, of betrayal, of misunderstanding, of ingratitude, she is a beautiful soul, the storage place of unmerited cruelty and misfortunes’ (1995: 75). The sublime indifference (la belle indifférence) to keep her desire unsatisfied and, thus, demonstrate the futility of desire itself. This archetype mirrors an

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•

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insensibility, an anaesthesia in the body which, according to Braunstein, may end in anorexia nervosa (1995: 76). The Sleeping Beauty, a mistress of deferral ‘who dreams of a future awakening in a paradise of delight, but who in the meantime calmly awaits the arrival of a suitor who will awaken her’ (1995: 76). In this waiting, she lends (rather than gives) herself to her life; she sleepwalks, spellbound. The beast, or ‘that which opposes itself to her alter ego’ (Braunstein, 1995: 76): a hysteric who recounts the torments she is subjected to and who derives jouissance from the fantasy linked to her suffering in the way Lacan mentioned earlier.

Braunstein goes on to explain how the husband of a hysteric is a victim (following a 1967 paper by Lucien Israël), akin to the wife of an alcoholic (1995: 77) and the archetypes above are all characters she allegedly learns to perform. She is acting a role, using her body and her emotions to get what she wants, a perfect imitator of form, tone, characters, and archetypes she inhabits to be heard – hysteric as a malingerer, one way or another. Yet, for Campbell, both social desire and mimesis mean ‘occupying a larger world and not restricting oneself to parents, child or couple’ (Campbell, 2005: 347). And what if the hysteric was read differently, as Anouchka Grose outlines? You could say they were inventing weird, challenging modes of existence for themselves, generating their own bizarre forms of enjoyment and providing a serious challenge to the question of what women want. If there was a freefloating cultural idea that what a woman wants is a man, then these women were presenting some kind of alternative. (Grose, 2020: 14) Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière Doctors persisted in inventing ways of recording hysteria so that it was seen through their medical eyes, rather than as a form of agency on the part of the subject – rebellion and resistance to cultural mores that were, quite literally, choking the hysterics. Charcot’s Tuesday lectures, documented in Asti Husvedt’s book Medical Muses (2011) and in André Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière – a print of which hangs above Freud’s couch in his London home – were lenses (amongst others) through which it was possible to read hysteria. What the doctors did not know then was that its mimetic qualities would cause them to be seen as complicit in these displays: The Tuesday Lectures were also, perhaps, scenes of catharsis (for the actresses even more than the spectators), in the sense in which tradition speaks of the catharsis of humeurs peccantes, which comes from the verb peccare: to sin, to fail, to commit evil and trick others. Does this mean that Charcot invented a theater against hysterical ‘theatricality,’ so as to

60 Mimesis denounce the latter as a simulation, as the excess and sin of mimesis? – Quite possibly. (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 244) In his essay on ‘The Image of the Hysteric’, Sander L Gilman recounts how Tony Robert-Fleury’s 1876 painting Pinel Freeing the Insane hung in the main lecture hall at the Salpêtrière (1993: 345), a reminder to doctors of their perceived role as saviours of these patients, even if at the Salpêtrière doctors tended to capture hysterics into a performative relation, rather than free them (Gilman, 1993: 50). Doctors created the images by which the hysteric’s figure would be recognised, and the hysteric mimicked these images, these poses. On the left side of Brouillet’s painting is a drawing of the arc de cercle, directly in the line of vision of the hysteric Blanche Wittman, but away from the doctors’ vision (Gilman, 1993: 345). The arc is an image directly taken from the opisthotonic position in tetanus and is used as an ‘ontological representation for “seeing” the body’, not for the first time, given that it is a striking manifestation of disease (Gilman, 1993: 364). The arc de cercle is the line between health and disease (Gilman, 1993: 366) and this is precisely what is reflected in the tiny index of drawn figures representing all the stages of la grande hysterie. The drawings of the arc de cercle and lesser-known poses are another invention, another of these lenses through which to see the hysteric. Perhaps a more lasting companion to the lectures is the full archive of the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, containing the drawings and photographs. Following funding to reorganise the hospital, Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, Charcot’s intern, set up the photographic studio. The photographer was Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard, a medical intern. Both left the Salpêtrière around 1880 and were replaced shortly after by Albert Londe, who was a photographer (Pichel, 2017). Under Londe, the archive was overseen by Paul Richer, who was a professor of artistic anatomy at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The act of recording for the archive is represented in Brouillet’s painting: to the right of Charcot, a doctor is sketching the attack that Blanche is having. The archive explores the changing symptoms of the hysteric with their mimetic character. It records the seizures suffered by Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève, who became the most famous hysteric patients in the French hospital. Their identities were known and their images were recognisable as celebrities and exemplary patients (Gilman, 1993: 349). The repertoire that counters the archive, however, is informed by often disavowed gestures of daily life (Taylor, 2003: 20). The notion of repertoire resists, for example, those drawn figures archived, like butterflies in a case, by Charcot in Richer’s synoptic table (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 119). Strictly speaking a collection, here columns of figures pin down the poses drawn by Richer from photographs taken on the Saltpêtrière wards. Women acting out. More revealingly, however, this is a tabling of Charcot’s desire for diagnosis, and the satisfaction of a voracious gaze. Thus the Études Cliniques sur l'Hystéro-Épilepsie ou Grande Hysterie, where the synoptic table was published (Richer, 1881), was Charcot’s

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archive of performed symptoms. If seen from the perspective of a repertoire, it can be re-read in terms of witnessing gestures and memory pathways that were filtered through mimesis stimulated by, for example, the seizures of epileptic patients in an adjacent ward (Didi-Huberman, 2003) and in the religious imagery that was everywhere within the institution. It was his passion and curiosity for hysteria, and for the hysterics themselves (as well as his medical ambition) that led Charcot to create the lectures and the Iconographie Photographique. Photography, itself a mimetic practice as we shall see, worked to create the hysteric figure, both in the mind of the hysteric herself and for the public imagination. Grose thinks of Charcot’s archive as a successful social media channel, giving the hysterics themselves something interesting to do (Grose, 2020: 14), perhaps becoming influencers of sorts. Both the Iconographie Photographique and Brouillet’s painting – which is only an example of a trend, as Gilman discusses (1993) – show, on the surface, a power imbalance between medical expert and suffering patient (Grose, 2020: 10). A closer look reveals more of a dialectical collaboration between artist and performer, an inter-dependence of roles by which one transforms the other. The patient is ‘the vessel of a disease, not any disease, but the disease of images and imagining, hysteria’ (Gilman, 1993: 353). The two types of visual imagery the Iconographie Photographique depicts are religious and medical. It shows, for example, representations of ecstasy and religious experience as pathological (Gilman, 1993: 367), especially those religions seen as being spiritually excessive (Gilman, 1993: 372), a change from previous times when religion was thought of as a cure for hysteria. This is the phase of les attitudes passionelles (the passionate attitudes), overemotional and manipulative body positions, reminiscent of ecstasy but also interpellating the doctor. DidiHuberman argues that these images show their own insufficiency by directing us precisely to what cannot be visualised, perhaps the divine. A trace of it, however, passes through and remains in the image, as it does in the hysteric’s body (DidiHuberman, 2003). The image then ‘becomes a paradoxical container for presence itself, no longer entirely separate from what it alludes to’ (Marshall, 2020: 69) just as the hysteric’s body also shows this duality, as ‘an index for the presence of a materially recognizable, corporeal illness’ (Marshall, 2020: 69). In these poses we find the double movements Dianne Hunter explores in her re-enactment of the synoptic table. The relation to religion is in contrast with the miracles the doctors seemed to perform in the recovery of the hysteric. Les attitudes passionelles is a highly mimetic phase: ‘Girard argues that mimetic rivalry and violence lie at the centre of the modern social order and the only way of externalizing this internal competitive relation with the other is a more transcendent identification with Christianity and God’ (Campbell, 2005: 335). ‘Hysterics both reproduced the actions of, and were likened by others to, figures taken from the history of literature, drama, and art’ (Marshall, 2020: 69), and at one point it is difficult to know what started this, who is the original image, and who is copying who. In the archive are also images of hysterical ulceration, a manifestation of the condition in the skin and reminiscent of stigmata. On the medical side, there is

62 Mimesis epilepsy (used to name the epileptoid phase) and tetanus with its own arc. Like any well-crafted composite collection, the archive is also influenced by attitudes and bodies in classical paintings, for example, Raphael’s Transfiguration, and popular imagery around the sleepwalker, the drug addict, and the monomaniac (Gilman, 1993: 374). The Iconographie Photographique is a graphic notation of body movements, a choreography of sorts that allows classification and, to a certain extent, as in the case of Hunter’s Dr Charcot’s Hysteria Shows (1998), their replication. Yet the archive is at a distance from the hysterical figure herself. If we follow Diana Taylor’s definitions, there is a rift between the ‘archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)’ (Taylor, 2003: 19). For her, the archive is supposedly stable as things tend to remain and not disappear; the repertoire (which the hysteric performs) does not remain the same. Both, however, are in constant mutual interaction. The archive might shape embodied practices, but it does not dictate them (Taylor, 2003: 21) and thus following Charcot’s capture at the Salpêtrière, the symptoms mutate again, go elsewhere, and create a new form. The archive ‘cannot capture and store the live event’ (Taylor, 2003: xvi), much to the sadness of the doctors. While the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière is a useful document, an archive with which to study the hysteric, we also need to be able to draw on the repertoire and retrace the repertoire’s progression into the archive in order to understand how the mimetic quality of the hysteric’s performance can be more accurately discerned, a performance which allegorises ‘a loss it cannot grieve’ (Butler, 1997: 146). In the words of Anouchka Grose, who explores medical illustration and hysteria, we need to ask what the doctors were doing to these women, and what these women were doing to the doctors. For her, the interest in these images comes later in retro-action, with Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis, through which is revealed ‘the possibility of the disruption of meaning in both the analytic encounter and the encounter between image and text’ present in the Iconographie Photographique (Grose, 2020: 9). The Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière aimed to document the stages and processes of hysteria as they manifested visibly in the patient’s body, actions, and postures. At the same time, Charcot was also building a case for the universality of hysterical symptoms, in a continuum from witches and demonic possessions from the Middle Ages and even before, back to ancient Greek times. Beyond his work, there is a progression in the overall reception of the image of the hysteric, which transcends the Salpêtrière’s archive because the continuity of the image built there made it visually reproducible – doctors could show what they saw. It was general and, therefore, real (Gilman 1993: 379). But even if it was a descriptive method of cataloguing, the archive was (like any archive) not innocent or objective. Referencing archival bias in Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes how ‘The presences and absences embodied (…) in sources or archives (…) are neither neutral or natural. They are created … Sources are thus instances of inclusion, the other face of which is, of course, what is excluded’ (2015: 48).

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The Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière was a mimetic means of collecting the mimetic symptoms the hysteric was displaying, pairing them with a variety of visual sources which she then reproduced herself. Yet what was achieved with this insistence on the visual manifestation of symptoms, a purely ocular-centric view, was a disruption of meaning, a new way for hysteria to escape us. In the imagination, the archive has expanded beyond the Salpêtrière and the nineteenth century, both forward and back in history and the world, encompassing a fuller set of recurring images, gestures and actions which, as Marshall notes, tend to arise in bodies when there are social crises involving gender. He sees the hysteriform poses appearing in early demonic possessions, exorcisms, and religious ecstasies, also in the medical sphere in the nineteenth century. They form a significant resource for visual and performing artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Marshall, 2020: 63). Thus the mimetic chain of the hysteric grows, to the point of becoming a Baudrillardian simulacrum, ‘a representation of a representation or, alternatively, a representation for which no known original can be identified’ (Marshall, 2020: 69).

Photography as mimetic Albert Londe, Head of the Photographic Service at the Salpêtrière, was ‘the first professional photographer to have a full-time appointment in any hospital in Europe’ (Gilman, 1993: 352). Photography was born as a product of the desire for art – a wish to capture the world – and science – a wish to establish a means of doing this. Driven by this impulse, photography emerged as a hybrid form, drawing on human imagination, creativity, and chemistry in equal measure, although it was the assumed ‘objectivity’ of the photograph in its replication of the world that appealed to science. Thus the photographic camera became a medical instrument, an investigative tool of importance, on par with the microscope. Didi-Huberman argues that photographs are indexical – showing us evidence of something sensitive, bringing to light the unseen. Photographs are also anticipatory, holding a capacity for diagnosis, prognosis, and foresight (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 33). They are also a trace, ‘incontestably faithful, durable, transmissible’, a ‘mastery of memory’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 48). Yet Didi-Huberman challenges these principles of photography, one by one: exactitude, facticity, objectivity, transmission, resemblance, and confidence (2003: 59–66). Photography is paradoxical. Photographs deepened the medicalisation of hysteria and fixed the hysteric further. They became ‘the central proof for the differential diagnosis between “hysteria” and its contractures and other forms of organic disease’ (Gilman, 1993: 392). With her arch documented for posterity, the hysteric had an image to aspire towards, a perfect semi-circle to mimic. However, as Didi-Huberman writes, photography does not tell the whole story of the attack but rather categorises its constitutive parts and analyses them, breaking the attack into pieces which can be more easily looked at. The Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière might have brought new knowledge to doctors but it did not cure the hysteric:

64 Mimesis When the moving body is inaccessible, like a star whose movements one wishes to follow; when the body executes movements in various ways, or of such great extension that they cannot be directly inscribed on a piece of paper, photography compensates for mechanical procedures with great ease: it reduces the amplitude of movement, or else it amplifies it to a more suitable scale. (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 32) Instead, the doctors’ ability (and their power) was that of foretelling the course of the disease to demonstrate their insight into the condition (Gilman, 1993: 364). Showing its metonymic quality, a photograph is a part that stands for the whole. A photograph also has a metaphorical quality in that it stands for something else, aside from what it literally shows. Thus it is part testimony and part poetic representation, taking on/re-presenting/reflecting what is there. Like the hysteric’s symptom, it is mimetic. When one is in front of a photograph, one is in front of an ambiguous paradox that resists classification, even if throughout history we have constantly tried. Photographs are not objective or removed. To photograph is to participate, to be in a way complicit. It is ‘a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening’ (Sontag, 1977: 12). Photographs certify experience, but also resist engaging with it directly; they limit experience by converting it into an image (Sontag, 1977: 9). They demand exclusivity, full attention. They make us see but, in that process, they demand we surrender to their product: ‘To attempt to improve one’s power of observation by looking through a lens, one must renounce the attempt to achieve knowledge by means of other senses or from hearsay’ (Foucault, 2002: 145). In what feels the opposite of Sontag’s statement, Jean Baudrillard likened photography to a suspension. It ‘produces a kind of thunderstruck effect, a form of suspense and phenomenal immobility which interrupts the precipitation of events’. He called this effect the ‘freeze-frame’ (1999: 134). Such a freeze-frame quality in the photograph bought doctors time to consider, think, and organise what they saw. Serge Tisseron argues that the act of photographing is particularly apt for bringing about the mental process of reflection. He suggests that to photograph is to think, and a correlation is made between it and psychic structures: ‘tenir un appareil devant le visage ou sur la poitrine, cadrer, appuyer sur le déclencheur, sont des formes de rencontre avec soi autant qu’avec le monde’ (Tisseron, 1996: 16) – ‘To take a camera to the face or chest, to frame, to press the shutter, are as much forms of encounter with oneself as with the world’ (author’s translation). A keen photographer himself, the painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944) reflects the same idea in his observation of the difference between making a painting and taking a photograph – each has a different temporal, and therefore emotional, relationship to its subject (Munch, 1973). Tisseron also argues how photography, developed in the nineteenth century, often became a method of scientific communication, how it liberated the gaze from horror and shame to make it focus on the malady only, facilitating its assimilation in the medical and social realms (1996: 24). But this had its downside. Doctors were now able to look at hysterics and freeze their poses, which were waiting to be categorised, but they could not

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foresee that, as well as a form of control over their patient, the photograph and the archive would become objects of fascination in their own right. According to Lyotard, hysteria and photography have a lot in common: The photo ceases to support the argumentation of the scientists, it suspends the dialectic (for an instant), unleashed tableau vivant. Grasp me if you can. But it will be or has been too early or too late. Is an accent (an accent in the state of the body) graspable outside of succession? Hysteria would not only be an illness, rather an ontological essay on time. Or, better: the former by virtue of the latter. Photography reveals this because it is a hysteria of the gaze just as much as a means of control. (Lyotard, 1991: 134) If photography is ‘a hysteria of the gaze’, it can be considered mimetic for the photographer and the viewer. Kaja Silverman, who in her books studies the relationship between photography and mimicry in Lacan, writes ‘when [mimicry] happens, the subject does not simply hold up the imaginary photograph in front of him or her, but approximates or attempts to approximate its form’ (1996: 201). Mimicry, she explains, should be taken as a given; its agency needs to be mastered and, in photography, this is by no means easy, as the imaginary, the mirror image, will always photograph the photographer before the photograph is taken. Thus, photography involves both external and internal conditions. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, cameras brought about a revolution in self-seeing. ‘To see oneself, differently from in a mirror: on the scale of History, this action is recent’ (Barthes 1980: 12). Photography enabled people to see themselves in radically new ways, allowing the photographed subject to develop a new consciousness of her self, exploring ways of seeing ‘her’ and how much that camera-and-selfimaged figure defines her behaviour. This raises questions in relation to the gaze and the act of being seen. Silverman asks: ‘How does one face a camera, or anticipate one’s photographic capture?’ (1996: 196). She argues that where there is a pose (a photographic imprinting of the body, the positioning of a representational body in space, thus converting it into a place and delimiting the frame), there is a mise-en-scène (1996: 203). Indeed, the poses in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière show this: The photos are often outlandish, showing young women with dishevelled hair, their nighties falling off their shoulders, pulling faces that may appear anything from distressed to ecstatic. One photo shows a woman with her body stiffened so she can lie, as if levitating, across the tops of two carefully placed chairs. Nothing about these photos seems ‘natural’ or off guard. They all have the aura of highly mannered theatre. (Grose, 2020: 14) But theatre is a moving, live artwork and a photograph is an object. In the recording, documentation, and categorisation, something is missing. The photographs

66 Mimesis and drawings index symptoms but fail to provide a narrative, a story told. As theatre, they are the promotional shots of a play: They were photographed to make up an album of hysteria, so as to decipher what they might possibly be saying by these postures. Which implies this: that these bodily states were semantic elements and that they could be linked together by a syntax. One would thus obtain sentences, regulated sequences, and, along with them, meaning. But the photograph which was to make them speak produces an opposite impression on us. It fixes the states in their suspended instability, isolates them one from another, does not restore the syntax linking them. It makes us see tensorial stances. (Lyotard, 1991: 132–133) At the time of taking the photographs in the Iconographie Photographique, these were indeed the days for play-acting before a new looking-glass that, as Barthes observes, reflects but does not mirror. When women were able to access cameras back then, we see how, in several instances including at the Salpêtrière, they used photography (even when not taking the photographs) to play out their desires, as if setting the stage for their own escape. In Becoming, the Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1999), Carol Mavor explores the mimetic practice of a mother with her daughters (1859–1865). Her mise-en-scène is a domestic interior … first-floor living room with balcony … a space which marks time as daughters pose and pass amongst its props … Images of mirror images (windows as reflectors, real and simulated doublings such as that enacted by sisters face to face through an open window) suggest the reduplication or doubling of the mother through her daughters. To reduplicate is not to create a simulacrum (a duplication) but to perform or make again, to trace. It implies the movement of longing for a first instance again, a reapproach, a looped or folded movement. The structure of Hawarden’s practice is reduplicative in that she as subject is never seen, apparent only through processes of mirroring. Here the camera is crucial in providing space for reflection between herself as subject and the viewer. Thus through reduplication Hawarden draws on her immediate environment, a room, the stage on which she sets her world. Through reduplication Clementina appears to use the camera, the dark room, to mediate an escape from that which historically has held them and their mothers – the domestic, the private, the framed, the drawing room. (Bowen, 2005) Doctors (in particular aliénistes, somewhat precursors of psychoanalysis), however, believed that some conditions could be cured by showing patients images of themselves (Gilman, 1993: 353). Gilman argues that the reason for that might be that photographs offer a radically different representation of the self to the

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self and thus produce a shock effect or startle (1993: 356). The mimetic aspect of photography, like that of the hysteric, might be unconscious rather than malicious. Hysterics suffered attacks that were photographed and, when they saw these images, they unconsciously mimicked them, taking them as the model in Girard’s mimetic desire (Figure 2.1). Some patients even recovered through seeing images of landscapes, so recognition of the image – knowing that the image was one’s self – did not seem important, but mimesis – embodying some of its aspects – was. The problem was that, like the rest of the world, psychiatric doctors at the time became besotted with photography or, more accurately, as Didi-Huberman writes, engoués, engorged: suffocated by swallowing too much, strangled from loving something too much (2003: 44). In Moving Pictures, Anne Hollander throws light on the passion for photography as it became more widely accessible, discussing the ‘emotional freight’ (1989: 446) carried by the photograph, particularly as smaller portable cameras with faster film enabled access to the general public, and thus to the family snap. ‘The snap, in the years between 1890 and 1910 a relatively new phenomenon, is experienced with some poignancy as, unlike the studio portrait, [it] is able to catch people in mid-flow, off-guard, in motion or posed on some intractable mood’ (Hollander, 1989: 446–447). Such snaps are the polar opposite of images of the hysteric in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. Gilman (1993: 379–402) outlines the visual qualities ascribed to the hysteric in the medical literature, showing the composite nature of this representation through photographic means: • • • • • • •

Immobility (which made it favourable to photographic representation and its reproduction and commodification in medical journals) Confusion over inherent physiognomy and that produced by hysteria, showing in an asymmetry, specifically hemiplegia: weakness, stiffness, or paralysis on one side of the body. This shakes the idea of beauty The specific gaze of the patients, the representation of their eyes marking them as diseased or mad The writing of symptoms in the skin (especially of genital regions – back to the womb – leading to hysterical ischuria: a stoppage or reduction in the flow of urine) The representation of contractures in hands and feet (reminiscent of possessions and epilepsy) The visual representation of posture and paralysis, hysterical gait ‘The scientific reduction of the sufferer and the disease to schematic representations’ (Gilman, 1993: 402) using diagrams, multiple photographs expressing movement, charts, tables, annotations, and graphs to enhance the realism of photography and represent the idea of hysteria as a whole

These images and the traces of hysteria in them demanded a trained eye, the expertise of the doctor to interpret them and see, in the outer appearance, a disturbance

68 Mimesis in the brain or the mind – thought to be the source of hysteria. But this reduction of the hysteric to signs, statistics, and diagrams is, of course, inaccurate. Photography provides a good illusion, yet the hysteric is impossible to frame or contain. The mimetic nature of her symptoms means that as soon as photographed, and when ready, she will move on. What were the hysterics mimicking? Gilman argues that these images were not of the patient, but of the condition: ‘The image is the essence of the patient, it gives the patient form as the creation of the doctor and the correct expression of the disease’ (Gilman, 1993: 358). As a neurotic, the hysteric hangs on to her symptom and demands the attention of authority, something we will investigate in Chapter Three when we look into mystery as a hysterical trait. The hysteric creates the image and, in turn, the image creates the hysteric, changing with subtle evolutions, the most fascinating of which is the transformation from the nineteenth-century female patient to the twentieth-century male shell shock sufferer (Showalter, 1985: 189–194). With this transformation comes also a shift in assumptions concerning treatment and cure, in that female hysterics were often seen as incurable, while suffering soldiers were not. To reduplicate is not to create a simulacrum, a duplication, but to perform or make again. The perception of photography as a ‘complex sort of mirror’ (Krauss, 1978: 46), an imprint or trace of the present moment, is demonstrated in a photograph of 1854 by the portraitist Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (1820–1910), known as Nadar.​ Pierrot the Photographer mirrors by miming. This is an early work of Nadar in collaboration with his brother, Adrien Tournachon. The mime is the pierrot Debureau, who mirrors or performs photography as both object (image) and act (the moment of photography, camera-time). Standing beside a tripod on which the camera is set, the clown’s left hand gestures across his body towards the camera while his right hand appears with a slight flourish like a crest behind and above the shutter, which he has apparently just raised.

Figure 2.4  Eleanor Bowen, ‘Trace (Pierrot the Photographer Reframed)’, taken from a copy of the photograph by Felix Nadar, 1854.

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Nadar shows us an image which may be read as a model for reduplication, the mime who mirrors the world with his body. Nadar’s carefully constructed portrait enacts photography itself, exposing the reduplicative moment as a trace and at the same time his own fascination with this as the central fact of photography, its dependence upon an act of passage between two bodies in the same space. The mime performs. In the familiar manner, momentarily holding his pose, he articulates in silence. Nadar the photographer lifts his shutter to encompass the moment and, as the shutter falls, the customary silence is punctured by a click. The hysteric performs. Like the mime, a clown who mirrors the world with his own body, the hysteric Augustine mirrors what she needs. A photograph of Charcot’s star patient shows the 15-year-old Augustine posing for a portrait ‘in her normal state’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 112). Showing a slightly self-conscious adolescent girl, this photograph was taken to act as a measure for all the others, in which she appears convulsed in various states of hysteria. Paul Richer’s synoptic table of the great hysterical attack, supposedly taken from the Saltpêtrière photographs, is an index of tiny drawn shapes set out in columns, like a manuscript of some kind. Looking closer, it becomes apparent that these are women in various states of disarray. Shockingly, ridiculously mimicking, miming people in the next ward or classical paintings they see on the hospital walls – a benevolent goddess, or the Virgin Mary gazing heavenwards. Then, getting desperate, or perhaps simply carried away, showing off, sticking their feet in the air or behind their head, doing a backward flip. Manic, mad, insensible. The body’s articulation here is distorted, speechless. The line of articulation rebounds incessantly between subject (hysteric) and symptom, in this case, represented by her photograph. And yet we want to find in imagery a way out, a space for discourse, for the voice(s) of hysteria. In the meantime, Charcot’s inscription of symptoms speaks in the doctor’s voice: Période de clownisme, Période des attitudes passionelles, Période de délire. Photographic indexicality is the subject of Nadar’s memoir (Krauss, 1978). In his terms, this is the physical proximity necessary for the tracing of a subject, that at the same time performs the miracle which seems to finally endow man himself with the divine power of creation: the power to give physical form to the insubstantial image that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, leaving no shadow in the mirror, no ripple on the surface of the water. (Tournachon, 1978: 8) The photographic object is formed in a moment, and in the same moment, we read the object in our own time. A photograph is historically a surface of resistance, in that a figure blocks light and shows up as an absence of light, an absence that is indexically linked to the figure – not copy but analogue re-presentation. Here we think of a passive

70 Mimesis subject but, conversely, we can think of the hysterical figure as an agent of signification as she performs for the camera. The figure signs what she cannot say.

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72 Mimesis Lyotard, Jean François (1991) ‘Speech Snapshot’. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 129–134. Marshall, Jonathan W (2020) ‘Traumatic Dances Of “The Non-Self”: Bodily Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 61–83. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.7 Mavor, Carol (1999) Becoming, the Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Micale, Mark S (1995) Approaching Hysteria. Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9780691194486 Munch, Edvard (1973) Edvard Munch 1863–1944 [exhibition catalogue]. London: Hayward Gallery. Nobus, Dany (1999) ‘Life and Death in the Glass: A New Look at the Mirror Stage’. Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Edited by Dany Nobus. New York: Other Press. 101–138. https://doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9780429476402-5 Nordau, Max (1895) Degeneration. Translator unknown. New York: D. Appleton and Company. https://doi​.org​/10​.1037​/13466​-000 Oughourlian, Jean-Michel (1991) The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Pichel, Beatriz (2017) ‘The Backstage of Hysteria: Medicine in the Photographic Studio’. Remedia. Available from https://remedianetwork​.net​/2017​/01​/16​/the​-backstage​-of​ -hysteria​-medicine​-in​-the​-photographic​-studio/. Accessed 09 February 2022. Richer, Paul (1881) Études Cliniques sur l'Hystéro-Épilepsie ou Grande Hystérie. Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier. Available from https://wellcomecollection​.org​/works​/ m3sfzk33. Accessed 27 January 2022. Scarry, Elaine (1998) ‘On Beauty and Being Just’. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 25 and 26 March. Yale University. https://tannerlectures​.utah​.edu/​_documents​/a​-to​-z​/s​ /scarry00​.pdf. Accessed 07 October 2020. Scull, Andrew (2009) Hysteria: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Showalter, Elaine (1985) The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon Books. Silverman, Kaja (1996) The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge. https://doi​ .org​/10​.4324​/9781315811581 Sontag, Susan (1977) ‘In Plato’s Cave’. On Photography. London: Penguin. 1–24. Stone, Jon, Charles Warlow, Alan Carson and Michael Sharpe (2005) ‘Eliot Slater’s Myth of the Non-existence of Hysteria’. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 98. (December). 547–548. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/014107680509801214 Taylor, Diana (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Cultural Memory and Performance in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​ /9780822385318 Taylor-Johnson, Sam (1997) Hysteria [video]. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =33PZhpay8gM. Accessed 08 March 2021. Tisseron, Serge (1996) The Mystery of the Camera Lucida: Photography and the Unconscious [Le Mystère de la chambre claire. Photographie et inconscient]. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Tournachon, Gaspard-Felix (Nadar) (1978) ‘My Life as a Photographer’. Translated by Thomas Repensek. October, 5.Photography (Summer). 6–28. https://doi​.org​/778642

Mimesis 

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Trench, Wilbraham Fitzjohn (1933) ‘Mimesis in Aristotle’s Poetics’. Hermathena, 23.48. 1–24. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (2015) Silencing the Past. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Wakeford, Eleanor (2020) ‘Marianna Simnett: Contagion and Monstrous Politics’. CLOT Magazine. https://www​.clotmag​.com​/oped​/marianna​-simnett​-contagion​-and​ -monstrous​-politics​-by​-eleanor​-wakeford. Accessed 19 August 2020. Weir, Lucy (2018) Pina Bausch’s Dance Theatre: Tracing the Evolution of Tanztheater. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2006) How to Read Lacan. London: Granta.

3

Mystery

The hysteric encompasses various mysteries: the mystery of the attitudes passionnelles, of her body and its sensations, of catalepsy, of conversion, of displacement, and ‘the red mystery of the feminine’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 271). Elisabeth Bronfen states that, in the hysteric’s theatrical performance, she ‘enacts a ciphered message’ (1998: 34). Through her symptoms, which have no organic cause, she sends a codified message to us. She is baffling, recalcitrant, and protean (Scull, 2009: 23). Her message is a persistent riddle, difficult to understand and explain, expressed ambiguously through the mechanism of mimesis. And it goes beyond that; it is also an ‘opaque, overdetermined cypher for wider social crises’ (Marshall, 2020: 72).

The hysteric’s riddle Whose riddle? Isn’t the riddle constructed by those who place her under scrutiny and ensure distance? It elicits the words of experts and images (she creates) that position her as other. If she has anything to say, we don’t hear it. We only see the body language as she, enfolded within the linear narrative of expertise and knowledge, flips backwards and sees momentarily from upside down. A carnivalesque subversion like that of Bakhtin (1984) as he finds, in the language of Rabelais, structures for rebellion? Images of reversal (Elliot, 1999) down side up up side down another folding

DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-5

Mystery  75 In 1987 performers apprehended, in the disposition of each body drawn for the Études Cliniques, a double movement effecting, like an undertow, the scraping back of a great tide of feeling (Hunter, 1998). anger contempt fear ridicule desire In an articulation of the relation between symbol and symptom, Didi-Huberman ascribes part of the mystery to the rhythm of the symptom: a withdrawal, a return of this withdrawal, and an equivocation between the withdrawal itself and its return presentation (2005: 179). He understands the symptom ‘as movement in bodies’ (Didi-Huberman, 2004: 15). Cathy Caruth, on the other hand, attributes part of this mystery to trauma and to a specific relationship to time that comes with it. The association of hysteria to trauma is not difficult to see if we consider that one of the most common current forms of hysteria is post-traumatic stress disorder. Freud already linked trauma and hysteria aetiologically in Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]). Caruth defines trauma as: the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flash-backs, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena. Traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness. The repetitions of the traumatic event – which remain unavailable to consciousness but intrude repeatedly on sight – thus suggest a larger relation to the event that extends beyond what can simply be seen or what can be known, and is inextricably tied up with the belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing. (Caruth, 1996: 91–92) Thus, the traumatic event has not been fully experienced and returns repeatedly as a remainder image – memories, screen-memories, fantasies, protective fictions, hallucinations – possessing the hysteric (Caruth, 1995: 4–5). Trauma can also return as a belated response in which the remainder is played out mysteriously, perhaps as a mimetic event. The psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit – afterwardness, deferred action or après coup – warrants attention in relation to the hysteric and her trauma. Afterwardness designates a phenomenon where impressions, experiences, or traces of memory become active or gain significance as they are relived, as a result of re-experiencing an event. Afterwardness has eclipses and active moments (Laplanche, 2006: 20). Jean Laplanche, in his examination of this concept, gave it two directions: a deterministic or progressive one (favoured by Freud) in which the past conditions the present, or a hermeneutic or retroactive one, in which elements of the past are interpreted in relation to the present situation (Laplanche, 1992). It is possible to consider afterwardness as a combination of these opposing directions without incurring a contradiction if we consider what Jean Laplanche calls the ‘implantation of the [other’s] enigmatic message’,

76 Mystery a concept which echoes the hysteric’s riddle. Laplanche relates these progressive and retrogressive modes to interpretation: So we arrive at this idea: even if we concentrate all our efforts on the retroactive temporal direction, in the sense that someone reinterprets their past, this past cannot be a pure or factual one – a ‘raw given’; it contains rather in an immanent fashion something that comes before – a message from the other. It’s impossible therefore just to hold a hermeneutic position on this – that is to say that everyone interprets their past according to their present – because their past already has something deposited in it that needs to be deciphered, which is the message of the third person. (Laplanche, 1992: 222) Afterwardness is present in the use the hysteric makes of her photographs and their temporality at the Salpêtrière – what Baudrillard termed the freeze-frame, as discussed in the last section of Chapter Two. The move from silent passivity to a position of agency is one that must be performed, and to do this a new move and an unprecedented language must be forged in order to break the frame. [in] her language … ‘she’ sets off in all directions … Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. For in what she says, too, at least when she dares, woman is constantly touching herself. She steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a murmur, an exclamation, a whisper, a sentence left unfinished … When she returns, it is to set off again from elsewhere. From another point of pleasure, or of pain. One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an ‘other meaning’ always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. For if ‘she’ says something, it is not, it is already no longer, identical with what she means. What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon). (Irigaray, 1985: 29) Thus ‘Irigaray argues that the woman’s “cure” is to allow her to speak her own discourse, one that, analogous to her own body … is not structured by similarity, but by difference, not ordered by substitution but by contiguity’ (Price Herndl, 1988: 63). Moreover, Irigaray ‘posits a listener’ – a reader – who is ready to hear and see, who will allow the discourse of spoken and embodied language to ‘proceed by its own logic’ (Price Herndl, 1988: 63). Still blur draws me to the point, the punctum (Barthes 1980), the cut through space that creates the still. It is not that movement itself animates, because movement in a photograph emphasises arrest. We cannot see movement, the

Mystery  77 moment, but held in tension with now, a gap opens between moments, hers and ours. The performance, the exploration, the not knowing becomes a double subject. (Bowen, 2008: 31) Roland Barthes’ punctum is a quality independent of technique or aesthetics. The photographs of the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière are thus an invocation for the photographic object to emerge from the disappearance of the subject. As the punctum cannot be targeted, photography always requires a passage à l'acte, a precipitous, all-at-once act (Butler, 2005). Contiguity, the state of bordering or being in contact with something. Her image must avoid becoming fixed, immobilised. It is not she herself but who she is, contiguous with herself. The hysteric’s riddle appears not only in her symptoms but also in transference, the relation between analyst and patient. Incidentally, transference is also the name that Charcot used to describe the displacement of symptoms and their movement around the body after the application of varying therapies, which he had a tendency to induce (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 214). Under Freud, transference refers to the displacement of affects and their concentration around the person of the analyst. The Freudian transference happens in every analytic encounter (for it is the movement force of therapy) but, for a while, hysterical symptoms seemed to be prevalent too. Andrew Scull refers to the English doctor Thomas Sydenham, who remarked that no chronic disease occurs so frequently as hysteria, this most mutable but strangely enduring of disorders. ‘As much as a sixth of his clientele, he announced, were of the hysterical persuasion, victims of “a farrago of disorderly and irregular phenomena”’ (Scull, 2009: 32).

Lacan’s hysteric Jacques Lacan reoriented the doctors’ thinking on hysterics. His core work developed in the classroom and his famous seminar has since been published along with some of his writings in the collection Écrits, which are known for being complex, even impenetrable. Madan Sarup writes that ‘Lacan’s writings are a rebus because his style mimics the subject matter. He not only explicates the unconscious but strives to imitate it’ (1992: 80). Jane Gallop equates the experience of reading Lacan to that of undergoing analysis, ‘complete with passion, pain, desire to know, transference’ (1985: 53). This is true of both Écrits and his seminars and contrasts with Freud’s lucid, easy prose. Susan David Bernstein takes it further and asks whether readers of Lacan suffer from hysteric symptoms (1989). At the same time, the syntax, euphony, and composition of the seminars are also seductive. but the form he’s left is offensive for some getting in the way of actuality, yours and his

78 Mystery his means of expression, the note-taking that spawns Écrits. The true picture, in as far as pictures are true. That’s the problem you are left with a sense that his pictures are true. Framing you Augustine Photograph Photographed body/self taken/given given away Self Image taken up by surrealism for art sur real taken up by/given to Lacan for image The figure of Augustine herself is taken/given as a photograph, to whom tribute is paid by that group of artists women and men who called themselves surreal. Celebrating the ‘fiftieth anniversary of hysteria’ (Aragon and Breton, 1928), or rather that particular configuration of hysteria, the surrealist group – André Breton, Louis Aragon, and others – declared their wish to ‘celebrate … the greatest poetic discovery of the late nineteenth century’ (1928: 20), proposing a new definition of hysteria … a more or less irreducible mental state characterised by the subversion of the relations established between the subject and the moral world in which he thinks for all practical purposes he belongs, outside of any kind of delirious system. (1928: 22, author’s translation; the gendering of the subject as male is potentially only linguistic as in French the noun subject is masculine) The experience of millions during and after the Great War had blown all presuppositions about human suffering – including mental illness – out of the water. The pre-war framings of society in Europe had been shattered. What many people now experienced was displacement. There were no definitive answers and thus, in the post-war context, the hysteric figure took on new meaning. It could now be said to stand for something other than madness. This was a familiar figure now that made public sense for the first time in human history, or perhaps, if it had made sense before, it was only artists who had recorded that, without words. Without voice. Think of Grunewald’s altarpiece, the soundless exorcism. These artists, some of whom had experienced the front line and all the trauma of that hellish war, declared in their Manifesto of 1928 that ‘Hysteria is not a

Mystery  79 pathological phenomenon and can be considered, in every respect, a supreme means of expression’ (Aragon and Breton, 1928: 22, author’s translation). So how does the doctor dare re-frame suffering – re-frame the psyche itself – and get away with it? Jacques Lacan moves away from symptoms and re-frames hysteria as a structure: ‘This means that a subject may well exhibit none of the typical bodily symptoms of hysteria and yet still be diagnosed as a hysteric by a Lacanian analyst’ (Evans, 1996: 79). He offered his main innovation in the thinking around the hysteric in a theory called the four discourses, outlined in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (2007). The four discourses detail specific relations (between master and slave, university teacher and student, psychoanalyst and patient, hysteric and physician) and what it means to speak within them. Yet, in Lacanian terms, ‘hysteria, as a clinical structure, must be distinguished from Lacan’s concept of the discourse of the hysteric, which designates a particular form of social bond’ (Evans, 1996: 80). The clinical structure designates a position within desire – appropriating another’s desire by identifying with them, as we propose in Chapter Two – whereas the discourse explains what it means to speak as a hystericised person. And it is the privileged relation between desire and hysteria as a structure that leads Lacan to create the discourses and develop the idea that psychoanalytic treatment involves hystericising the patient (Evans, 1996: 80). The different social bonds in the discourses are revealed in the form of quasiequations; they look like equations but are only reminiscent of mathematics, a form Lacan loved, for his seminars are full of schemas. In these equations, four elements are rotated into four positions (Figure 3.1), which show the relation between an agent speaking from a position of truth and an other who produces something that is then lost. The elements of the discourses are: • • • •

S1: a Master Signifier, or a signifier outside the chain of signification S: the barred subject or subject of speech a: objet petit a, or the object cause of desire, surplus jouissance S2: the signifying other, the place from which one speaks, or knowledge

Lacan played out relations and elements in different configurations for his four discourses. He starts with the discourse of the master, and then rotates the terms anticlockwise to reach the discourse of the university, then the analyst and, finally, the hysteric (Figure 3.2). Incidentally, Lacan also briefly defined a fifth discourse,

Agent ————— Truth

Other ————— Product (Loss)

Figure 3.1  The positions of Jacques Lacan’s four discourses from Seminar XVII (2007).

80 Mystery Discourse of the Master

Discourse of the University

S1

S2

S2

a

S

a

S1

S

Discourse of the Analyst

Discourse of the Hysteric

a

S

S

S1

S2

S1

a

S2

Figure 3.2  Jacques Lacan’s four discourses from Seminar XVII (2007).

the discourse of the capitalist, with the other’s side like that of the slave in the master’s discourse and the agent’s side with barred S over the master signifier. Anouchka Grose outlines a relation between Lacan and the Salpêtrière, a sort of translation that Lacan effects of Charcot’s synoptic table and the materials found in the Iconographie Photographique: Lacan is definitely a master of the non-illustrative. He is quite dismissive of what he calls ‘the imaginary’ – the fantasy overlay that many of us might refer to as ‘reality’ but which, for Lacan, is simply there to protect us from ‘the real’. So he uses equations in order to replace ‘the imaginary’ with ‘the symbolic’, which he sees as less seductive and illusory – not a fiction designed to comfort and blind you, but a better way to get at some kind of truth. Instead of pictures of girls doing weird things you have a series of perplexing-looking equations. (Grose, 2020: 15) If the perplexity and the strangeness are still there, this is part of the hysteric’s strategy to make us stop, look, and listen. Let us go back to Francesca Woodman’s 1976 photograph ‘On Being an Angel’ in order to read Lacan’s discourse of the hysteric through it. Francesca herself is the hysteric, the agent, S, the split, barred, alienated subject, the woman bent backwards. In her silence, she speaks to us open-mouthed and breasts up, from the position of the object that causes desire, objet petit a. She addresses us, the viewer, also her symptom, whose object of desire she wants to be. We try to make sense of what we see and listen to what she might be uttering. In this exchange, this offering of the symptom and effort at understanding it, knowledge might be produced, but the insight is lost. Lacan gives us his backward/forward diagram, threadings of articulacy. It could be said that, if we take the aforementioned Woodman analysis as an example of Lacanian logic then, if it were not simply an intellectual exercise, it might

Mystery  81 be considered entitled and uncritical in taking its rigid stance, assuming only the perspective that serves its desire and feeds its assumptions. From whose perspective is this figure seen as an object (petit a) of desire? Who is it that sees? For this figure, ‘she’, may be viewed from perspectives other than this as, perhaps, an object of pity, mirth, fear, wonder, perplexity, or consternation. From this, we understand how the articulation of the split subject goes nowhere, for that which it addresses is the very symptom that portrays and betrays it. Like a photograph, it binds her to who she is, and the movement is circular. In a similar movement Virginia Woolf envisaged her anti-novel The Waves (1931) as an image, setting off circular rhythms across the page, a little ship turning and turning. Woolf repeatedly speaks of The Waves in imagistic terms, although, in terms opposing Woolf’s own modernist vision which emphasises structure, it has been described more contemporarily as ‘a verbalisation of a mystical vision’ (Mulas, 2005). This – as Lacan would say, following the trajectory of discourse ‘as a signifying articulation’ (Wajcman, 2003) – is language sent out, not in a linear way, but circulating, making sense, a rhythm of words with which Woolf articulates the tacit knowledge she calls ecstatic (Woolf, 1931). Taken out of the big picture, it is a language of relations. The four discourses show that, for Lacan, it is the hysteric’s discourse that produces knowledge even if that knowledge is also lost. Knowledge is not the domain of the university – which produces split subjects, supporting a ‘fixed, preexisting knowledge, inevitably in support of the master’s ideology’ (Grose, 2020: 17). It is not found as a product of the master–slave relation, which produces objects that cause desire, along with the capitalist discourse. It is also not in the analyst discourse, which produces the symptom, even if he speaks from the place of the objet petit a and puts dominant ideas in question, and even if this discourse is the inverse of the master’s (Grose, 2020: 17). Of the hysteric, Anouchka Grose writes: The barred subject is the agent this time. She addresses the master, driven by the effects of her surplus jouissance – the truth that underpins her – thereby generating knowledge. The hysteric insists on telling the master about her excessive stuff – the fact that she doesn’t quite fit into the limited discourse he has provided – thereby producing new forms of knowledge. The hysteric causes the master to think. In this sense, hysterics are very good subjects to have around because they stop people closing things down and answering questions too quickly. They keep discourse moving, and for this reason, Lacan equates the hysteric and the scientist: the person who isn’t complacent about the phenomena they observe and experience. (Grose, 2020: 15–17) So, referencing the barred subject, Woodman offers her body/self as a spectacle, concerned, like Woolf, with drawing a ‘self’ through the perspectives accrued around it, while Woolf aimed to free the subject from monocular authorship by drawing it through multiplicity.

82 Mystery Jouissance is a French word that, when referring to Lacan’s concept, tends to be left untranslated. It is a term that can clumsily be translated as enjoyment, but Lacanian jouissance has a trace of what happens when you have too much of a good thing. It is not enjoyment. It is too much enjoyment, so much that you want it to stop. Jouissance is excess. The eros of pleasure eventually leads to thanatos, the death drive, Freud’s contribution as outlined in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (Freud, 2001 [1920]). Dylan Evans observes that jouissance ‘expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his own satisfaction (Freud’s “primary gain from illness”)’ (Evans, 1996: 93). In Seminar XX, Encore, Lacan describes jouissance as a bodily substance (1998: 23), a secretion, one of the key products of the hysteric. Feminists have ascertained that hysteria, in Freudian terms, is jouissance itself distorted by patriarchy. Jouissance is a transcendent state and attaining it frees the hysteric from oppression. In an introduction to Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s The Newly Born Woman, Sandra Gilbert writes about woman, the hysteric, and the tarantella. She discusses Cixous’s writing and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, defining jouissance as: a virtually metaphysical fulfilment of desire that goes far beyond any satisfaction that could be imagined by Hugh Hefner and his minions […] [fusing] the erotic, the mystical, and the political that sometimes seems to characterize Cixous's thought on this subject, for Connie’s coming to sexuality is also a coming to selfhood and coming away from the historically hegemonic Western ‘nerve-brain’ consciousness that would subordinate body to mind, blood to brain, passion to reason. (Gilbert, 1986: xvii) In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous and Clément write about the need for ‘transcending the heresies of history and the history of hysteria, [the newborn woman] must fly/flee into a new heaven and a new earth of her own invention’ (Gilbert, 1986: xiv), perhaps into an age of post-hysteria. The artist Shannon Bell performs Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Arch of Hysteria’, finding in its suspension a fold between pain and ecstasy, linking hysteria to female orgasm (2014: 207). She also tattooed on her body a posthysteric discourse (Figure 3.3), which she defines in her article on Dora (whom she renames D’Or): ‘The hysteric as represented by Freud and produced by Lacan paved the way for the posthysteric’ (2014: 197). She moves three of the elements around, but keeps knowledge in position. In her discourse, the agent is jouissance. With this discourse, she adds a spike to Bourgeois’s arch: erection and the female ejaculating phallus (2014: 207). Thus, Bell’s posthysteric is a circuit breaker, a queer practitioner that shows, quoting Lacan’s Seminar XVII, ‘the magnitude of what she as a woman is capable of revealing concerning jouissance’ (Bell, 2014: 208). Keira O’Reilly (2015) had a dream of having Shannon Bell’s work replace the print of Brouillet’s Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière, which we discussed in Chapter Two, which is placed above Freud’s couch in his house in London.

Mystery  83

a

S

———

————

S1

S2

Figure 3.3  Discourse of the posthysteric by Shannon Bell (2014).

While hysteria and knowledge are linked, for Lacan, investigating hysteria is not how knowledge is produced. ‘The desire to know is not what leads to knowledge’ (Lacan, 2007: 23). This is, perhaps, why medical discourse and the doctor’s voice have failed in relation to hysteria, now that it has disappeared from diagnostic manuals and ended up fragmented, replaced by other conditions – and yet not replaced, simply redistributed and re-named. Such a history, privileging the doctor’s voice, demonstrates the failure of knowledge to unveil the mystery of hysteria – and thus, of the mind–body connection. Hysteria itself, as a condition, has not disappeared, although medical interest in it has (Stone et al., 2008). We acknowledge that our voice here, too, can sound privileged, for in our tracing of the hysteric we have not provided our readers with her voice yet. This will come in the next two chapters. We are preparing a space for the hysteric to speak. Hysteria as a Freudian clinical concept is different from Lacan’s hysteric’s discourse, which designates a specific social bond. One does not need to be a hysteric, in the clinical sense, to enter the discourse of the hysteric, but, of course, the hysteric is in this discourse. Analysis, diagnosis, and symptomatology are signs of power and hegemony, a form of control. The hysteric fails to produce a kind of knowledge that is expected, and this is portrayed as a feminine failure, misknown and misunderstood. The knowledge the hysteric produces is linked to the French savoir, a symbolic, intersubjective supposed knowledge that is related to jouissance and gained in relation to an other, instead of connaissance, imaginary knowledge or even self-knowledge (Evans, 1996: 96–97). In order to produce knowledge, one has to do it, according to Lacan, through ‘the hysterization of discourse. In other words, it is the structural introduction, under artificial conditions, of the hysteric’s discourse’ (Lacan, 2007: 33). There needs to be jouissance. Knowledge was hoped for by those who were supposed to know, and thus a supposition of knowing displaced actual knowing. That the supposition of knowing displaces actual knowing forms an echo. Displacement is a consequence of the act of folding. So our folding process becomes significant in itself, although the significance (for now) escapes us. Folding involves the displacement, by secretion, of parts of a whole. To fold is to conceal, but at the same time to envelop. Knowledge is not discarded but kept within the fold. Thus secrets are made.

84 Mystery Art allows one to enter the discourse of the hysteric and unveil knowledge, bringing it to light and allowing it to be experienced. This is explored in detail in the book chapter ‘Work of Art as Analyst as Work of Art’ (González, 2018). The problem here is that language by itself, even artistic language, does not release the hysteric. It is not language per se that rescues the hysteric, but a language attached to a more affectual or embodied imaginary, where ‘she’ can own not just one, but many desires. A focus on language and representation misses the fundamental meaning of the hysteric’s mimesis which is a staged performance for the other, but it is a peculiar narration in the sense that it is one-sided. […] She is like a soap opera star forced to play the same role, over and over again. (Campbell, 2005: 346) This might be because, we argue, hysteria itself is a language rather than a disease and we need to pay attention to the hysteric utterance, to what it is telling us, rather than ask her to convert her insight into something readily understandable. It is we who must do the work. In order to share the knowledge of the hysteric, hysterical language is required. The potential for this is in creative practice, and Shannon Bell’s work is a good example. But for that, we must erase the doctor’s voice; we must try not to ventriloquise the ways that language is used in other disciplines, which we might associate with knowledge but which might be only reproducing the other discourses. As Anouchka Grose writes: it’s the discourse of the hysteric that pushes for recognition, requiring the counterpart discourse of the analyst to bring it to its full fruition. (And, likewise, the university supports the master.) So it’s the hysteric’s discourse that can open things up and produce change, which leads to the paradoxical idea that the aim of psychoanalysis could be to hystericize the patient. You’re no longer trying to cure the hysterics and make them fit in. You’re trying to shake up the locked down obsessionals (the university knowledge types) in order that the master can be questioned. (Grose, 2020: 17) But the discourse of the hysteric and Lacan’s approach has its critique too. According to Braunstein, it might not satisfy the hysteric, who, as we saw in Chapter One, is oscillating, fragmented, provisional, and constantly shifting but longs to gain a status that regulates the condition of woman: ‘This is why the formula of the hysteric’s discourse includes that unrelenting search for a master who might respond without ambiguity to the question of the being of woman’ (Braunstein, 1995: 78). This master comes in the form of priests, doctors, professors, and psychoanalysts. But we know from earlier chapters and Lacan’s own discourses that the knowledge these masters bring fails, is not rooted in truth, and is disconnected from her desire: ‘It is a master who, as soon as he thinks he really

Mystery  85 is a master, winds up transformed into a beast or, even worse, a fool’ (Braunstein, 1995: 79). So we are back where we started. Jan Campbell critiques Lacan’s preference for a mental and linguistic imaginary over one of embodiment, and Lacan’s apparent casting aside of the body has already been challenged by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the feminist Luce Irigaray (Campbell, 2005: 341). Irigaray places the hysteric centre stage: not staging herself ‘as Lacan thought in order to narrate herself for the other, for she mimes and exists as the other’ (Campbell, 2005: 346). At a more fundamental level, psychoanalytic discourse and especially Lacanian (due to reliance on concepts such as the phallus) can be seen as masculine, patriarchal, male-founded, and male-dominated, even if some feminists have argued that, if ‘understood as a descriptive, not prescriptive discourse, [it] helps to explain the workings of sexual power’ (Price Herndl, 1988: 55). But Lacan was against any biological determinism (Evans, 1996: 19) and his phallus is a signifier, not an organ. The discourse of the hysteric offers a framework for thinking, writing, and reading the hysteric even if, in the process, we traverse his work.

What do you want from me? For Lacan, neurosis is a structure that asks questions. Where the obsessional neurotic asks about existence – like Hamlet, to be or not to be? – the hysteric asks about a position with respect to the Other’s desire. Classically, the question is Che vuoi? What do you want from me? (Lacan, 2007). This is the question of desire for Lacan, and not ‘What do I want?’ He switched from his natural French speech to Italian, perhaps to dramatically emphasise the question, which tends to come with a gesture. It could also be in a language foreign to Lacan to stress that desire is always a desire for the Other’s desire, and even more so in the hysteric. This is why mimesis is one of her fundamental traits. Or maybe the strange articulation of the hysteric’s question has a simpler origin: We see this Other to whom he fundamentally asks a question in The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte; it is the bellowing of the terrifying form that represents the appearance of the superego, in response to he who invoked it in a Neapolitan cave; the response is ‘Che vuoi?’ or ‘What do you want?’ (Lacan, 2019: 15) Lacan placed this question on the third stage of his complex graph of desire (Lacan, 2006 [1966]: 690, 2019: 15). Slavoj Žižek, in his study of ideology, describes the question as: ‘Che vuoi?’ – ‘You’re telling me that, but what do you want with it, what are you aiming at?’ This question mark … thus indicates the persistence of a gap between utterance and its enunciation: at the level of utterance you’re saying this, but what do you want to tell me with it, through it? … And it is at this exact place of the question arising above the utterance, at the place of, ‘Why are you telling me

86 Mystery this?’, that we have to locate desire … in its difference to demand: you demand something of me, but what do you really want, what are you aiming at through this demand? This split between demand and desire is what defines the position of the hysterical subject: according to the classic Lacanian formula, the logic of the hysterical demand is ‘I’m demanding this of you, but what I’m really demanding of you is to refute my demand because this is not it!’ (Žižek, 1989: 123–124) The hysteric addresses Che vuoi? to her own idea of authority and the law (what is known as the Other or Big Other, as opposed to the other of alterity), and this not only speaks of desire but also raises the issue of what one might do with it. The question, although posed, does not have an answer and both neurotic questions ‘are as it happens the two ultimate questions that have precisely no solution in the signifier. This is what gives neurotics their existential value’ (Lacan, 1993: 190). This shows how the hysteric is interested in enigmas that ‘do not have solutions’ (Safouan, 1980: 57). Fantasy, as defined by Lacan in his matheme and which we discussed in Chapter Two, is a potential and momentary answer to the question. This is not a fantasy that satisfies desire, but a fantasy that shows the hysteric how to desire, that defends her against the desire of the Other (Žižek, 1989: 128–132). In 1956, Lacan took up the question of sexual position and reinstated the classic link between hysteria and femininity, for both men and women. The new question he phrased was ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ or ‘What is a woman?’ (Lacan, 1993: 170–175). Woman, however, does not refer to biology, but to ‘a position in the symbolic order’ (Evans, 1996: 222). Shannon Bell also introduces the defining question of the posthysteric: ‘How to …?’, specifically ‘How to [female] ejaculate?’ It is the asking and answering of this question that marks the postness of the hysteric (Bell, 2014: 208). The hysteric ‘sustains another person’s desire, converts another’s desire into her own’ (Evans, 1996: 39), as we will see in Chapter Four, with the analysis of Sigmund Freud’s most famous patient, Dora. Hysterics appropriate another’s desire and identify with them. At the same time, they give up the position of the object of desire themselves; they identify with the desiring subject but are no object: ‘in the case of the hysteric, inasmuch as desire is sustained in fantasy only by the lack of satisfaction the hysteric brings desire by slipping away as its object’ (Lacan, 2006 [1966]: 698). This is a condition for sustaining the desire of the Other because being taken as an object would reopen a wound: [the hysteric] strives to get his partner to accept his privation, in the name of which all his efforts at love, his detailed caring and tender services, are in vain, since he reawakens the said wound of privation. There is no compensation for this wound in the satisfaction that its bearer purportedly derives from alleviating it. On the contrary, it is reawakened by its very presence, by the presence of that thing the regret for which causes this wound. This is exactly what was revealed to us by what Freud was able to extract from

Mystery  87 the hysteric’s discourse. It is the basis on which we can understand how the hysteric ­symbolizes the initial non-satisfaction. (Lacan, 2007: 73–74) For Lacan, hysteria helps us see the structure of desire itself. Thus ‘what is important in the analysis of a hysteric is not to find out the object of her desire but to discover the place from which she desires (the subject with whom she identifies)’ (Evans, 1996: 39). But there is a fundamental faithlessness to the hysteric’s intrigue and mystery (Lacan, 2006 [1966]: 698), which translates to witnesses and viewers as shape-shifting, a visual consequence of her mimetic ability. She does not believe in herself, or in what she represents, and thus her own identity remains, for herself, at the level of fantasy: The hysteric thus goes through the world doubting her identity, trying to define what she is, what her proper name is (that proper name that ‘importunes’ her), imitating various identities that are similar to roles (social, theatrical), fishing for the nature of the Other’s desire in order to identify with the object of that desire and thus attain a fantasy identity. (Braunstein, 1995: 79) Even in this faithlessness, and even when silenced by doctors or undermined in her symptoms, the hysteric does ask her question, through her body: ‘when the hysteric presents her riddled body to the physician, even though mute, she poses her question’ (Wajcman, 2003). In hysteria and in the discourse of the hysteric, the body is the site of knowledge production, a kind of knowledge that is not only distinct from intellectual processes but enables the experience of understanding the mind–body, the connection between two realms we tend to perceive as separate but are not. This is the crystal Didi-Huberman mentioned in relation to the Salpêtrière, to which we referred in Chapter One.

Talking the hysteric The hysteric is a cultural and clinical riddle (Bronfen, 1998: 16), like all neurotics having a peculiar relation to pleasure, pain, and reality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the classic case history of Anna O, whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim. We will be addressing her by her pseudonym when referring to the clinical case, and by her real name when discussing her life, a full account of which has been presented by Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester in Freud’s Women (1992). Bertha was a feminist writer and the co-founder and 20-year president of the German Jewish Women’s League (Price Herndl, 1988: 52). When suffering from hysteria, she was young and by all accounts very intelligent, but had to forego her higher education to take care of her dying father. Freud never met her. She was Breuer’s patient, and the symptoms she displayed were anorexia, cough, hemiplegia, headaches, sense disturbances (to vision, speech, and hearing),

88 Mystery somnambulism, hallucinations, blackouts, and confusing changes of personality. Eventually, she also suffered from aphasia, an inability to understand or utter words. She was treated with hypnosis initially but, at one point, she decided to just talk to Breuer. Thus, she can be credited with making concrete two of the main tenets of psychoanalysis: its therapeutic process as a ‘talking cure’ – this is Anna’s term (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 30) – and free association, or ‘chimney sweeping’ (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 30), although the term was suggested by another hysteric, ‘Fräulein Elisabeth von R’ (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 135–181). Free association is what the patient is asked to do in psychoanalysis. The third tenet, transference, is fully fledged in Freud’s case history of Dora, which we will address in the next chapter. In the therapeutic relationship, the patient is asked to free associate, to say everything that comes into her head. The analyst, on the other hand, listens without memory or desire (Bion, 1967), evenly hovering attention, in a state of reverie or meditation that allows the mind to be aware of more than one dimension at once, refusing to make one thing more important than others. Also named free floating attentiveness, evenly hovering attention requires both indifference and engagement, and this may seem, at first, to be at cross purposes. The analyst needs to be actively listening, with interest and attention. Yet, she also needs to be indifferent in terms of the content of the patient’s free associations, not giving more emphasis to aspects of the narrative just because they have social or cultural importance attached to them. Technically, decor details might be as important as a loved one’s death, for example. Both of these injunctions, to free associate and to evenly hover one’s attention, are impossible to fulfil completely. Here, we are reading Anna O’s case as a written work, not with a clinical view on the accuracy of her diagnosis or how well she might have recovered under Breuer’s care (both of which are contended) but considering how she is portrayed in Studies on Hysteria’s writing and how the mysterious qualities of her symptomatology are recounted. In her analysis of Anna O, Dianne Hunter expresses how the term hysteric has been used to demean women’s work towards their liberation, equating hysterics and feminists as excessive: ‘Hysteria is a selfrepudiating form of feminine discourse in which the body signifies what social conditions make it impossible to state linguistically’ (Hunter, 1983: 485). The language alluded to is what Luce Irigaray came to understand as related to the Freudian superego, or the Lacanian Other, the law to whom the hysteric’s question is asked. Lack of words, in a way, is what leads to hysteria (Price Herndl, 1988: 58–59): The hysteric is the woman who has no unconscious representation of her sexuality, and who therefore experiences the no-thing directly, without the mediation of language. Without the possibility of re-presentation, she experiences absence as if it were present, continually. She lacks the structural, linguistic framework for ordering experience, so she experiences the anxiety, the too-muchness of experience, directly in her body. This helps to explain the repeated theme of language disturbances in hysteria […] Because the

Mystery  89 hysteric lacks the spatial-temporal distance gained from the framework of language, she experiences the world as if it were continually present to her. (Price Herndl, 1988: 61–62) They had no vocabulary for it. A mask forms before (or instead of) vocabulary. A mask may be other than visual. It may be gesture or sound, skin disease, loss of voice, or disease of breath itself. Symptom. Yet, hysteria is also a language, not merely a form of expression as surrealists claimed, but one with a message. To decipher the mysterious message of the hysteric requires an accurate key. Freud described hysterical symptoms as ‘pictographic script which has become intelligible after the discovery of a few bilingual inscriptions’ (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 129) and in psychoanalysis, Hunter argues, these affects are translated into words (Hunter, 1983: 484) formulating the Other, if we follow Irigaray. So, another way out must be found. For Irigaray, this way is contiguity as we mentioned earlier, a way for the hysteric to ‘speak her own discourse, one that, analogous to her body […] is not structured by similarity, but by difference’ (Price Herndl, 1988: 63). Diane Price Herndl also discusses Michèle Montrelay’s idea for a cure through language: through metaphor, a seemingly opposing operation. Yet, in order to change the characterisation and narrative of the hysteric, both are needed: a way, as it were, to fully hystericise discourse without the hysteria itself, without the need to embody it. But the importance of the discursive aspects must not be underestimated. It is not only talking that relieved Anna O’s symptoms. It was being listened to, without being made into an object (Price Herndl, 1988: 66; Hunter, 1983: 466). But as Showalter argues, the hysteric’s story was incomplete, rough, distorted, and rearranged. She attributes the meaning of hysteria (beyond simply being another symptom) precisely to this inability to tell an orderly story. And yet, the doctors did just that (1993: 25–26). The doctors also listened and learned from the hysteric’s talk. And the doctors talked too. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was the subject of most scientific publications in Europe (Hunter, 1983: 466) and that interest has continued to this day, even if it is no longer widely diagnosed. Lacanian analyst Gérard Wajcman, in his paper ‘The Hysteric’s Discourse’ (2003), explains how the history and condition of hysteria usher talking about it. The history of hysteria, Wajcman writes, would demonstrate the failure of knowledge to unveil the mystery, as can be seen from certain historicist interpretations. Still, this history describes the conditions under which a mystery triggers the production of knowledge. (Wajcman, 2003) And so the stories of hysterics were told in case histories, or their symptoms detailed in diagnostic manuals, first as hysteria and then in the various conditions that replaced it after 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association dropped the term. These include words in our popular vocabulary such as post-traumatic

90 Mystery stress disorder, anorexia, and clinical aspects of hysteria, chopped and fragmented into distinct categories such as somatic and conversion disorders or dysphoria, for example. Yet, these names and their articulation in language still do not address what the hysteric is rebelling against and how she is doing it. Particularly in psychoanalysis, there is a problem with diagnoses, as they present a contradiction. Certainly, a categorisation gives the analyst a handle on the clinical situation. Things fall into place if one is named, for example, a hysteric. But then a checklist of therapeutic strategies is also activated. Thus, the response also becomes categorised, rather than individual. Furthermore, psychoanalysis acknowledges that symptoms are overdetermined or arise due to multiple causes. As things are not always what they seem in analysis, the analyst has to try not to see the patient as an example of a diagnostic category. Instead, she needs to develop an orientation to the patient, find what Wilfred Bion called the ‘O’ (Grotstein, 1996), the ultimate reality and essence of phenomena such as panic, anxiety, fear, or love – even if the phenomena themselves remain fundamentally unknowable, like hysteria. From listening and diagnosing, doctors turned to writing, representing hysteria on the page in language (although not hystericised language), while she kept asking her question: What do you want from me?

Case hystories The hysteric’s mystery is nestled somewhere between the transference she elicits and the interpretation of what is going on in her body, in the texts and the works of art that represent her. Often those works are written – in case histories, literary works (such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, which we will examine in detail) or directly onto the skin, as in Shannon Bell’s Discourse of the posthysteric tattoo. And because of this prevalent representation of the hysteric, special attention has to be paid to our own role in reading and writing her, as viewers, artists, or doctors. Once we encounter the hysteric, we have agency in relation to her mystery. Even if his thinking is not wholly sympathetic to that of Lacan, Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold is useful in understanding where the mystery resides and what its container is. Deleuze and Lacan have, in fact, sometimes been seen as diametrically opposed: Lacan nods to structuralism as a thinker of alienation, barred subjectivity, and lack, and Deleuze is a critic of structuralism and psychoanalysis and a philosopher of vitalism and positivity, creative potentialities of desire, and production. Yet, we think, this is reductive. Deleuzian and Lacanian concepts have shifted in their thought and it is possible to juxtapose them, to find junctures and sutures within them. We use the idea of the fold in the construction of our writing in a literal and metaphysical sense – in the way that certain made forms lend themselves to a physical reality that can at the same time be read metaphorically. The Deleuzian fold is more precise, but not altogether different to DidiHuberman’s approach to writing the hysteric in The Invention of Hysteria. Deleuze outlines this idea, principally, in a book on Leibniz and the Baroque. In this, he

Mystery  91 continues his interest in aesthetics, which he began discussing in The Logic of Sense, here linking perception, intuition, and affect. Like Lacan’s concept of extimacy – intimacy outside – Deleuze’s fold is a relation between outside and inside: An Outside, more distant than any exterior, is ‘twisted’, ‘folded’ and ‘doubled’ by an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation between the interior and the exterior. It is even this twisting which defines ‘Flesh’, beyond the body proper and its objects. (Deleuze, 1988: 110) In labyrinths and caverns, the fold is the smallest constitutive part (Deleuze, 1991: 231). ‘Fold’ is a noun as well as a verb. ‘To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside’ (Deleuze, 1988: 18). In the doubling created by folding the outside in, the inside itself is hollowed out which allows a specific relation to oneself to emerge. This he calls enkrateia, the relation to oneself based on selfmastery (Deleuze, 1988: 100). In his study of Foucault, he outlines four folds of subjectivation, of establishing a relation to ourselves: our material part, the relation between forces, knowledge or truth, and the outside itself or the ultimate fold (Deleuze, 1988: 104). To the hysteric, this could translate as her body, which Deleuze, reading Leibniz, directly acknowledges: ‘a flexible or elastic body still has coherent parts which form a fold, with the result that they do not separate into parts of parts, but rather divide infinitely into smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion’ (1991: 231). The hysteric’s enkrateia is also the force of her symptom, the knowledge she produces, and the Other – doctors, viewers, and artists that represent her. we read another and inevitably assumptions are made structures put firmly into place beliefs confirmed by what appears to be there by what we know If hysteria is not madness, it is historically, like madness, kept at a distance. In his discussion of ‘acting madness’, Adam Phillips positions madness by imagining it acted (Phillips, 2012: 169–200). An actor, acting mad, acts like a mask, displacing the potential reality of actual madness by distancing. Enacting a fold. We have seen the mechanics. Hysteria could be distanced by scrutiny, as at the Salpêtrière where subjects were considered curiosities or specimens, but also the subject could be reified, put on a pedestal. In each case, hysteria is distanced, placed beyond the frame of normality, and in each case, an image is both projected by, and on behalf of, the subject. Such positioning of madness puts into question whose madness. The mysteries of what is hidden within the folds of the hysteric were disseminated to an audience through the genre of clinical case history. Elaine Showalter argues that ‘all medical practice, depends on narrative, the “doctor’s story,” which both shapes the formal case study and determines practical treatment’ (1993: 24).

92 Mystery For anyone who has read Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, or even the earlier aliénistes, the similarities between these case histories and detective novels will not come as a surprise. This is notable in Gaétan Gatien de Clérambault’s work on perversion: Passion érotique des étoffes chez la femme (Erotic passion of fabric for the woman). His book comprises case notes on three patients accused of having a sexual fetish for fabrics, notably silk and velvet. He describes their encounter with the material, the feeling of its contact with their skin and the relation of this to the rest of their bodies (de Clérambault, 2002 [1908]). Freud himself made the link between medical case histories and fictional stories in his account of Elisabeth von R’s treatment: It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, without any preference of my own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electric reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, where a detailed description of mental processes such as we are now accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affection. (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 160–161) Just as photography brought hysterics into more general view, case histories awoke the imagination beyond the clinic. They offered character, plot, denouement, complexity, and often the supernatural – and in the cases of Freud and de Clérambault, a definite style and literary flair as well. In his essay ‘Open Letter to Detectives and Psychoanalysts: Analysis and Reading’, Patrick French admits that the revelation in the mystery story is disappointing because our engagement with the exposition of the case, with the scene, is not passive and does not conform to a pre-existing meaning; rather, meaning is produced ‘through a transferential play with the text and with other texts’ (French, 2000: 222). Mariana Valverde identifies the key feature of the forensic gaze as ‘the close attention to the physical traces left not only by criminal activity but by everyday activity on people’s bodies and clothes, on floors, walls, gardens and objects’ (2006: 83). In the same way, hysteria left traces in the hysteric’s body, in how she approached her day-to-day life. And now a series of staccato images – a little filmstrip – comes to mind. First, there is my grandmother, blowing raspberries in the middle of conversations, repeating my grandfather’s words incessantly, on and on. Even as a small child I’m embarrassed. It isn’t funny. Then there is the catatonic wife of the angry guy in the film American Beauty, who says nothing and stares ahead indifferently, then the American housewife in The Hours (based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway) who is reading Mrs Dalloway in the 1950s and who trashes a birthday cake in front of her young son. The filmstrip goes on, and still, we are left with the question. If the hysteric articulates knowledge other than through her symptom, what will she do with that knowledge?

Mystery  93 Perhaps the closest type of detective to the doctors treating hysterics is the metaphysical detective. These go from C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Father Brown to Philip Marlowe, Lieutenant Columbo, and Hercule Poirot (Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 18). A metaphysical detective story is a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective story conventions – such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as surrogate reader – with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot. Metaphysical detective stories often emphasise this transcendence, moreover, by becoming self-reflexive (that is, by representing allegorically the text’s own processes of composition). (Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 2) John T Irwin (1994) sees the analytic detective story as one of the branches of the metaphysical detective story. Edgar Allan Poe dedicated the first pages of ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’ to an exegesis of the qualities required for obtaining analytical knowledge, which Mariana Valverde summarises: ‘the analytical mind combines strong logical powers with two other things: a quasi-intuitive sixth sense about human frailties and a computer-like vast storehouse of assorted, non-specialised information’ (Valverde, 2006: 79–80). With Poe’s accounts of Dupin’s detections as their paradigm, analytic detective stories focus on deduction and analysis rather than adventure and drama. This results in caricaturesque depictions of character and, sometimes, rather poor solutions. As Borges puts it in ‘Ibn Hakkan al Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth’: his character, ‘steeped in detective stories, thought that the solution of a mystery is always less impressive than the mystery itself’ (Borges, in Irwin, 1999: 28). In the category of metaphysical detectives, one also finds the postmodern detective (which includes, for example, the work of Raymond Chandler and Paul Auster). The definition and characteristics of what constitutes a postmodern detective are contentious. McHale, cited in Merivale and Sweeney, defines it as a shift from the hermeneutical to the ontological, a warning against the quest for knowledge. Common characteristics of postmodern detective fiction are self-reflexive writing, self-awareness, and a questioning of the text, and of fiction in general, through its form (Merivale and Sweeney, 1999: 15). Doctors (from Charcot onwards) and artists representing the hysteric also interpret; they engage with the hysterics in a transferential relationship, and they make a diagnosis before any diagnosis is possible to see what the diagnosis might be. Sometimes, this is a wild diagnosis, as in Freud’s ‘Wild Analysis’ (2001 [1910]) a text in which he narrates a treatment given to a patient by an uninitiated doctor, disregarding psychoanalytic theory. It is a deviation. The term wild, however, does not necessarily hold a negative connotation in psychoanalytic terms. As Roy Schafer shows, ‘today recourse to the concept wild analysis plunges us into theoretical debate’ (Schafer, 1985: 276). He argues that the interpenetration and mutual influence of different areas of knowledge do not denote wildness, but are at the core of the creation of

94 Mystery psychoanalytic meaning. With the help of this kind of wildness, the hysteric can be seen in a different way, from a different point of view (Schafer, 1985: 280). Doctors might benefit from listening to artists more and looking inside the fold, not to extract secretions, but to understand the hysteric’s relation of outside to inside. Then, we might be able to get at the knowledge she reveals. The ideal position for approaching the hysteric in order to represent her is one that falls between an artist and an analyst (Nobus, 2005), whose attitude is a mixture of: 1. The inquisitive and fallible position, related to the detective who, when confronted with that which defies explanation, challenges and resists being fitted to any given model (such as a piece of evidence, or the hysteric’s symptom), formulates a hypothesis. She is not scared of discarding it if the evidence or symptom is not able to verify it. Instead, she formulates a new one, even if this contradicts the first one 2. The position of ignorance (I only know I know nothing), related to the Socratic philosopher, who does not use knowledge gained through the object to confirm her own knowledge. Despite learning concepts and techniques in order to take up their roles within social structures, artists, analysts, and detectives need to shed some of this knowledge in order to undertake their work. They start from this paradoxical position where knowledge is mysterious 3. The paradoxical position, related to the zen mistress, who produces enigmatic statements to facilitate dynamics, rather than impose a viewpoint. She neither gratifies nor frustrates the demands made on her but brings the process of engagement and representation further by denying total rationality and challenging knowledge itself The fold is the format or the container, the detective-Socratic-zen mistress is the point of view or the attitude towards the symptom, and the language is hystericised, following Lacan. This is how we create this exquisite corpse in which we trace, in writing, an outline of the hysteric. In a way, this threefold way of representing the hysteric through art (the zen mistress), science (the detective) and philosophy (Socrates) echoes Birgit M Kaiser who, considering Deleuze’s aesthetics of folds, writes: these aspects [of the fold] render plausible how something can be different without being separate: a paradoxicality that also allows for the three modes of thinking, differently expressed in art, science and philosophy, which, without being separate, are truly of equal value, but unique in their unfolding. (Kaiser, 2010: 209) So, we take another turn.

Writing the hysteric Reply/repli/ritournelle, a folding back, withdrawal, or return – a folded process, like small waves, over and back. Without an image, we panic and wonder how to

Mystery  95 find a way forward. Deleuze, with his co-writer Felix Guattari, discusses the case of becoming-woman, using Virginia Woolf as their example. The peculiarities of women’s writing are the ability to move at molecular speed … the becoming-woman in writing means the intensity of the speed of movement between the lines, the lines of life and the line in-between life and the text, the ability to include personal experiences. Life is also felt as a very dangerous thing in itself. (Baranova, 2020: 2) This becoming-woman is related to Lacan’s latter question associated with the hysteric: what is a woman? Anouchka Grose explains that hysteria ‘is a subject that inevitably has a bearing on performance, truth and representation, not to mention finding idiosyncratic ways to articulate yourself’ (Grose, 2020: 12). Scull (2009: 52), citing Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock, also warns us of the need of the hysteric for articulation, even if this is read as erratic and falsely superior: Hail, wayward Queen! Who rule the sex to fifty from fifteen: Parent of vapours and of female wit, Who give th’ hysteric, or poetic fit, On various tempers act by various ways, Make some take physic, others scribble plays. But writing the hysteric in case histories or writing as a hysteric is as problematic as curing her. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of the novella The Yellow Wallpaper (one of the best-known literary portrayals of the hysteric), was diagnosed with hysteria. As a treatment, she was asked to lead a domestic life and leave her successful writing career. When following the doctor’s orders, she broke down, curing herself by doing completely the opposite. Being the hysteric writer threatens her position as being written about, something that doctors wanted to preserve (Price Herndl, 1988: 52–53). Yet, she wrote, and so did Bertha Pappenheim. ‘But writing is a poison as well as a remedy, because to cure the woman, it must kill the hysteric. Writing takes the place of the hysteric. And leaves the subject’ (Price Herndl, 1988: 68). To become a woman in writing or in life means to have the ability to slice like a knife through everything. This ability of becoming-woman to become a master of simultaneous multiplicity makes a woman writer something of a clairvoyant (Baranova, 2020: 2). For Juliet Mitchell, writing the hysteric contains all the problems of translation between the semiotic systems of body and language, and she strongly refutes Julia Kristeva’s assertion that a woman’s novel falls into a hysterical genre (Showalter, 1993: 24). Mitchell instead rescues the discourse of the hysteric and recognises that what Hélène Cixous calls écriture féminine is hysteria which has found a voice (Price Herndl, 1988: 54):

96 Mystery The woman novelist must be an hysteric. Hysteria is the woman’s simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the organisation of sexuality under patriarchal capitalism. It is simultaneously what a woman can do both to be feminine and to refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourse … I do not believe there is such a thing as female writing, a ‘woman’s voice.’ There is the hysteric’s voice which is the woman’s masculine language … talking about feminine experience. (Mitchell, 2011 [1984]: 148) In her analysis of women’s writing, Mary Jacobus sees The Yellow Wallpaper as one of ‘the short stories which Freud’s case histories read like’ (1986: 202). Gilman composed the work to criticise her doctor, his rest cure, and the consequences this had for her (Delchamps, 2020: 105). The narrator in the first-person novel is never named by anyone. She is always in relation to someone or something else: a wife, a sick person. Her recovery wishes, to be in a nicer room, are not granted and she is placed in a nursery, which is covered with a yellow wallpaper she finds hideous. Positioned outside. She has to take full rest, but the male characters (husband-doctor, brother) maintain there is nothing wrong with her other than a hysterical tendency. To become herself, she is not allowed to do any work, any writing, which, much like the author, she does, as we are reading her diary. But Price Herndl argues that she is writing to no one, thus is no longer a speaking subject (1988: 71) and instead becomes an object. She begins to hallucinate, to see the wallpaper as prison bars, with a woman on the other side. At the unstable end of the story, she tears the wallpaper with her bare hands and merges with the woman behind. Both Gilman and the narrator wanted to get better (Delchamps, 2020: 110). They are not passive, or victims. They self-diagnose and attribute their lack of improvement to the doctors, thus they take their destiny into their own hands: [t]he existence of the story itself, penned by the narrator forbidden from pen and paper, becomes a symbol of resistance that defies John and his views … She wants to cure herself of opposition, of the oppressive attitudes that surround her by resisting her prescription. (Delchamps, 2020: 113) The Yellow Wallpaper ‘unravels in a hysterical narrative form and simultaneously embodies the urge to diagnose that disorderliness’ (Delchamps, 2020: 118), rendering the cure famous, but not curing hysteria. The urge to diagnose and its inherent violence are essential to note in order to get away from pathologising readings and understanding what the hysteric is up against, the dispelling of her mystery, the laying bare of who she is. She resists, the mystery shrouds itself even further. Even in our reading, we need to refuse the desire to diagnose and to cure, avoiding wanting the hysteric to ‘get better’ (Thrailkill, 2002: 551–552; Delchamps, 2020: 120). The paper – the one on which the diary is written – becomes unruly, like the one on the wall, and the story becomes a representation of ‘artistic sin’ (Delchamps, 2020: 116). It appears as a hystericised detective/

Mystery  97 Socratic philosopher/zen mistress. It shows, in writing, the mystery of the hysteric and of the treatment for her symptoms without demands for a release. It is something odd, new, and contradictory. In the wake of its creation, the narrator rejects the restoration of her health. Instead, she cures herself of the cure. A diary to no one was the beginning of the end of incarceration. Writing, inscribing a surface of her own choosing, Gilman was energised to tear down the walls. Virginia Woolf went further, having opportunities that Gilman did not in that, standing outside, she was able to envisage freedom. Woolf stood up in Girton and Newnham in Cambridge in the late 1920s and talked about a room of her own and in so doing, as Virginia Woolf standing up talking, she allowed herself to meander and interrupt herself. ‘It’s the gift we all needed, when we were going to be authoritative, to allow ourselves to say but wait a minute - let’s think about this properly. Let’s have a dialogue you know, and it is about dialogue’ (Smith, 2012).

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98 Mystery David Bernstein, Susan (1989) ‘Confessing Lacan’. Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation and Rhetoric. Edited by Dianne Hunter. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. 195–213. de Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatien (2002 [1908]) Passion érotique des étoffes chez la femme (Archives d’anthropologie criminelle de médecine légale et de psychologie normale et pathologique). Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. Delchamps, Vivian (2020) ‘“A Slight Hysterical Tendency”. Performing Diagnosis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 105–122. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.9 Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Foucault. Edited and translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1991) ‘The Fold’. Translated by Jonathan Strauss. Yale French Studies, 80, Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy. 227–247. https://doi​.org​/10​ .2307​/2930269 Didi-Huberman, Georges (2003) The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges (2004) ‘Foreword: Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies)’. Philippe-Alain Michaud. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. New York: Zone Books. 7–19. Didi-Huberman, Georges (2005) Confronting: Questioning The Ends of a Certain History of Art. Translated by John Goodman. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Elliot, Shanti (1999) ‘Carnival and Dialogue in Bakhtin’s Poetics of Folklore’. https:// scholarworks​.iu​.edu​/dspace​/bitstream​/handle​/2022​/2327​/3​?sequence​=1. Accessed 19 February 2022. Evans, Dylan (1996) An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. https://doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9780203135570 French, Patrick (2000) ‘Open Letter to Detectives and Psychoanalysts: Analysis and Reading’. The Art of Detective Fiction. Edited by Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales and Robert Vilain. New York: St. Martins Press. 222–232. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/978​-1​ -349​-62768​-4​_16 Freud, Sigmund (2001 [1910]) ‘“Wild” Psycho-Analysis’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI (1910): Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage. 219–227. Freud, Sigmund (2001 [1920]) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: Vintage. 1–64. Freud, Sigmund and Joseph Breuer (1955 [1893]) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893–1895) Studies on Hysteria. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press. Gallop, Jane (1985) Reading Lacan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. https://doi​.org​ /10​.7591​/9781501721601

Mystery  99 Gilbert, Sandra M (1986) ‘Introduction: A Tarantella of Theory’. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. González, Laura (2018) ‘Work of Art as Analyst as Work of Art’. Transpositions: AestheticoEpistemic Operators in Artistic Research. Edited by Michael Schwab. Leuven: Orpheus Institute Series, Leuven University Press. 75–95. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv4s7k96.8 Grose, Anouchka (2020) ‘Psychoanalysis, Illustration and the Art of Hysteria: Transcript from a Talk, Worcester 2019’. Journal of Illustration, 7.1&2. 9–18. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1386​/jill​_00022_1 Grotstein, James S (1996) ‘Bion’s “transformation in ‘O’”, the “thing-in-itself”, and the “real”: Toward the Concept of the “transcendent position”’. Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations, 14.2 (December). 109–141. Hunter, Dianne (1983) ‘Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna O’. Feminist Studies. 9.3 (Autumn). 464–488. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/3177609 Hunter, Dianne, ed. (1998) The Makings of Dr Charcot’s Hysteria Shows: Research through Performance. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Irigaray, Luce (1985) ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’. This Sex Which Is No One. Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 23–33. Irwin, John T (1994) The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytical Detective Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Irwin, John T (1999) ‘Mysteries we Reread, Mysteries of Rereading: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story’. Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 27–54. https://doi​.org​/10​.9783​ /9780812205459​.27 Jacobus, Mary (1986) Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.7312​/jaco92530 Kaiser, Birgit M (2010) ‘Two Floors of Thinking: Deleuze’s Aesthetics of Folds’. Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader. Edited by Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 203–224. https://doi​.org​/10​.1057​/9780230248366​_10 Lacan, Jacques (1993) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses 1955–1956. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W W Norton. Lacan, Jacques (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore 1972–1973. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love And Knowledge. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W W Norton. Lacan, Jacques (2006 [1966]) ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York and London: W W Norton. 671–702. Lacan, Jacques (2007) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W W Norton. Lacan, Jacques (2019) Desire and Its Interpretation 1958–1959: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI [Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation]. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity Press. Laplanche, Jean (1992) ‘Notes on Afterwardness’. Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives. Edited by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton, translated by Martin Stanton. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. 217–223. Laplanche, Jean (2006) Problématiques VI: L’après-coup. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

100 Mystery Marshall, Jonathan W (2020) ‘Traumatic Dances Of “The Non-Self”. Bodily Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive’. Performing Hysteria. Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 61–83. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.7 Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. (1999) Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.9783​/9780812205459 Mitchell, Juliet (2011 [1984]) ‘“Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis” – Women: The Longest Revolution’. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Edited by Eagleton Mary. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 147–151. Mulas, Francesco (2005) ‘Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: A Novel of “Silence”’. https:// core​.ac​.uk​/download​/pdf​/11687134​.pdf. Accessed 02 March 2021. Nobus, Dany (2005) ‘On Psychoanalytic Method’ [Lecture delivered on 1 February]. London: Wimbledon School of Art. O’Reilly, Keira (2015) ‘Citing Shannon Bell's Discourse of the posthysteric (Tattoo)’. http://www​. kiraoreilly​. com​/ blog​/ 2015​/ 9​/ 2​/ nqs​r wao​s xez​o stm​t hqo​n x6t​i mg82tb. Accessed 15 February 2022. Phillips, Adam (2012) ‘Acting Madness’. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. London: Penguin. 169–200. Price Herndl, Diane (1988) ‘The Writing Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna O, and “Hysterical” Writing’. NWSA Journal, 1.1 (Autumn). 52–74. Safouan, Moustapha (1980) ‘In Praise of Hysteria’. Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Edited and translated by Stuart Schneiderman. London: Yale University Press. 55–60. Sarup, Madan (1992) Jacques Lacan. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Schafer, Roy (1985) ‘Wild Analysis’. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 33.2. 275–299. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/000306518503300201 Scull, Andrew (2009) Hysteria: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Showalter, Elaine (1993) ‘On Hysterical Narrative’. Narrative, 1.1 (January). 24–35. Smith, Ali (2012) Conversation with Mark Lawson, ‘Front Row: Ali Smith, Dave Brubeck, Crime Fiction’, Front Row. London: BBC Radio 4, 6 December. Stone, Jon, Russell Hewett, Alan Carson, Charles Warlow and Michael Sharpe (2008) ‘The “disappearance” of Hysteria: Historical Mystery or Illusion?’. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 101.1 (January). 12–18. https://doi​.org​/10​.1258​/jrsm​.2007​.070129 Thrailkill, Jane F (2002) ‘Doctoring “The Yellow Wallpaper”’. ELH, 69.2 (Summer). 525– 566. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/elh​.2002​.0019 Valverde, Mariana (2006) ‘The Authority of the Detective and the Birth of the Forensic Gaze’. Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths. London: Routledge. 77–89. Wajcman, Gérard (2003) ‘The Hysteric’s Discourse’. The Symptom, 4 (Spring). https:// www​.lacan​.com​/hystericdiscf​.htm. Accessed 08 February 2021. Woolf, Virginia (1931) The Waves. London: Hogarth Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime object of Ideology. London: Verso.

4

Disappearance

Étienne Trillat, in his book Histoire de L’Hysterie, writes: ‘L’hystérie est morte, c’est entendu. Elle a emporté avec elle ses énigmes dans sa tombe’ – ‘hysteria is dead, that’s understood. It has taken its mysteries with it to its grave’ (Trillat, 1986: 274, author’s translation). This death alludes to the fact that, since 1952, hysteria has not been used as an official diagnosis (Maines, 1999: 2). Hysteria did not appear as a category in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952. Instead, it was referred to as an old classification for conversion hysteria and other similar conditions. Terminology shifted again and, in the second DSM edition of 1968, it became hysterical neurosis and hysterical personality, subdivided into conversion and dissociative types. In 1980, the third edition of the DSM further buried hysteria and only conversion and dissociative disorders remained, with hysterical personality transforming into histrionic personality disorder, which, as Johanna Braun notes, comes from the Latin histrio, actor/actress, indicating that the hysteric is a performer, moving beyond the limits of medical discourse (Braun, 2020: 12). By the fourth (1994) and fifth (2013) editions, hysteria had disappeared from the index. The current categories, in terms of what we understand to be hysteria, are somatic symptom and related disorders and conversion disorder, or functional neurological symptom disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2013: 310). This language of diagnostic categories is partly defined by customs and values, and it is therefore uncertain, imprecise, haphazard, and fraught. Neurologist Jon Stone et al. write ‘it was not hysteria that disappeared, but rather medical interest in hysteria’ (Stone et al., 2008: 12). The disappearance of hysteria from diagnostic manuals ‘can be partly attributed to the understanding of its construction as a narrative’ (Showalter, 1993a: 24). Apart from a ‘diagnostic drift in the evolution of disease categories’ such as hypochondria and melancholia, Mark S Micale attributes the clinical diminution of hysteria to sociosexual emancipation and psychological literacy (1995: 171, 174). Whether the diagnostic category is used or not, the hysteric is present in the clinic. She is also manifest in culture, as we have shown throughout this book, in films, dance, objects, paintings, and literature. She exists all around us, in our language, in what we see and what we experience, and is especially vibrant in the form of mass hysteria, a DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-6

102 Disappearance phenomenon we will explore in our envoi. Showalter (1997) sees it as present in presumed cases of alien abduction, recovered memory, and Gulf War Syndrome, for example. This is why Mark S Micale refers to ‘disappearance’, in quotation marks, when mentioning this trait of the hysteric (1993). Dominik Zechner argues that ‘hysteria’s trope gains power and popularity precisely as its referential phenomenon disappears from the scene’ (2020: 88). Its concept creep gains traction and terrain in the battle between signifier and clinical situation: ‘one’s generality bulldozes over the other’s idiomatic singularity; one’s timeliness trumps the other’s hopeless anachronism’ (Zechner, 2020: 89). Jan Campbell links the traits of mimesis and disappearance, and this is an astute observation. Citing Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, she explains how in the Oedipal complex there is a mimetic identification between ego and subject: ‘I want what my brother, my model, my idol wants – and I want it in his place’ (Borch-Jacobsen, 1988: 27). But this is a flight of identification (Campbell, 2005: 336), a disappearance. In nature, the imitative pattern of mimesis provokes a blending with the environment and the illusion of disappearance. One stands in as the photographic negative of the other (Zechner, 2020: 89). ‘Representation [of a figure] is partial, and incompletion suggests that which is not full or finished, something withdrawn from knowledge, unspoken, hidden, but something to which we are still tied’ (Bowen and González, 2020: 83). The hysteric here can be ‘imagined as a fragmented figure emerging from the consequences of silence, partially accrued, crystallising around its own gap’ (83).​ Thus withdrawal of this incomplete figure remains a ‘trace bearing the entire weight of a “presence” that may never fully have realized itself’ (Zechner, 2020: 87). In this chapter, we consider disappearance as a constitutive trait of the hysteric. In so doing, we give our attention to Freud’s best-known case history, Dora, his writing on his treatment of Ida Bauer. We explore the story of Dora, and also the analysis that Freud made of her, or the fragments that have been transmitted to us through his text. We look at more contemporary readings, representations, and possessions of the text. We have already delved into the relation between the hysteric, her speech, and writings about her. In studying Dora, it is also necessary to address the relation of hysteria to reading, providing a framework for reading the hysteric, an act connected to Lacan’s discourse, which we addressed in the previous chapter. As we will see, the disappearance of the hysteric and her reappearance as a haunting textual and also phantasmatic ghost can be considered ontological in nature, concerning her being and existence.

Reading the hysteric In his examination of Dora, Dominik Zechner directly links hysteria to reading: ‘the essential connection between hysteria’s concept creep’ – the dilution of a precise term, as we discussed in Chapter One – ‘and its diagnostic value concerns the question of reading’ (2020: 89). In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella which we began to examine in the previous chapter, the narrator is denied the agency of reading and writing and is instead read to by her

Disappearance  103 husband-doctor. The point at which she discovers another woman trapped behind the pattern in the wallpaper is significant because, as Annette Kolodny tells us, she ‘progressively gives up the attempt to record her reality and instead begins to read it’ (Kolodny, 1980: 458). As the story continues, she disintegrates, fragmenting as a coherent subject and thus The Yellow Wallpaper can be understood as a misreading of the hysteric on the part of John the husband, who misses the signs of what is going on with his unnamed wife. It could be said that recording and reading are the same things, for the recording of her situation is a revelatory process through which she begins to see and hear her position more clearly. Within a framework lacking outside recognition, for example, that of her husband John, she loses sight and sound of herself. Thus, if he had been able to see her, she wouldn’t have disappeared nor, from another perspective, would she have needed to disappear. What the narrator reads behind, or in between, the lines of the wallpaper is her own story, her own untenable and unacceptable reality (Kolodny, 1980: 459), just as Blanche Wittman was reading it in the drawing within her line of vision as portrayed in Brouillet’s painting, which we discussed in Chapter Two. Then, Blanche and the narrator mimetically became what they saw. They disappeared behind the wallpaper and the drawing in order to be seen in what was left behind. And yet, as Zechner points out, it is also possible to misread the hysteric by reading into (or reading as hysterical) symptoms that are in fact movements, gestures, or images that demonstrate ‘profound defiance against reigning master codes’ (Zechner, 2020: 89). Such profound defiance was clearly (from our position as readers) performed at the Saltpêtrière and was, like the contemporary #MeToo movement, ‘pegged hysterical’ (Zechner, 2020: 89). More than a misuse of the term, this is a ‘fundamental crisis of understanding’ (Zechner, 2020: 89), a misreading.

Figure 4.1  Eleanor Bowen, ‘Blueprint for a Ghost ii’, found photograph (detail), 1919.

104 Disappearance And while there is a danger of normalising hysteria, especially for women (‘what is true for Dora “is true for all women”’, Price Herndl, 1998: 55), to understand the hysteric, one needs to read her. And in a great part, that means reading the case histories doctors wrote of the hysterics. As Lisa Appignanesi writes: Cases illuminate. They allow us to tease out the intersections and interactions of culture, psychiatric practice and illness in a given historical moment. They show us how disorders are suffered, but also lived over time. What they clearly reveal is that lives can be both productive and punctured or punctuated by madness and sadness, let alone badness. (Appignanesi, 2009: 10) The hysteric is made aware of rules through unreasonable patriarchal demands. She challenges the status of these rules and her compliance. Grose identifies in the hysteric ‘the transformative potential of unruly communications, arguing for the possibility that linear arguments and an insistence on sense-making are far from the only means of addressing the Other in order to bring about change’ (Grose, 2020: 9). Change, rebellion, and resistance to these rules are what the hysteric brings. ‘[Hysteria] marks a moment of drastic unreadability that may not be surmounted by dint of reverting back to established codes of decipherment and interpretive mastery’ (Zechner, 2020: 90). But the hysteric’s text is comprised of much more than the writing in case histories: her body, her symptom, her speech, and, especially, her image. ‘Reading the skin’ – and by this, we understand the surface that connects her to the world, which includes the photograph – ‘meant reading into the nature of the patient, his or her actions, and his or her resultant diseases’ (Gilman, 1993: 388). It is not devoid of interpretation and inference, often without the ability to observe her properly and to let her speak. This is why, when reading her, we have chosen to be especially careful, to approach from afar, to trace first, creating a sketch, rather than a portrait. A sketch can be erased, re-sketched, and turned around. A painting is harder to unsee and fixes the hysteric. As Gilman writes: It is central to any understanding of this composite image that the desire of all of these studies, no matter what their national context, is to place themselves within the myth of the realism of the act of representation and the highly specialized role that the physician (as interpreter) plays in reproducing and ‘reading’ the image of the patient. And this reading has a clear relationship with the means of reproducing and disseminating the image of the hysteric. […] The reading of the photograph had also blended in with the aesthetic (or, perhaps better, artistic) tradition into which the ‘new’ science of representation had placed the image of the hysteric. (Gilman, 1993: 380–381) Some of the most telling portraits, however, are sketches, moments of being captured; for example, we see in Rembrandt’s ink sketch of a small child how she

Disappearance  105 takes her first tentative steps. In an essay on drawing, Hélène Cixous longs for the ‘truth’ of these moments, that which may be caught in the turn of a line, a tone, a patch of ink. Cixous reads, and through her reading of drawing, she wants the living of (a) life in all its particularity, its passing. She longs for ‘what passes between us’, for some can ‘portray passing’ (Cixous, 1993: 97, 93). One who sketches ‘from life’ reads the body, takes time, apprehends. gesturebreathskin The reader must choose a position from which to read for, says Cixous, the emotion sought is ‘born at the angle of one state with another’ (1993: 97). Such a position, that of the reader/recorder who takes time in order to begin understanding her subject, contradicts the Saltpêtrière’s model of seeing in which the camera, whose photograph frees its subject from time, ‘was as necessary for the study of hysteria as the microscope was for histology’ (de Ranse, 1879: 331). For example, as the painter and photographer Edvard Munch observes, having spent time drawing his young sister on her deathbed, the photographic instant of the camera is a form of portraiture without time, unlike that drawn in real time, from life (Bergman, Gunning, and Pappas, 2021). Thus, he argues, from the perspective of the artist/recorder/reader, the two processes of capture are in opposition. The reader scrutinises the image and its contours, following with concentration. She must watch and listen.

Dora’s case ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1953 [1905]), popularly known as the Dora case, starts with a disappearance: it was originally going to be called ‘Dreams and Hysteria’ and would operate in relation to Freud’s great work The Interpretation of Dreams (Kahane, 1995: 32). But Dora unfolded and made the ground shift. In our reading, we attune ourselves to the disappearance trait in her story and what this means for the hysteric, instead of providing an account of her treatment, which has already been expertly done by Bernheimer and Kahane (1990), Mahony (1996), and Romano (2015), among others. Dora, Sigmund Freud’s first properly psychoanalytic case history (Evans, 1996: 79) is significant for two reasons: she abandoned Freud after three months of treatment; and it is in this text that he began to conceptualise transference, the therapeutic relation between analyst and patient which we explored in Chapter Two. Dora is a notoriously complex subject of study because it is ‘[o]ne of the most commented-on texts in psychoanalytic history, the case magnetizes precisely by virtue of its forced finitude: the premature termination of treatment, an unrealized cure, the deficient protocol that remained’ (Zechner, 2020: 91). Dora is precisely the best example of Wajcman’s assertion that a hysteric ushers talk about her (2003). Its fragmented nature, and Freud’s relation to it, have just added to our need to complete, understand, and solve her mystery. Despite these challenges, Dora remains archetypal and we must re-tell her story one more time.

106 Disappearance For an account of Ida Bauer’s life as Freud’s patient, the best reference is Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester’s chapter ‘Dora: An Exemplary Failure’ (1992). We have navigated our reading of Dora from Freud himself to the classic psychoanalytic accounts of the work (Bernheimer and Kahane, 1990; Mahony, 1996), feminist critiques (Moi, 1981; Johnson, 1989; Evans, 1991; Showalter, 1993a, 1993b), and Cixous’s play and its analysis (1983) to more recent re-readings (Bell, 2014; Romano, 2015; Zechner, 2020) and works of art (Kivland, 1999; Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity, 1979). Let us set the scene. When she entered therapy with Freud, Ida Bauer was barely 18 years of age. Around three months later, she abandoned treatment of her own will. What brought her father to take her to Freud – her hysterical symptoms – were, like most, varied and baffling, centring around the area of the mouth. She had difficulty breathing, lost her voice at times, coughed nervously, and suffered from migraine headaches and what Freud termed ‘hysterical unsociability’ and ‘taedium vitae’ (Moi, 1981: 60). The story Freud recounts in his written case is one of family romances where the main characters are Ida, the protagonist, for whom he used the pseudonym Dora (the name of his sister’s maidservant; Bell, 2014: 189), her parents, and a couple, Frau and Herr K, friends of her parents. In broad brushstrokes, the analysis reveals Ida’s discovery of her father’s affair with Frau K. She also suspected she was being offered to Herr K in exchange for this affair to continue. The writing circles around the trauma of an unwanted and disgusting kiss and two dreams (Romano, 2015), the first known as the dream of the burning house, and the second dream, best known by its first line: ‘I was walking about in a town which I did not know’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 94). It is after the resolution of this dream that Ida broke off her treatment. She disappeared from Freud’s narrative of her case history. Other things too made an act of disappearance, customary of the hysteric: her symptoms. After Freud interpreted her cough as a fellatio phantasy (Romano, 2015: 40), it disappeared spontaneously (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 48). This, though, had happened before. In its place, a new symptom of piercing gastric pain appeared (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 38). This contradicts ‘Freud’s concluding assertion that during psychoanalytic treatment old symptoms do not disappear nor do new symptoms form’ (Mahony, 1996: 36). The early understanding of hysteria as a wandering womb is also an act of disappearance, as the organ is not found where expected and is therefore assumed to have gone on wandering in the body. Similarly, the wandering of the condition itself is a disappearance/appearance act: ‘Hysteria’s migration from the uterine origins accorded it in Hippocratic and Galenic medicine to its new incarnation as a nervous complaint had begun to take place in the last third of the seventeenth century’ (Scull, 2009: 25) and further mutated into conversion, somatic, post-traumatic, and eating disorders, like a magician’s act. So of course Dora’s cough appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in mysterious circumstances and for no apparent reason. Freud tells us that the stories hysterics told were ‘an unnavigable river whose stream is at one moment choked by masses of rock and at another divided and

Disappearance  107 lost among shallows and sandbanks’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 16). The reminiscences of part of Dora’s life were abundant but often followed ‘by another period as to which their communications run dry, leaving gaps unfilled, and riddles unanswered’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 16). Elaine Showalter writes about how: hysterics were unable to tell a complete, ‘smooth and exact’ story about themselves. They left out, distorted and rearranged information because of sexual repression. And this incapacity to give an ‘ordered history of their life’ was not simply characteristic of hysterics; it was the meaning of hysteria. … Thus, the therapist’s role was to suggest, edit, or construct such a narrative for the patient. (Showalter, 1993a: 25–26) She goes further and relates Dora’s case to the Gothic and modernist novels in narrative conventions, themes, plots, reversals, variations, dramatic sense, deliberate gaps, and ambiguities (Showalter, 1993a: 27–31). She draws on Barbara Johnson’s analysis in ‘Is Female to Male as Ground is to Figure?’ (1989) where she links Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Birth-Mark’, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Freud’s Dora as narratives that tell the story ‘of a failed cure’ in which ‘a female patient [is] subject to the therapeutic ambitions of a male doctor’ (Johnson, 1989: 255). These narratives are ‘allegories of psychoanalysis’, more a silencing cure than a talking cure as speech disappears and Dora ceases her denial of Freud’s interpretations (Johnson, 1989: 258). She ‘disputed the fact no longer’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 104). Claire Kahane associates hysteria and Dora’s case to passion – a subjection to an insupportable desire which is accompanied by a rage which is too infrequently acknowledged (Kahane, 1995: 14). She also recognises how Dora led Freud to conceptualise bisexuality in hysteria, problematising the conventional Oedipal narrative and thus revealing the instability of gender (Kahane, 1995: 22). Because of her disappearance from the couch and the consequences this had for psychoanalysis, Freud, and the authority of the doctor, Zechner terms Dora a ‘feminist heroine and epochal icon of analytic collapse’ (Zechner, 2020: 91). Her ‘legacy echoes well into these pressing public debates in the present’ – the phenomenon of mass hysteria in the #MeToo movement and public debates surrounding abuse and sexual misconduct in the workplace – ‘and especially in current representations of the hysteric as resistance to cure and “the master narrative”’ (Braun, 2020: 19). Dora walks out on Freud after 12 weeks. She walks out because he isn’t listening. He is unable to hear her. He cannot read her. In that moment of ‘drastic unreadability’ and ‘analytic collapse’ (Zechner, 2020: 90, 91), is her own knowledge, and she takes it away with her. It is a knowledge that fuels the speech of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, enabling her to see and read

108 Disappearance herself as a prisoner with her back to the wall, a knowledge fuelling the narratives of many other women at the time. Those who had talent, ambition and a passion for life ‘seemed like lonely bonfires, burning away their frustrations and emptiness into their diaries and private letters’ (Glendinning, 1969: 6). The hysteric’s voice echoes well into present conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, all that beats at the frame’s edge. It is an ancient challenge, the speech of others. In past centuries the Church had to ban it from the streets. It is at the outside edge, transgressive. Showalter’s analysis highlights the relation between Dora and the act of reading, more than the importance of the writing, the genre itself, or what actually happens in the case. And it is Dora’s disappearance from treatment that precipitates that masterclass in reading. Campbell argues that the disappearance act of the hysteric happens to avoid identification ‘as a defence against time’ and, thus, ‘into the idealized model of the family romance’ (Campbell, 2005: 336). Dora is the one who got away, a textual ruin (Zechner, 2020: 91), a fragment of an analysis which Freud could only acknowledge in the title of his case. It is a synecdoche for hysteria, where we mistake her fragment for the whole and yet she is the fragment that stands in for the whole, the rest of which is missing. A failure to read Ida the patient and Freud the doctor in Dora’s case is a failure to read hysteria itself, and for this reason, we must read attentively, as an analyst would listen to a patient. In the second dream, where she is walking about in a town she did not know, Dora receives a letter from her mother saying ‘Now [Dora’s father] is dead, and if you like you can come’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 94). Maria Ramas (1990) links this dream letter to Frau K’s letter inviting Dora to join her and Herr K in the Alps, the vacation which precipitated Herr K’s sexual advances to Dora. She considers the dream’s wish of her father’s death ‘not only a fantasy of revenge’ – for offering her to Herr K, as Freud suggested – ‘but also a wish to create another sort of reality’ (Ramas, 1990: 172). But perhaps this dream letter is also related to another letter, which Dora recounts in her therapy, in which ‘she took leave of [her parents] because, as she said, she could no longer endure her life’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 23). Even though when her father found it he did not consider it a declaration of serious suicidal intent, the letter was a cry for disappearance, a need to exit reality as she knew it and vanish. It is no surprise that sometime after, ‘she had a first attack of loss of consciousness – an event which was subsequently covered by an amnesia’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 23). It was after this episode that her father urged her to see Freud. This is also another reality from which she vanished. How typical a hysteric is Dora? Freud asked this question during his analysis of her first dream but deferred answering it ‘until a considerable number of other cases have been similarly analysed and published’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 81). Can any hysteric be typical, or is that a contradiction in terms? This is why reading the hysteric is important, but bound with failure, as Zechner explains:

Disappearance  109 This dilemma has to be kept in mind throughout any sort of engagement with hysteria: instead of starting from an abstraction whose general applicability can seemingly be taken for granted, the reader ought to pay attention to the singularity of each case – and each symptom arising within each case – in order, perhaps, to achieve, through a careful hermeneutic effort, some level of legibility, as precarious and preliminary as it may turn out to be. The abstraction of symptoms will necessarily end up being vague and undependable; the massification of hysteria will reveal itself to be empty if the singular constitution of its symptoms is ignored. (Zechner, 2020: 90–91) Perhaps Zechner is right and, with the hysteric, our only possible goal is legibility, rather than readability, and all the reader can get is a figure of resistance and rebellion – in Zechner’s terms, the resistance and rebellion aspect is also left out and generalised to a chaotic screaming mass, or a single frantic female. So, not a portrait, a set of tools, a strategy, or even a history. We get just an outline. We only have the doctor’s voice in Dora’s case and, as Showalter points out: When a male analyst/narrator is retelling the story of a woman, however, the label of ‘hysteria’ has significant relations to power and credibility. How can Dora’s narrative be seen as plausible and coherent when Freud is so determined to reject it and when it is told in a culture where women’s plots are so limited? (Showalter, 1993a: 31) Ida keeps disappearing behind Dora, Freud’s creation.

Fragments of analysis In Seminar XVII, where he outlines the discourse of the hysteric we discussed in Chapter Three, Jacques Lacan writes of Bertha Pappenheim, Fanny Moser, and Ida Bauer as ‘mouths of gold’ (2007: 99), referring to the amount of knowledge Freud was able to gather from them (Bell, 2014: 189). Freud wrote about them as Anna O (with Breuer), Emma von N, and Dora. Susan Katz describes the case history as a literary form emerging from a synthesis between clinical observation and fictional devices. She warns us that while the heroines within are disguised behind pseudonyms and altered facts to preserve anonymity, these were real women, placed in the hands of doctors who changed the course of their lives both through treatment – whether successful or not – and the publication of the case (Katz, 1987). Let us look at ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]), specifically at what Freud narrates and his own positioning within the story, to understand how he guided Ida’s treatment, which precipitated her disappearance and her ghostly appearance in writing. To do so, we will start at the very end.

110 Disappearance In his case histories, Freud seems to have adopted particular narrative conventions of the nineteenth-century novel. In Dora’s case, there is a striving towards a satisfactory outcome: marriage as a mode of closure (Showalter, 1993a: 27). Whatever happened in the treatment, whatever the consequences for Ida, the story of Dora ‘must have its proper ending, its concluding scientific postscript’ (Johnson, 1989: 266): Years have gone by since her visit. In the meantime the girl has married, and indeed – unless all the signs mislead me – she has married the young man who came into her associations at the beginning of the analysis of the second dream. Just as the first dream represented her turning away from the man she loved to her father – that is to say, her flight from life into disease – so the second dream announced that she was about to tear herself free from her father and had been reclaimed once more by the realities of life. (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 122) Barbara Johnson notes that Freud’s story ‘ends by pledging its allegiance to a larger story, a larger sense of coherence, a larger set of myths’ and she contrasts this with The Yellow Wallpaper, written by the hysteric Gilman which ‘ends with the very voice of inconclusiveness’ (Johnson, 1989: 266). But what Freud was hearing and neatly re-writing in the narrative conventions of his time was the ‘unfamiliar voice of a more spontaneous but coherent and normal female consciousness’ (Showalter, 1993a: 32). Freud’s interpretation of the narrative conclusion, post-analysis, highlights the particular befuddlement he exhibited when it came to Ida, which comes across in his reading of the patient and his writing of Dora. Johnson highlights various interpretations Freud offered to explain Dora’s symptoms and which show his confusion about female sexuality. She writes of Freud’s understanding of a ‘second sex’ in women – the clitoris – and his irritation at it, which he mitigated by revealing what he thought was Dora’s secret: childhood masturbation (Johnson, 1989: 263–265). This is his interpretation of his patient’s first dream as well as her playing with her reticule during therapy. Dora resisted this interpretation and yet Freud termed it ‘complete and without a flaw’ (1953 [1905]: 78), a surprising assertion in an otherwise fragmented and incomplete case history: This is not to substitute a clitorocentric universe for a phallocentric one but rather to take the clitoris […] as a synecdoche for the possibility that the world could be articulated differently, that resistance is always the sign of a counterstory. (Johnson, 1989: 264) Resistance in analysis manifests as not following the principle of free association, and, while it must be analysed, Lacan warns us against understanding resistance as the ill will of the patient (Evans, 1996: 169). For Dora, her counterstory was

Disappearance  111 not allowed and, until she disappeared, her resistance to Freud’s theory was futile and she ran the risk of becoming fixed, static. The clitoris has to disappear, somehow, to make way for the other female sexual organ, the vagina, and for reproduction. Freud’s main interpretation in Dora’s case refers to her having a sexual interest, not in Herr K, but in Frau K. This is how Maria Ramas sees Freud’s elucidation of Dora’s second dream and the death of her father within (Ramas, 1990: 172). This reading of Freud’s suppression of female sexuality perhaps brought about the erroneous idea, based on fantasy, distortions, and mistranslations, that hysteria used to be treated by masturbation, giving rise to the vibrator (Grose, 2020: 13). We mentioned earlier that the two main interests in Dora’s case are her disappearance from treatment and how this became the locus for the discovery of transference. Freud, however, also conceptualised countertransference. For Lacan, countertransference is a resistance, hindering treatment (Evans, 1996: 30): ‘there is no other resistance in analysis than that of the analyst’ (Lacan, 2006c [1954]: 314). Whereas transferences are positive to treatment if analysed, countertransference, the position the physician feels drawn to by their relation to the patient, must be kept in check, not acted on. But ‘Freud was drawn into the lure of Dora’s resistance’ (Evans, 1996: 169). Transference has the curious effect of sometimes heightening symptoms, as we can see in Dora’s case, but then, after the analysis proceeds, these symptoms ease and a cure can take place. As Patrick Mahony points out, though, we can read Freud’s account of transference as a narrative of his countertransference towards Dora. Far from dissolving his countertransference, Freud enacted it with the reader, whom he also tried to pressure and seduce into complicitous agreement (Mahony, 1996: 113). Barbara Johnson agrees, and she particularly sees this in Freud’s use of marginalia and the coda ending his writing, the postscript, which takes the case itself as its object and strives towards coherence, towards a moral (Johnson, 1989: 267). In this coda, Freud transforms from doctor to (mis)reader and transference becomes countertransference or ‘transference onto the story itself as value-object’ (Johnson, 1989: 267). ‘I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time’, Freud writes in the postscript (1953 [1905]: 118), but ‘[t]hese descriptions of failure are couched in the language of narrative control’ (Johnson, 1989: 266). Showalter analyses Freud’s narration in the context of his reliability or unreliability. If he was reliable, Dora’s disappearance would mean she was punishing him for unlocking her resistance as the problem of her transference, given that erotic feelings towards her father and Herr K were also transferred into Freud. But Freud made mistakes; this much he avows, so he was not reliable. Then, in this reading, Dora becomes ‘a victim of Freud’s unconscious erotic feelings about her that affected his need to dominate and control her’ (Showalter, 1993b: 319). She is never a subject, like Anna O, only a narrative object. Her disappearance then becomes a heroic gesture of self-assertion and defiance. Her unhappy subsequent life was the result of Freud’s failing her and leaving her defenceless in a social

112 Disappearance environment hostile to intellectual women. His interpretation of her story is more about himself than about her. (Showalter, 1993b: 319) Kahane links Freud’s listening to the phrase ‘I get nothing out of my wife’, which Freud repeats three times in the narrative (1953 [1905]: 26, 98, 106). She questions who gets something and who has something to give and links this to the oral demand of his interpretations of her speech, to fellatio (Kahane, 1995: 23), suggesting that other possibilities of oral satisfaction do not occur to him. In several pieces of writing, Freud refers to his therapeutic work as a practice similar to archaeology where psychoanalysis is like ‘the technique of excavating a buried city’ (Freud and Breuer, 1955 [1893]: 139). But the analogy for Dora’s case is different. Cesare Romano terms it ‘the burglar’s picklocks’ (Romano, 2015: 51) that would break open Dora’s jewel case, which she dreamed of and recounted on the couch. But Freud fails to unlock her. This key-lock analogy as a way of structuring the logic of Dora’s case and the abandonment of the archaeologist’s trowels, shovels, and spades are what Romano (2015) and Zechner (2020: 95) consider the reasons for Freud’s mistakes and inevitable failure. Zechner goes further: ‘This reading [gynaecophilia] reflects the chasm running through Dora’s narrative separating issues of experience (philia) from knowledge (logos) whose discrepancy is one of the determining factors accounting for the analysis’s failure’ (2020: 93). Yet again, the knowledge of the hysteric was missed and the archaeological finds allowing us to understand hysteria were dismissed as rubble. Although here Freud, had his knowledge of excavation been more extensive, could have made another pertinent archaeological analogy because, as observed by the British field archaeologist HC Bowen, field archaeologist, ‘archaeology is rubbish’, and a midden, rubbish heap, or heap of rubble is for the archaeologist often the most productive means of unearthing truth in that it is the science of remains, the detritus of human lives. But the failure of Dora’s treatment can also be attributed to the place Freud reserved for her in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud wanted Dora to be the exemplar of his Oedipal theory of the neuroses, his second theory after the abandonment of the seduction theory, as we explained in the introduction. The Oedipal theory would have Dora fixated on the family romance of her father, unconsciously unable to move on, and it is her own repressed sexual wishes that are making her ill. She is to blame. Dora resisted not only the theories and interpretations but also being put in this place without her consent. The way Freud engaged with Dora is not neutral, or evenly hovering attention, but a relation which feminist critic Toril Moi likens to armed combat: ‘Dora can be perceived as the bearer of feminine epistemology in the study only because Freud selected her as his opponent in a war over cognition, creating her as his symbolic antagonist’ (Moi, 1981: 73). And in this struggle, Moi is much more pessimistic than Hélène Cixous, who gave voice to Dora in her play ‘Portrait of Dora’ (1983), or us: It may be gratifying to see the young, proud Dora as a radiant example of feminine revolt (as does Cixous); but we should not forget the image of the

Disappearance  113 old, nagging, whining and complaining Dora she later becomes, achieving nothing. Hysteria is not, pace Hélène Cixous, the incarnation of the revolt of women forced to silence, but rather a declaration of defeat, the realization that there is no other way out. Hysteria is, as Catherine Clément perceives, a cry for help when defeat becomes real, when the woman sees that she is efficiently gagged and chained to her feminine role. (Moi, 1981: 67) Martha Noel Evans reinforces Moi’s perspective: ‘If the speech of witches and hysterics was universally discounted as mendacious … it is because women do not have the necessary real power to challenge the word of their colonial masters’ (Evans, 1991: 282). Freud changed Dora’s speech to give it the coherence he wanted, editing, erasing, renaming, and changing chronology. But the hysteric in Dora’s case is not ‘a mark of female pathology, but rather a result of male denial of women as subjects of enunciation’ (Evans, 1991: 282). Freud’s confessional claiming of responsibility for Dora’s treatment happens, like his countertransference, in the marginalia, ‘a paratext, marginalized and belatedly appended’ (Zechner, 2020: 92). He writes: ‘No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 109). Dora’s text is like two cases coexisting but unaware of each other: Dora and her transference in the main text and Freud and his countertransference in the marginalia. This placement repeats, for Zechner, ‘a major moment in the Dora narrative itself, namely regarding the appendix’ – the human organ – ‘and its status as a site for the manifestation of hysterical symptoms’ (2020: 92). Dora suffered from abdominal pains which Freud interpreted thus: ‘Her supposed attack of appendicitis had thus enabled the patient with the modest means at her disposal (the pains and the menstrual flow) to realize a phantasy of childbirth’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 103). In the footnotes, he explains that fully developed hysterical symptoms, such as the supposed inflammation of Dora’s appendix, can be traced to imagined sexual life. Collins et al. (1990: 244–245) also see this display of hysteria in Freud in the very way he presents the case, especially in the reordering of the material, whether deliberate in order to connect the narrative of the case, or involuntary. His memory seems to fail him in the most recent events of the case, when he knew Dora was about to disappear. What Collins et al. point out is the fact that the way Freud tells Dora’s case is reminiscent of ‘the characteristics of the neurotic’s discourse in analysis – reticence, amnesia, paramnesia, and alteration of chronology’ (Collins et al., 1990: 244–245), which, perhaps ironically, Freud details a few pages into his presentation of Dora (1953 [1905]: 16–17). Mahony sees in Freud’s language a limitation of his grasp of the case, as he uses the same term (lösen, in German) to mean solve – as in figuring out or resolving her riddle – and dissolve the symptom, and the term ‘manage’ (Erledigung leisten) when referring to the case (Mahony, 1996: 117). Freud still believed in the therapeutic framework he set out and its potential for restoration. In Dora’s case, her disappearance undercut this. But Showalter claims that the text’s hysterical

114 Disappearance narrative is a reflection of Freud more than Dora (1993a: 27). There is a notable shift in the text as Freud reports Dora’s first and second dreams. In the first, she is an other who speaks, dialogical, with direct quotations. The second dream section, however, is a monologue, where Freud’s interpretations and Dora’s associations are both in his first person, and Dora is relegated to an indirect discourse (Kahane, 1995: 27). This reveals Freud’s ‘resistance to Dora’s different voice’ (Kahane, 1995: 28). Dora disappeared. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she left Freud after his attempted interpretation of her second dream. ‘She seemed to be moved; she said good-bye to me very warmly, with the heartiest wishes for the New Year, and – came no more’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 109). Four pages earlier, Freud tells us that Dora had already made the decision two weeks before, and he relates this period of time to the notice a maidservant or governess would give (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 105). He knew she would not return: Her father, who called on me two or three times afterwards, assured me that she would come back again, and said it was easy to see that she was eager for the treatment to continue. But it must be confessed that Dora’s father was never entirely straightforward. He had given his support to the treatment so long as he could hope that I should ‘talk’ Dora out of her belief that there was something more than a friendship between him and Frau K. His interest faded when he observed that it was not my intention to bring about that result. I knew Dora would not come back again. (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 109) In revenge, he named her Dora, the name of a maidservant (Pajaczkowska et al., 1981: 75), making Ida disappear. This is a doubly fragmented, mirroring case. When Dora disappears, Freud disappears too. As Lacan writes in ‘Presentation on Transference’: It is through the very same trap door that Freud disappears, with a still more insidious sliding. Dora leaves with a Mona Lisa smile and even when she reappears, Freud is not so naive as to believe she intends to resume her analysis. (Lacan, 2006 [1966]: 183) It is as if the text itself, in its fragmentation of writing and marginalia, transference and countertransference, becomes hysterical, asking us readers, Che vuoi? What do you want from me?

A Case of Hysteria Reading Showalter’s and Johnson’s parallel analyses of Dora and The Yellow Wallpaper has made us ask: can Freud’s writing of Dora be the wallpaper entrapping Ida? Dora, like hysteria, has been both an obsession and an inspiration to

Disappearance  115 artists. In this and the next section, we examine two works inspired by Dora: Sharon Kivland’s book A Case of Hysteria (1999) and the film Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity, directed by Claire Pajaczkowska, Anthony McCall, and Andrew Tyndall (1979). Sharon Kivland was put under a spell by Freud’s case history. To break it, she had to re-write it as a work of art, a mystery novel, and a critical study of words and images. Hers is a story of possession by a text and by a hysteric, as well as a journey towards reading her correctly, with attention, so that she can reveal something of Kivland herself. If no longer a chronic condition, reading Dora is still the sickness. The cure A Case of Hysteria records and effects is not one of the subject or the text but of the reader (who is only in the first instance the writer). Clinically, the book’s aim is not to cure ‘Dora’ or Dora but to cure itself of Dora. (Kivland, 1999: x) Kivland’s work demonstrates how reading, an act that identifies, deciphers, and makes sense of a network of complex relational events, is fundamental to understanding the hysteric. Reading is not an innocent activity. It is open to misreading (Kolodny, 1980). The novelist Vladimir Nabokov also warns us that no reading is possible, only re-reading: ‘Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader’ (1980: 3). In A Case of Hysteria and in her wider oeuvre, Kivland shows us that the reader has rights and also responsibilities. Jacques Lacan liked reading more than writing. He really only published one book, Écrits. He chose to open this work with a chapter on Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story ‘The Purloined Letter’ (Poe, 2003 [1839–1850]; Lacan, 2006b [1966]), which represents his manifesto for reading and an injunction for how his work should be read. The text in Écrits relates to his second seminar of 1954–1955 where he discussed the ego in Freud and in psychoanalytic technique (Lacan, 1991). Poe’s detective story is symmetrical, with two scenes containing scenes within scenes. The first scene happens in detective Dupin’s apartment. He is visited by the Prefect of police, who narrates the scene within the scene. This one happens in the royal boudoir. The queen receives a compromising letter, which she hides from the king who is in the room. Minister D enters and understands the situation, deciding to take advantage by availing himself of the letter while the queen is powerless. The police have tried everything to find the letter but have been unsuccessful and, hence, the Prefect engages the services of Dupin. The second scene also happens in Dupin’s quarters and is narrated by Dupin himself, who recounts his successful retrieval of the letter. The scene within the scene, this time, takes place at Minister D’s apartment and shows how Dupin finds and replaces the letter. It was hidden in plain view, on the mantelpiece. In his analysis, Lacan divides the circuit of the letter into the two narrative scenes, each with three positions, mirroring his concepts of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic (for an in-depth explanation of Lacan’s three realms,

116 Disappearance see Evans, 1996). The pattern of these two scenes leads him to create a third scene, the one taking place at the time of reading.​ According to Lacan, to read well, one has to rob, to be able to see that the blind and the complacent seer leave open what should be hidden. The word seer, which is typically used when discussing Lacan’s analysis, could be perhaps replaced with reader of the situation or viewer if possible confusion with the connotations of prophet needed to be avoided since here the characters do not have foresight. The reader needs to take advantage of this situation. For Lacan, to read is not to enter the Real (which is blind) or to give in to one’s own subjective Imaginary readings (which are complacent), but to understand the Symbolic potential of the letter, to be aware of the rules of the game, of the structure of play. The letter in the story, and the hysteric, appear and disappear and, as they follow a particular circuit, they have an effect and change whomever they have contact with. This is particularly true of the hysteric Dora. Kivland’s A Case of Hysteria – and the wider history of the hysteric – shows how reading Dora, just as reading Kivland’s book as a work of art, comes with its problems: it is prone to misreading and a turning of the text, resulting in the work and the hysteric reading us. In any situation in which a hysteric shows up, it means there is something that is not understood, something that is illegible, unreadable, something escaping meaning. As we have seen in Lacan, the moving of the scenes comes with a shift in position, and the reader can become a complacent seer first, then blind to the situation, if a hystericisation (the process we explored in Chapter Three when writing on the mystery of the hysteric) does not take place in the reading itself. For the artist Louise Bourgeois, who made the sculpture Arch of Hysteria we discussed in Chapter One, the work of art is not a vehicle to gain knowledge but a way to show something: The work of art is limited to an acting out, not an understanding. If it were understood, the need to do the work would not exist anymore … Art is a guarantee of sanity but not liberation. It comes back again and again. (Bourgeois, 2012: 7)

The blind Real

The complacent seer Imaginary

The robber Symbolic

Scene 1 Royal Boudoir

King

Queen

Minister

Scene 2 Minister D apartment

Queen

Minister

Dupin

Scene 3 Reading

Minister

Dupin

Lacan/the reader

Figure 4.2  Lacan’s interpretation of Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’.

Disappearance  117 Kivland’s A Case of Hysteria is beautiful. With all the tools and mark-making a book format can supply (fonts, images, fragments of images, repetitions, metaphors, dialogues, footnotes, changes of voice, narrator, identity, etc.) she examines each of the segments of Freud’s narrative to find Dora within. The clinical picture, both dreams, and the postscript are unfolded and interspersed with six other case histories, typeset sans serif, representing female fragments of a detective, which turns out to be the author. The 55-page section ‘One or Two Things They Know About Her’ was performed as a read-through work in London in 2016, 17 years after A Case of Hysteria was published. This part is a dialogue piece for 70 voices including Octave [Mannoni], Jacques [Lacan], and others. Kivland assembles speculations from authors around Dora where there is no textual evidence in Freud’s case. This is interspersed with stage directions from Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. The work is critical of the reading of Dora’s case, the voices reminiscent of gossip, wishful thinking, and psychoanalytic jargon. The section ends with Octave – presumably French psychoanalyst Mannoni – saying: ‘Tant pis, ce qui est écrit est écrit’ (‘Too bad, what is written is written’; Kivland, 1999: 80). The book is a reflection of what constitutes a case, what the relation between the particular and the general is, and the relation of that to truth. It is also a work on reading and writing the hysteric and, therefore, the mystery. It questions the authority of the case history itself in relation to Freud’s fragmented writing and its temporal loops (Borossa, 1999). The premise for the book and the artistic choices within are clearly explained: ‘A Case of Hysteria returns to a recorded specimen in the literature of hysteria, works through an exemplary reading of that record, and brings one instance of such reading to an end’ (Kivland, 1999: xiv). It is a distant encounter with Dora, mediated by Freud and by his writing, which Kivland retells ‘without addition’ (1999: xiii), as a translator or editor, which, like the initial version by James Strachey, is told, partly, in her own words. This contradiction in the analytic reporting of cases is highlighted. In fact, she even acknowledges that the word ‘case’ in the title is Strachey’s addition (1999: xiv) and links it to the idea of a container, which is what the work is. It asks the question that so many other texts on Dora should ask – whose story is it? Who gets to author it? (Kivland, 1999: 274) – another way perhaps of asking what the book wants from us, the readers. In Kivland’s encounter with Dora, she is able to transcend the case in order not to generalise, but to make hysteria itself appear, rather than disappear: Enclosed within this case, lying within these pages – still unfragmented and without analysis is hysteria. As you turn them, the leaves of this book may both effect one cure and preserve a second illness. Caveat lector. You have been warned. (1999: xv) The trouble is, can we find it, identify it, and experience it? Like a ghost, when hysteria appears, it is invisible. Yet, like Lacan’s reading of ‘The Purloined Letter’,

118 Disappearance it is there, in plain view. Holding it in one’s hands, though, like the hysteric, involves robbing, taking away, hiding, and purloining: ‘I have not entirely restored what is missing’, writes Kivland in her editor’s introduction, taking on Freud’s or Strachey’s voice, ‘unlike a conscientious archaeologist, I have omitted to mention in each case where the authentic parts end and my constructions begin’ (Kivland, 1999: 6). Dora is a construction in Freud’s quest for knowledge, a ‘function of the text’ (Pajaczkowska et al., 1981: 76). Kivland’s container-casebook highlights hysteria’s shape-shifting and disappearing acts as that which makes it what it is. Anouchka Grose concurs: Certainly, hysterics seemed to know how to provide perplexing encounters. Coming back to the idea of doctors and patients, texts and images, art and theory, knowledge and power, perhaps we could say that hysteria, when viewed a certain way, offers ways of thinking about how you might show something in the hope of being simultaneously understood and misunderstood, or of misunderstanding oneself, or of bamboozling people who seem knowledgeable. In other words, doing anything but being straightforwardly explanatory, because what could be more boring than that? (Grose, 2020: 17)

The ontology of hysteria The hysterical riddle we explored in Chapter Three is not one of Freudian conversion, indecisive sexuality as Lacan ascertained, or even translation as Juliet Mitchell sees it, but is instead ‘a crisis in ontological being’ (Campbell, 2005: 337). Through Peggy Phelan’s concept of the ontology of performance and the links she made between dance and hysteria, we can trace disappearance as a constitutive trait of the performing hysteric, an act of resistance and rebellion. In her seminal book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Phelan argues that ‘performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity … becomes itself through disappearance’ (1993: 146). This has to do with the relation between performance and the present moment, and with the fact that performance, in itself, cannot be apprehended in the way that other arts can. It cannot be reproduced or repeated. It disappears. Any attempt to write it, to preserve it through documentation, will alter the event, as Diana Taylor showed with her examination of the archive and the repertoire (2003), which we explored in Chapter Two. If performance, like the hysteric, has been termed valueless and empty, Phelan argues that its role is to revalue that emptiness, which gives it its political ‘distinctive oppositional edge’ (Phelan, 1993: 148). The disappearing act also has to do with the performing body, which, although visible and available, recedes to a vanishing point in order for something else to emerge – as a photograph, emerging gradually in the darkroom, replaces its origins in the living subject and becomes available for all to see. Roland Barthes, reflecting shortly after his mother’s death on a family snap of her as a child, meditates on the photograph as an ontological interface between presence and absence. Phelan in turn finds the same dynamic in her earliest realisation

Disappearance  119 of performance, in which as a young child she cuts the outline of a man from a pop-up book of medical illustrations, leaving a gap whose cast shadow seems to bring her closer to his real presence than any illustration could (Phelan, 1997: 2): I am investigating […] the possibility that something substantial can be made from the outline after the body has disappeared […] the affective outline of what we’ve lost might bring us closer to the bodies we want to touch than the restored illustration can. (Phelan, 1997: 3) This is what we aim to do with the outline we trace in this book. Perhaps Kivland’s act of reading/holding Freud’s case study of Dora verbatim is, as a reframing, itself a cutting around the outline, a tilting of the text that, from where we are, becomes substantial and, once again, legible. Phelan speaks of ‘the act of writing toward disappearance’, as opposed to that ‘of writing toward preservation’ and, assuming that Freud was writing towards the preservation of evidence and the satisfactory snapping shut of a crucial case, he missed his subject, who simply removed herself. For, says Phelan, we ‘must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself’ (Phelan, 1993: 148). But you have to be able to read it and, as Freud’s subject, Ida had to resist encasement through the disappearance of Dora, to be encountered again (albeit fragmentarily) in acts of reading such as Kivland’s. Phelan makes a case for dance, movement, sound, character, or art appearing after the disappearance of the hysteric; we argue that what appears is also resistance and rebellion. ‘Performance is the attempt to value that which is nonreproductive, nonmetaphorical. This is enacted through the staging of the drama of misrecognition (twins, actors within characters enacting other characters, doubles, crimes, secrets, etc.)’ (Phelan, 1993: 152). She examines the wrapped and suspended body performances of Angelika Festa, which manifest ‘the suspension of the female body between the polarities of presence and absence, and insists that “the woman” can exist only between these categories of analysis’ (Phelan, 1993: 164), between appearing and disappearing. Phelan’s understanding of the ontology of performance also applies to a video work directly commenting on Dora and playing on the misrecognition Phelan mentions. The 1979 film Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity, directed by Claire Pajaczkowska, Anthony McCall, and Andrew Tyndall and also published as a script (Pajaczkowska et al., 1981), is a critical feminist reading of Freud’s text, in which they find the relations of power and subjection very problematic. In the film notes accompanying early viewings of the work, they highlight Dora as an exemplar text to discuss: • •

a theory of female sexuality the historical development of psychoanalysis as an Ideological State Apparatus often used by dominant ideology to try to reconcile women to their position within the family

120 Disappearance • •

understanding hysteria not only as an illness but as the inevitable predicament of women who speak in a language which has never been ours, a phallocentric language. To analyze that language, how it represents. Freud’s representation of Dora, the representation of female sexuality in psychoanalytic theory, and representation in films. (Pajaczkowska et al., 1981: 75)

For the artists, the mystery of hysteria is female sexuality and the structure of the narrative follows Freud’s libidinal energy towards Dora (Pajaczkowska et al., 1981: 76). This is clear in the film’s second section, where a man, of an appearance we might associate with a psychoanalyst, and a young woman are in dialogue, he speaking explanatory words, she recounting in the first and third person. These are interspersed with TV adverts for aspirin, disinfectant, and deodorant and silent pornographic film footage. The first section is a monologue, delivered by a woman’s mouth, sideways and attached to a body but reminiscent of Beckett’s Not I. The third and last section is a reading of correspondence, some shorter theoretical postcards, some from Dora to her mother (Pajaczkowska et al., 1981: 80). While Phelan’s analysis of Festa’s works focuses on their relation to death and rebirth through the images of the mummy and the cocoon, in Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity, the key drive is not thanatos, but eros. We would argue that both are equally present in performance and both require the technique of ‘looking beyond’ the body and into a second order of re/presentation (Phelan, 1993: 156), implicating the viewer in the work. Dora disappears as she appears on the screen, she appears as she leaves the screen, much as the phenomenon of anamorphosis demonstrated by Hans Holbein the Younger in his painting The Ambassadors directs the reader/spectator to a position from which they can read/see the otherwise invisible subject, a phenomenon discussed by Lacan in Seminar XI (1981 [1973]). Phelan refers to a passage in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which underpins the hysteric: the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not supposed to know. And this discourse of truth finally takes effect, not in the one who receives it, but in the one from whom it is wrested. (Foucault, 1978: 62) Dora questions sexual expectations and is not supposed to know, according to Freud, about either sexual practices or family secrets. ‘Women and performers, more often than not, are “scripted” to “sell” or “confess” something to someone who is in the position to buy or forgive’ (Phelan, 1993: 163). Yet, at the same time, these women are invisible within the dominant narratives of history and the practices of performance. So what is the solution to the problems posed by Ida to Freud, by Dora to her readers, and by Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of

Disappearance  121 Mistaken Identity to its viewers? Phelan proposes a Lysistrata-style strike on the representation of the female body, which would be felt both aesthetically and politically and would, eventually, bring about a new form of representation. This interference with the current structures of representation does not mean a refusal to participate. Quite the contrary, it would mean that artists make work ‘in which the costs of women’s perpetual aversion are clearly measured’ (Phelan, 1993: 164). This ‘radical negativity’, which Phelan suggests after Shoshana Felman, involves exchanging what one does not have for what one desires, avoiding becoming the negative of what has disappeared and cannot be seen. Radical negativity resists reproduction and is the dimension that makes thought in performance transform into a radical act (Phelan, 1993: 164–165). Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity offers the beginnings of a political reading of Dora, showing the historically tight connection between hysteria and protest. Ida refused to participate, showing a resistance to the dominant narrative of family relations, which Phelan writes as ‘to being seen as only receptacles for reproduction’ (Phelan, 1993: 55). Through her disappearance, she made herself heard without words, producing knowledge rather than submitting to the patriarchal knowledge production on the hysteric represented by the doctor’s voice. Hysteria, as a condition, has a destructive quality, as well as the mimetic one we discussed in Chapter Two: it critiques, including, as we saw in The Yellow Wallpaper, the validity of the cure itself. It scrambles the codes to its own decipherment, and it is by disturbing its own structure that the hysteric is critical, rebellious, and revolutionary. But to make critical work is not sufficient. Phelan appeals to ‘[t]hese institutions’ – museums, archives, and even banks and universities – which ‘must invent an economy not based on preservation but one which is answerable to the consequences of disappearance’ (Phelan, 1993: 165).

Male hysteria So far, in this chapter, we have gone from Dora to Freud to readings of Dora. Throughout the book, we have cited other examples and cases to illustrate our hysteric’s main traits. We might have given the impression that hysteria is the domain of women only, but hysterical men are ‘not nearly as rare as is often believed, to be sure, and certainly existing in defiance of one very common view of the disorder, that it was rooted in the female’ (Scull, 2009: 23). Gender plays a large and complex role in the biography of hysteria, as sexual difference is formed into its very structure and this helps in the building of an explicit and strong transference (Showalter, 1993b: 319). Stimulated by Dora and Freud’s role in her case, we very briefly trace some thoughts around male hysteria, considering its simultaneous appearance and disappearance. The male hysteric is an elusive subject, as are transgender hysterical formations (see Grose, 2020: 12). While the transgender hysteric is a pending subject of research, male hysteria has been convincingly and thoroughly studied by, among others, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (through a 1991 edited collection including

122 Disappearance chapters by Peggy Phelan and Shannon Bell), Elaine Showalter (1985, 1993b, and 1997), Mark S Micale (1990 and 2008, this manuscript being the most notable contribution to the subject), and, more recently, Tim Posada (2020). Micale links hysteria’s medical disappearance to global conflict at the beginning of the twentieth century, leading to the appearance of shell shock and the need to sever the link between what male veterans were suffering from and the feminine and feminising womb (2008). But hysteria is not limited to those witnessing and trying to make sense of the horrors of war. Micale traces the slow move of hysteria from the womb to the nervous system and cites Charles Lepois, personal doctor to Henry II of France, who observes in 1618 ‘hysterical symptoms are almost all common to both men and women’ and Thomas Sydenham in 1681 who attributes hysteria to ‘such males as lead a sedentary or studious life and grow pale over their books and papers’ (Micale, 1990: 366). Shortly after, male hysteria was to disappear or at least veil itself behind a new name: hypochondriasis. The pull of the hysteric towards the womb was too strong for doctors. Charcot picked up where Lepois and Sydenham left, bringing it back to a neurological model from the gynaecological one it kept slipping into. A decade after conducting his work on women, Charcot recorded case notes for over 90 male patients whom he regarded as hysterics (Micale, 1990: 372). Charcot worked against strongly set stereotypes, liberating the condition from boundaries set at pubescent boys, leisured upper classes, and effeminate or homosexual men (Micale, 1990: 376). In fact, in an attempt to establish the ‘authentically “masculine” nature of the disorder’, he wrote about ‘hysterie virile’ (Micale, 2008: 133). The picture of hysteria in males and females is very similar in Charcot’s writings. The arch of hysteria, opisthotonos, is represented as inverted, emprosthotonos, in one of Charcot’s drawn illustrations (Micale, 1990: 400), a rigid and elevated forward fold, which was also present in female patients but became less iconic. He attributed different secondary causes of the disorder: for women, it was commonly ‘an overpowering emotional experience’ in domestic settings; for men, ‘a physically traumatic event, usually one in the workplace, and the disorders were often compounded by prior venereal infection or alcoholic excess’ (Micale, 1990: 406). The condition was in each case the result of what was at the time understood as an excessively feminine or masculine behaviour, and which was highly polarised. Even if his work has an ambiguous relationship to gender and social stereotypes – think of the portrayal of hysteric women in the Iconographie photographique – Charcot’s study of hysteria surprises because of the sameness among the sexes and a resistance to a ‘wholesale masculinization of the hysteria concept’ (Micale, 1990: 409). This had, ‘for both science and society, a liberalizing potential’ (Micale, 1990: 410). Freud analysed himself as a hysteric, an expression of his repressed femininity (Hunter, 1983: 485–486). Yet, the neurological model and liberalisation of hysteria did not reach Vienna. In ‘An Autobiographical Study’, Freud writes about the bad reception his paper on male hysteria had when he presented it to the Viennese Society of Physicians on 15 October 1886, just after his return from

Disappearance  123 his apprenticeship with Charcot. When trying to find access to male patients in Vienna to continue his research, ‘an old surgeon, actually broke out with the exclamation: “But, my dear sir, how can you talk such nonsense? Hysteron (sic) means the uterus. So how can a man be hysterical?”’ (Freud, 1959 [1925]: 15). Commenting on this episode, Sander L Gilman explains: It was the young, French-trained Freud who knew that the concept of hysteria was tied to universals (which, at that point, he understood as trauma) and was not merely a reflex of the biological uniqueness of a subgroup. It was hysteria (the hallmark of the new science) that Freud wished to rescue from the crabbed claws of a Viennese medical establishment that could not even get its Greek correct, for hystera is the correct form of the Greek noun for uterus. […] Freud’s understanding, like the understanding of his time, was that hysteria did not manifest itself as a disease of the womb but of the imagination. (Gilman, 1993: 402–404) The hysteric continued to be understood as female, with the pathological imagination simply replacing the moving womb as its central cause (Gilman, 1993: 404). Elaine Showalter alludes to the fact that a wide acknowledgement of male hysteria would bring about different models of hysterical narrative. She comments on the fact that most cases of male hysteria are of male patients studied by male doctors, but there are a few by female doctors too. These, however, emphasise ‘the intense cultural hostility to the idea of the hysteric as male and the therapeutic authority as female’ (Showalter, 1993a: 32), citing films like Zelig, Spellbound, and The Prince of Tides as examples of this strong resistance to female therapeutic authority, portrayed as the woman therapist falling in love with her hysterical male patient and taking over his symptoms (Showalter, 1993a: 33). So perhaps the failure of the imagination was not on the side of the hysteric, but on the doctors who failed to see woman other than as hysterical potential. As with other traits manifesting in the history of hysteria, the arts, more than the clinic, have been able to expand the imagination about the male hysteric. As well as the example of Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture Arch of Hysteria (1993), which we discussed in Chapter One, Jonathan W Marshall notes an interesting display of male hysteria in Japan, a defeated nation in the Second World War. He refers to the body in the dance form butoh, a form encompassing techniques found in dance, performance, and movement, and yet difficult to categorise (Waychoff, 2009: 37): ‘[t]he tetanization’ – the stimulation of a muscle by rapid contractions so that the muscular response is sustained – ‘of the body in hysteria, especially of the male body, […] recurs within the work of the founder of butoh, Hijikata Tatsumi’ (Marshall, 2020: 68). Citing Klaus Theweleit’s work on male fantasies, he juxtaposes the trope, in fascist literature and sculpture, of the body as armour, making threatening forces crash against it and breaking down before retreating,

124 Disappearance what he calls a hysterical construction against ‘fear of contamination and collapse’ (Marshall, 2020: 68). Marshall explains how butoh channelled the energies of the male hysteric and his demonic possessions into the art form, manifesting in the ‘radically twisted, convulsing, tremulous bodies’ (Marshall, 2020: 77) of males. Here the body, like that of all hysterics, is a ‘fluid, changeable structure which morphs through unstable iterations of flesh and emulsion’, as ‘shifting fragments, pieces and ruptures’, in transit between forms and captured by photography (Marshall, 2019: 158). Although the core themes and explorations of butoh are not explicitly founded in the hysteric’s question, an aesthetic expression of distress in the body as it appears through an image (Sanders, 1988) links them. Artistic presentations of hysteria in the male contain the same traits as we have discussed in the context of women: symptoms expressed through the body, extraordinary mimetic powers, the manifestation of mysteries and riddles, and a propensity to vanish, only to materialise again. The continuous dis-re-appearance of the male hysteric is still more uneasy than that of women hysterics, more in dispute and more veiled behind terminology, including inside amorphous forms of mass hysteria, a phenomenon we will return to in the conclusion.

(Dis)appearance Every disappearance of the hysteric means a reappearance in a different place or with a different shape. The name of the condition might have shifted to histrionic personality or post-traumatic stress disorder; its form might have vanished from the individual consulting room to spread instead into culture as mass hysteria (#MeToo, the covid-19 pandemic), or perhaps it might have migrated from medical discourse into art, film, literature, and dance. Symptoms disappear to appear in other guises, in order parts of the body, yet it is all part of the hysteric. In Hysteria Today, Leonardo S Rodriguez writes that in the hysteric’s conversion, ‘truth returns, albeit in a disfigured, mutilated form’ (Rodriguez, 2016: 22–23). Disappeared, disfigured, mutilated, veiled, vanished, transformed, purloined – these amount to similar operations: wanting to suppress something that is insistent. This is evident in Dora, as she disappeared from Freud’s couch and appeared as the narrative of transference and countertransference. The disappearing strategy of the hysteric is reminiscent of the one his 18-monthold grandson plays in Freud’s writing ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and which he calls Fort/Da (2001 [1920]). The boy would repeatedly throw a cotton reel out of his cot, forcing his mother to retrieve it. Fort and Da were understood by Freud to be the baby’s approximations of the words gone and there. In the text, Freud explains thanatos, the death drive, through the compulsion to repeat, and he sees the child’s game as a way of transforming an unhappy situation – the mother leaving the room – into a happy one over which he has control. Freud also saw this as revenge on the parents. The hysteric throws her question into the world: what do you want from me? Instead of revenge, or perhaps as well as it, hysteria is a form of resistance and rebellion against perpetual stress, imposed demands, and

Disappearance  125 impossible paths: marriage and domestic life, sexual relations and identity formations, body ideals, or the horrors of war. All this is embodied in the Dora case, as she ‘was treated like a pawn or a possession by her father and denied the rights to privacy or personal freedom’ (Showalter, 1993b: 317), her intelligence ‘represented as a form of neurotic resistance’ (Showalter, 1993b: 318). So she rebelled. It might be seen as spectral, with its white-gowned Victorian imagery, but hysteria is not a ghost. ‘If hysteria was dead and buried, it has been resurrected to circulate with remarkable vitality’ (Benson James, 2019: 17). Phantom from time past, mystery, or omission, the general consensus is that hysteria is here to stay and each disappearance, forced or not, will result in a resurgence, as GS Rousseau ascertains: hysteria will always be present in society unless some miracle occurs – it can never disappear altogether, because its essentially protean nature compels it ‘to imitate’ other diseases. According to this line of reasoning, the unwritten history of hysteria – the history that lies beyond the narrow medical gaze – is not Veith’s chronological summary of medical theories narrowly conceived, but rather a social history of hysteria placed in large cultural contexts that do not mute the gleanings of literary and artistic voices. This broad record, if appended to the medical one, is more revealing than the narrow ‘medical gaze’ because hysteria itself is a reflection of the cultures it imitates. (Rousseau, 1993: 106) Rousseau then advocates for an understanding of hysteria as a category rather than a disease or condition, an idea this book aligns with, taking it further into a distinct category of resistance. When hysteria disappears, two things remain as traces before its new emergence: the fascination with the hysteric’s mystery and the lingering echo of her or his voice.

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Disappearance  129 Rousseau, G S (1993) ‘“A Strange Pathology”: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500– 1800’. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Edited by Sander L Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G S Rousseau and Elaine Showalter. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 91–221. https://doi​.org​/10​.1525​/9780520309937​-003 Sanders, Vicki (1988) ‘Dancing and the Dark Soul of Japan: An Aesthetic Analysis of “Butō”’. Asian Theatre Journal, 5.2 (Autumn). 148–163. Scull, Andrew (2009) Hysteria: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Showalter, Elaine (1993a) ‘On Hysterical Narrative’. Narrative, 1.1 (January). 24–35. Showalter, Elaine (1993b) ‘Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender’. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Edited by Sander L Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G S Rousseau and Elaine Showalter. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 286–344. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1525​/9780520309937​-005 Showalter, Elaine (1997) Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Showalter, Elaine (2020) ‘Hystories Revisited: Hysterical Epidemics and Social Media’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 27–37. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​ .ctv18dvt2d.5 Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity (1979) [Film] Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock dir., US, 40mins. Stone, Jon, Russell Hewett, Alan Carson, Charles Warlow and Michael Sharpe (2008) ‘The “Disappearance” of Hysteria: Historical Mystery or Illusion?’ Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 101.1 (January). 12–18. https://doi​.org​/10​.1258​/jrsm​.2007​.070129 Taylor, Diana (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Cultural memory and Performance in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​ /9780822385318 Trillat, Étienne (1986) Histoire de l’hystérie. Paris: Sehgers. Wajcman, Gérard (2003) ‘The Hysteric’s Discourse’. The Symptom 4 (Spring). https:// www​.lacan​.com​/hystericdiscf​.htm. Accessed 08 February 2021. Waychoff, Brianne (2009) ‘Butoh, Bodies, and Being’. Kaleidoscope, 8. Article 4. 37–53. Zechner, Dominik (2020) ‘The Phantom Erection: Freud’s Dora and Hysteria’s Unreadabilities’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 87–101. https:// doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.8

5

Voice

Looking into Francesca Woodman’s image ‘Self-portrait talking to Vince’ (1980), we see a voice. Amidst the dilapidated ruins of a Roman palazzo in the late 1970s, Woodman positions herself in ‘psychological spaces between fantasy and reality’ (SCAD, n.d.). This photograph, made in the year before her death by suicide in 1981 is, as ever, meticulously staged. She stares awkwardly out at us, as though her head is held in place. A corkscrew of twisted wire spiralling from her open mouth glistens like ectoplasm, and other elements echo this, for example, the obsessive pattern on a curtain beside her, two curling strands of hair by her left cheek (although they might be marks on the wall), and a line of blistered plaster overhead that seems to continue and carry the emerging bubble of her silent speech upwards. Francesca did not manipulate her self-portraits. The objects and effects we see are purely down to careful scene-setting and timing, the traditional photographic options available also to Charcot’s Salpêtrière photographer, Paul Richer. The camera in this context is an instrument operating within a liminal space, between paper and subject. As Woodman herself puts it in a handwritten note beneath a photo-portrait of her friend and model Charlie, ‘There is the Paper and then there is the Person’ (Woodman, 2015: 99). Francesca Woodman’s images might be seen to embody Julia Kristeva’s observation that ‘the “body language” of hysteria is seen as both feminine and radical, outside of patriarchal culture’ (Kristeva cited in Showalter, 1993: 29). An example of this is a series of fast photographic self-portraits where she wraps herself in the peeling wallpaper of a lofty palazzo room. We might assume that here Woodman is referencing disappearance itself and possibly, more specifically, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s powerful image of a woman in wallpaper. Either way, the core elements in these images are the lack or loss of voice, and perhaps a re-positioning of language. The materiality of Woodman’s work, each image caught by and developed in darkness on small squares of paper, can also be said to reflect the materially embodied ‘mother tongue’ proposed by Roland Barthes (1977: 188). This is a body language incorporating disappearance from any frame that seeks a neat explanatory story, and, with voice, it is a language that becomes part of the same articulate state. In Passions of the Voice, Claire Kahane goes further and describes hysteria as disturbances in the ‘bodily zones of exchange between inside and outside, DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-7

Voice  131 between incorporation and projection’, a confusion between body and language (1995: xi), and thus defines the hysteric’s voice as ‘tonal stability’ (1995: viii). ‘Dora’s mouth and throat are … the theatre where she tries to articulate the way things are between the sexes’ (David-Menard, 1989: 90–91). Janet Beizer defines it as ‘an unrestrained interiorized force that must be stopped’ (1994: 47). Yet a voice continues to emerge, an oracular voice, a voice of revelation (Beizer, 1994: 53–54), an authentic voice in touch with a truer self. Elizabeth Bronfen writes: one of the seminal definitions of the hysteric is that there is a noncoincidence between her self-representations and the being she really is, but in such a way that she not only plays roles, but that her existence resides in the performance of these roles. This is why (even as hysteria is connected with mimesis as mimicry, deceit, and simulation) one can isolate a distinct, indeed an authentic, voice emerging from the hysterical performance. (Bronfen, 1998: 118) Much commentary on Francesca Woodman’s photographic output concerns her preoccupation with surrealism, consequently contextualising her practice through psychoanalytic discourse. One is aware of Woodman’s deployment of surrealist structures in terms of visual puns (Krauss, 1999), or the occlusion of herself as a subject by means of blurring or by literal covering or camouflage (wallpaper, clothing, light). Thus she acknowledges her understanding of surrealism as a language by which the inside (sphere of the unconscious) manifests as the outside (‘natural’ or ‘common-sense’ world). Woodman was an artist whose voice could thus be said to echo writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, or, more contemporarily, Ali Smith. As we discussed in Chapter Four, Gilman’s projected self appears through the wallpaper of the bedroom in which her narrator is kept in a state of enforced passivity, while the ek-static structure deployed by Woolf in texts such as The Waves manifests the internal thoughts of each character, deconstructing notions of chronological time, but referencing a sense of time as non-linear and nonetheless ‘commonsense’, rooted in relationship. And as we saw in Chapter Two, there is thus a sense that these figures are taken out of (them)selves temporarily, but returned to themselves in the end. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze identified in the structure of Woolf’s writing a sense of becoming, a refusal of subjectivity because we are never one thing – thus, ‘to write is to become something other than a writer … Woolf responds “To whom do you speak of writing?” The writer does not speak about it but is concerned with something else’ (Deleuze, 1997: 6). So the Woodman figure can, like many discussed here, be said to represent a state of becoming, the ‘self’ as process-led and incomplete. In her blog ‘Virginia Woolf meets Francesca Woodman’, focusing on dress, Jessica Draper observes how Woodman’s body is presented in a state of becoming, between being clothed and unclothed, like a frontier between the two worlds of interiority and exteriority

132 Voice … Virginia Woolf was fascinated by the process of dressing as representative of a state of being which equated to an in betweenness. (2014) It could also be said that the author Ali Smith’s works, like Woolf’s and Woodman’s, are meticulously structured to hold a tension between stability and instability. Smith speaks in ‘words [that] aren’t stable’ (Wood, 2018). She depicts worlds in which ‘everything is mutable’, and at the same time ‘insistently political’ (Wood, 2018). As Woodman’s apparitions inhabit real spaces, in Smith’s novel Winter (2017), characters are portrayed in terms of shifting states of desire – a disembodied head follows an elderly lady around her council house, and a landscape (apparent to only one character) manifests above a dining table. All of these, as James Wood puts it, pun on the anxieties of post-Brexit Britain, the era of Trump, and the ongoing pressing need to save our planet. Margaret Sundell’s commentary on Woodman’s photography (1996) explores the disappearing body apparent in many of Woodman’s images as the signification of an endless search for self, which can be aligned with Lacan’s analysis of the mirror stage (Lacan, 2006a [1966], 2006b [1966]; Nobus, 1999; Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986). In this context, Woodman’s frequent use of mirrors and reflective surfaces, the blurred elusive moving body, can be considered in terms of absence and loss, a dialectic of inner/outer and visible/invisible. However, Andrew Metcalfe and Lucinda Ferguson (2001) imagine, in a position closer to that of Deleuze, discussed earlier, the state of half-opened being, a concept borrowed from Gaston Bachelard which offers the possibility of a position between being and not being, a place of multiplicity not dialectic (Bachelard, 1969: 222). Citing the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, they suggest that ‘between inside and outside us is a third part of the life of a human being … an intermediate area of experiencing’ (2001: 241). Enacting and embodying outside, Woodman makes analogies of body and world which are not surreal visions but something experienced, sometimes positioning her hands like walls or lips, by an open door, a hollow tree, an almost imperceptible dent in swathes of paper. She arranges her tangled hair to be like scribbles of foliage. Theorising a language of the body that supplements verbal/rational language (of sense), Roland Barthes proposes the body of the voice in terms of ‘grain’ (1977). Barthes describes grain as ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. It is not, or not merely, the timbre of the voice but the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue’ (Barthes, 1977: 188). Perhaps we can say that photographic paper, like the hysteric’s voice, has grain in that it offers friction and does not allow for a smooth brushing over and onto the next thing. Seeing Woodman’s photographs, small as they are, one does a double take, as if they called our name and we had to answer. Talking to Vince, Woodman speaks his name. Woodman’s performance allows her (and perhaps the viewer) to enter the hysteric’s discourse and unveils some sort of knowledge, bringing it to light in

Voice  133 the photograph. And this knowledge is articulate, showing, that hysteria itself is a language rather than a disease, speaking through her body. As Andrew Scull writes, it might ‘constitute an unspoken idiom of protest, a symbolic voice for the silenced sex, who were forbidden to verbalize their discontents, and so created a language of the body’ (2009: 7). Her utterance might not be translatable. In translation, something might be gained (access to the text, for example) but also something is always lost. But for the hysteric to be heard, we must try not to ventriloquise her language or translate into it, even if we associate it with knowledge, for it might be a hoax, only reproducing what is already known. Ventriloquy, like mimesis and possession, is a hysteric-related term that can be read with ambivalence, as a deceptive or sophisticated method. The doctors of hysterics are a testament to such ambivalence, linking their patients’ animal noises to convulsion of respiratory muscles and a hysteric’s performance to an ‘“art” requiring “considerable study”’ (Beizer, 1994: 47). Historically, ventriloquy has been understood as ‘an evil spirit speaking from within’, an intersecting of science and sorcery (Beizer, 1994: 47). In a more modern understanding, it involves a dummy, ‘making the ventriloquizing agent external to the body from which speech appears to emanate’. So in ventriloquism, subject and object are both together – physiological animal noises – and separated – performance (Beizer, 1994: 47). Ventriloquy is a mimesis of the voice through possession. Indeed, the hysteric has often been described as possessed. In a possession, one gives up something of oneself to another and this, as is shown in the popular film The Exorcist, often comes up as changes in voice. Mark Fisher writes: The one who is possessed is also dispossessed – of their own identity and voice. But this kind of dispossession is of course a precondition for the most potent writing and performance. Writers have to tune into other voices; performers must be capable of being taken over by outside forces. (Fisher, 2014: 52) In this process of possession and dispossession of the hysteric’s voice as it inhabits her body, knowledge is found ‘in a gap between the limits of two ontological categories. [Knowledge] escapes any positivist or constructivist logic by emerging between, and yet not as part of, two negations: neither, nor’ (Wolfreys, 2013: 70). That which the hysteric escapes with her voice (constructivism, positivism, other -isms) is that which the doctors apprehended. Possession is an inhabiting of a body within another body and this implies negotiation and power. It can be peaceful. Or not. Then there is also the issue of voice in psychoanalytic treatment, especially in its asymmetry. The hysteric is laying down on the couch; the analyst is outside her field of vision, not speaking much. Both voices are disembodied, one body scrutinised, and the analyst’s voice attached to the hysteric’s interior objects (Kahane, 1995: 155).

134 Voice As long as the face and mouth have not been completely revealed, and as long as the spectator’s eye has not ‘verified’ the co-incidence of the voice with the mouth … the voice retains an aura of invulnerability and magical power. (Chion, 1999: 28) Lacanian scholar Mladen Dolar refers to the voice as a ‘mysterious sound-object’ that overlaps two excesses, that of the subject and the Other (2006: 135). He acknowledges the importance of this in the development of Freud’s ideas on hysteria, for which phantasies were integral. These were not seen but heard. In a draft letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess dated 2 May 1897, where he outlines the architecture of hysteria, Freud writes: ‘[Phantasies] are related to things heard, as dreams are related to things seen. In dreams, to be sure, we hear nothing, but we see’ (Freud, 1966 [1950]: 248). With recourse to Jacques Derrida, Dolar relates hearing oneself speak to consciousness, an elementary narcissism ‘needed to produce a minimal form of a self’ (Dolar, 1996: 13). This hearing, however, Derrida equates with understanding, not to a simple sensory stimulus. A voice always involves a certain amount of ventriloquising, as Žižek suggests, our voice ‘hollowing [us] out’ and speaking ‘by itself’ (2001: 58), which is why the experience of hearing oneself speak is always strange. Ventriloquism itself, Dolar ascertains, ‘pertains to voice as such, to its inherently acousmatic character’ (2006: 70), originating deep within the body and far away from the moving mouth with which it is associated. This association makes it uncanny and mysterious. Žižek links this spectral quality of the ventriloquised voice to all human experience, not just to that of the hysteric: An unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from ‘its’ voice. The voice displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see, so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always a minimum of ventriloquism at work: it is as if the speaker’s own voice hollows him out and in a sense speaks ‘by itself,’ through him. (Žižek, 2001: 58) The hysteric’s voice is somewhere between language and body, identified with secretion, body fluids containing voice, that which undermines its agency (Beizer, 1994: 128–129). It is easily dismissed. In it, she can drown. But this fluidity is not containable and it travels. Thus, the hysteric’s voice also inhabits the space between self and other. Anna Gibbs (2005) reflects on the work of French philosopher Luce Irigaray as an intervention into a particular thought context in which its habit of generalising human experience on the basis of the masculine is challenged, interrupting so as to make space for the voice of an other. This interruption takes the form of commentary and side remarks but, more importantly, questions. Gibbs calls this an ‘interrogative mode of writing which aims to open up spaces of debate rather than to close them down with assertions’:

Voice  135 Here a fragmentary form emerges, one in which the parts do not add up to a whole, where totality as well as closure is resisted … Irigaray has also termed her procedure a ‘miming’ of the texts she undoes, a technique she both takes from and turns against Derrida, who in turn stole it from Benjamin. (Gibbs, 2005) The hysterics were only partly miming the doctors, as Irigaray mimed Derrida and Benjamin; it just happened that the physicians’ voices were louder. But if the hysteric was not speaking the doctor’s voice, what or who speaks through the hysteric? *** Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait talking to Vince’ (1980) might remind us of Augustine’s ‘The Cry’. Didi-Huberman examines the Salpêtrière photographs, those ‘indisputable documents’ (2003: 287) that Charcot used as proof for his neuro-physiological model of hysteria. He detects a certain moment when the mutual benefits of staging hysteria – life for the women, information for researchers, and stardom all round – produced a paradoxical situation. For the ‘more the hysteric delighted in reinventing and imaging herself … the more a kind of ill was exacerbated’ and ‘consent turned to hatred’ (2003: xi–xii). Stephen Heath defines the different approaches to the hysteric taken by Charcot and Freud: ‘Charcot sees, Freud hears’. ‘You see how hysterics shout’, complains Charcot (1978: 58). But why shut away any of our senses? In the change between looking and listening, we are closer to the hysteric, closer than if we were simply hearing physiologically. This is a hearing more intimate, ambiguous, and permeable (Kahane, 1995: 12). When discussing the hysteric’s question Che vuoi?, Slavoj Žižek notes how Lacan writes the word ‘voice’ in his graph of desire. He explains this by drawing a distinction between Derrida’s voice – whole, with self-presence and meaning – and Lacan’s conception – a meaningless object, a remnant, a left-over of the attempt to produce meaning. The clearest example of this is the hypnotist’s voice: When the same word is repeated to us indefinitely we become disorientated, the word loses the last traces of its meaning, all that is left is its inert presence exerting a kind of somniferous hypnotic power – this is the voice as ‘object’, as the objectal left over of the signifying operation. (Žižek, 1989: 115) Following Lacan, Bruce Fink ascertains that hysterics are oral while obsessives are anal (Fink, 2004: 167). As a trait of the hysteric, voice can be considered the ultimate because it contains all the other traits. It is located in the body, even if at times it feels disembodied, as though the sound does not physically originate in the body before us. Possessed, the voice of the hysteric is changed mimetically.

136 Voice This voice is experienced as a mystery. Where does it come from? What is it articulating? For whom? The voice disappears but something of it is imprinted in the listening too. Art can bring about the elusiveness of the hysteric’s voice in its images. Yes, even in photographs, even if it would appear that what is missing in them is ‘the voice, an absence signalled, as it were, in the naming of the “hallucinations of hearing” … the absence of the speech across the body, in convulsion, delirious’ (Heath, 1978: 58). In ‘The Cry’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: Figure 45), Augustine starts an attack, on her back, face upwards and mouth open in a perfect crescent – somebody has blacked in the shape. In other images such as ‘Ecstasy’ and ‘The Call’ (Figures 64 and 60), she is more specifically posed. At first, inmates were complicit mediums for the voracious researching gaze, happy to perform such subjects to the camera, but Didi-Huberman believes there came a turning point. ‘The Cry’ shows something real. She is ‘wailing, madly crossing her legs, ripping at her straitjacket … cutting herself off. A cry was the last place she could turn’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 287). Price Herndl tells us that ‘[h]ysteria can be understood as a woman’s response to a system in which she is expected to remain silent, a system in which her subjectivity is continually denied, kept invisible’ (Price Herndl, 1988: 53). This speaks for the systemic struggle of every gender, although here we cite discourses referencing the historical male/female binary, these concerning hysteria and the hysterical figure in history before it was struck off as a medical category. This is voice as a bargaining tool. You belong if you don’t speak. Your utterances cast you away. Alongside the tussis nervosa, or nervous chronic cough, aphasia, or inability to use words, and aphonia, or loss of voice (Showalter, 1993: 28), the globus hystericus is a classic symptom of hysteria. Globus, a mysterious ball stuck in the throat, a sense of choking. All are symptoms of blocked speech, faulty communication, and ‘expressive blockage and constraint’ (Beizer, 1994: 2). Consequently the hysteric experiences these symptoms, as ever, without any particularly discernible physical cause. It is a scream without sound, ‘a bone stuck in the throat of the speaking being which makes it impossible to “tell everything”’ (Žižek, 2008 [1997]: 277). If you could you wouldn’t need to express through symptoms. Žižek analyses the scream in art with particular reference to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956), and Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893). These are not necessarily hysterical manifestations, but they share with the hysteric figure that what is ‘stuck in the throat’ is precisely the voice qua object, the voice that cannot burst out, unchain itself and thus enter the dimension of subjectivity. […] the exemplary case of the voice qua object is a voice that remains silent, a voice that we do not hear. (Žižek, 1991: 49)

Voice  137 It could be said that, in The Scream, Munch represents his own inner turmoil, linked as this was to existential distress. Can the artwork itself be seen thus as a symptom, converting the unspeakable? Žižek classifies the scream in these works and relates the deferred scream to self-reflexivity, for this is a scream only heard when perceived in silence (1991: 50). Although Didi-Huberman does not explicitly say so, this could be applied to the experience of voice in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière and, we argue, to many representations of hysteria in art. If Barthes’s idea of ‘grain’ (1977) indicates an articulation of meaning other than by words, can we apply this to the figure of a mute? Perhaps that of Barbara Fitts who appears in Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty (1999). This is the figure of a wife whose demeanour is catatonic, apparently without agency, who takes the emotional abuse by her husband in silence. However, we can read her silence otherwise, for she seems damaged, traumatised, and not fully present. An insightful analysis by Natasha BC Smith reads Mrs Fitts, and the film as a whole, ‘through the lens of social anxiety’ (n.d.). Smith writes from her own experience, suffering from a mental disorder with crippling symptoms arising from a ‘fear of not living up to other people’s expectations’. She finds in the self-entrapment of Frank and Barbara Fitts echoes of her own symptoms. These are figures drawn as people whose agency is governed by others, whose symptoms would rather, like Frank, kill than suffer humiliation or, like Barbara, do nothing, say nothing, and be nobody than act or speak or, as is the case here, get beaten up emotionally. So is Mrs Fitts simply timid, afraid to speak for fear of being beaten up? Projecting silence is not only a means of cover and self-protection but also agency in the form of protest, a rebellion. I discovered for myself when, at the age of just five, my parents moved house, and thus I from my daily life to another one I didn’t want to be in. My friends weren’t there, neither was there anything familiar. You go into fight/flight mode. You run away from anyone who tries to make you go to a school that isn’t yours, and when they make you go there you are determined not to show up. The best way to do that, given that you are undeniably present physically, is to refuse speech or any sound at all. This is certainly, at the very least, a time-waster for all concerned, and even at that age, you’re fully aware of the hassle you’re causing. The resulting sensations of glee and self-loathing that I experienced seem now part of a process whereby ‘I’, under the expectant gaze of parents, teachers, and peers, was defended by another problematic, anti-social, and attention-seeking figure. Perhaps it is possible to see this process as a kind of double exposure in which a second figure overlays the first, as some kind of decoy or distraction? The symptom of silence constructed filmically or photographically can be as powerfully disturbing as that of a scream. The experience of Augustine’s photographically silenced ‘Cry’ or Woodman’s ectoplasmic calling for Vince might resonate viscerally in the viewer as the distressed sounds they don’t hear, as much as the heard voice in, for example, the silent soundtrack of Sam TaylorJohnson’s (Sam Taylor-Wood) film Hysteria, which we discussed in Chapter Two. Laughing non-stop for eight minutes is some feat and, as the actor plays

138 Voice this out before Taylor-Johnson’s camera’s merciless gaze, the subject’s physical exhaustion becomes evident, and her demeanour changes as (though) a second figure emerges, crying out uncontrollably. The still eye of the camera emphasises stasis, but there is a discrepancy between this and the subject’s minimal movement, held as it is in this case within the hardly shifting outline of the head and neck. Thus in ‘The Cry’, in ‘Talking to Vince’, and in the demeanour of Barbara Fitts, the voice articulates, whether we hear it or not. Claire Kahane argues that Charcot’s cataloguing of hysterical symptoms, la grande hysterie, is a story that ‘moves from blocked orality to its liberation’, with Freud joining temporality to meaning and making the hysteric’s story individual (Kahane, 1995: 12). Mariske Broeckmeyer (2020) researches voice and incantation as a way of exploring migraine. She explains how when expressive aphasia (partial loss of language but full comprehension) is manifested, a paresthesiae (burning, prickling, tingling, numbness, crawling, itching sensation) appears in the lips and tongue, making speech effortful or impossible. ‘She finds herself attempting to talk but no words follow’ (Broeckmeyer, 2020). She refers to Oliver Sacks’s definition of this phenomenon, which is ‘a symbolic drama … their symptoms constitute a bodily alphabet, or protolanguage, which may secondarily and subsequently be used as a symbolic language’ (Sacks, 1995 [1970]: 223). The globus hystericus is meaning formulated but never voiced, internalised, stuck halfway towards articulation. However, it is an image itself, a metaphor for the un-hearable. In a world where language precedes voice, Jan Campbell tells us, ‘bodily symptoms perform and “speak” precisely because parts of the psychic experiential world have become lost and split off’ (Campbell, 2005: 344). I often hear the hysteric’s voice, her cry, her call, even if it is not there. *** ‘The agent suffers the truth rather than delivering it’ (Wajcman, 2003). As a functionary of truth, the subject may expose truth by means other than speech. Charcot’s pupil Freud picked up his master’s baton but, instead of running forward, he realised he had to go back. ‘Analytic experience is based on the fact that … we do not know what we say: what we intend to say is not the truth of what we say: the agent of speech conveys a meaning unknown to him’ (Wajcman, 2003). Another dis-location. Perhaps we can picture the hysteric as a baroque figure, side-stepping in syncopation to her own tune. Such an exquisitely concertina-ed body evolves to withstand and navigate oppression, as does her ventriloquising wandering voice. And still, we have seen her as other. In our chapters on mimesis and mystery, we imagined a filmstrip of staccato images, this being a way of bringing to mind unwanted images, for example, my grandmother blowing raspberries, repeating his words as ballast against her own. These were, I wrote years later in an attempt to rebuild her image and make sense of it in my own mind, ‘repetitions of a simpleton thrown out with the precision

Voice  139 of one who maintains order’, that she had to maintain a sense of ‘self’ (reality) within a system that repressed her voice. Wishing (as you do when they’re gone) that she ‘had been more unkind’, the poem continues: If you had become truly wild you would have gathered strength. If you had made yourself inhuman we would have been afraid. You needed too much love. You were not unkind enough. Now may I become your Medusa, articulate your voice?​ In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), Hélène Cixous writes about women writing. Greek mythology tells how Medusa’s appearance will turn any man beholding her to stone, and Freud uses this classical image to illustrate his theory of castration anxiety (Freud, 1940 [1922]). The monster is slain when, in a mirror held up to her by a man, she sees her own image, but the laugh comes his way as Cixous imagines how the creative force of a woman must be turned towards him, and her voice turns around so that woman can write woman. In her essay, Cixous makes the admission that, for years before she started writing, she too didn’t open her mouth because she was afraid, ashamed of her own voice. She didn’t ‘repaint her half of the world’ (Cixous, 1976: 876). In Cixous’s writing, it is the monster Medusa’s voice that, in a face-off with man, re-humanises her. ***

Figure 5.1  Laura González, ‘Study for Hysteria’, photograph.

140 Voice Our mothers, so many, were not unkind enough. They did not speak up. We know that. Internalised shame and frustration made them mad. *** We keep complaining about the doctor’s voice as oppressive and privileged, thoughtless at best, harmful and deadly at worst. But our own voices can be read as privileged and thoughtless too. Where is the voice of the hysteric? We are not the hysteric. Although she is not (y)our other. We trace her. Again and again. We invite her into our outline, our container of overlays. It is not for us to ventriloquise or even to tell her story. She is not (y)our other. All we want to do is to perk up your ears. To make you ready to listen. *** Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours … Now women return from afar, from ‘without’ … from below, from beyond ‘culture’. (Cixous, 1976: 877) to a freedom in which we no longer need to contort ourselves and our voices to fit another frame What would it have been for Beckett’s Winnie (discussed later in this chapter) to have heaved herself out of that pile of sand, maybe like a cork unscrewing itself from the bottle? In Western culture, those women who wrote often did it instead of speaking or speaking out. Many used monikers not their own, taking a male or genderambiguous name: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, George Sand, George Eliot, AM Barnard, Isak Dinesen, Vernon Lee, JK Rowling – each name a Gorgon’s shield against the prejudices they faced. ‘We did not like to declare ourselves women, because … we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.’ Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell) (Taylor, 2020) ‘Don’t ever call me a woman author again’. Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant (George Sand, from a letter written in 1832) In A Room of One’s Own (2015 [1929]), the novelist Virginia Woolf encouraged something that women across cultures and throughout time had rarely

Voice  141 experienced or even thought to desire: the idea of a personal space that would enable personal perspective and ‘one’s own’ creative life. She speculated that ‘Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman’ (2015 [1929]: 38). Woolf was concerned with revealing and affirming those hidden histories of the female voice, her authorship. In so doing she challenged and critiqued such derogatory male voices as that of the poet Robert Southey, who commented, in a letter to Charlotte Brontë, dated 12 March 1837, that ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation’ (British Library, n.d.). Such views, prevalent throughout history, reveal a systemic patriarchal agency, an active undermining of ‘female’, an erosion, primarily, of the voice. We see such systemic prejudice still in small boys who learn it, and in little girls who learn it too if it is manifest powerfully enough within the family, for whom an often jokey culture is the norm at the expense of their mothers and sisters. As recently as 1997, Joanne Rowling adopted initials in order to disguise her gender from a potentially massive young male market and later, for the Strike novels, she was Robert Galbraith – even if this was only to hide her identity as the massively successful JK, she still did not choose a female name. So there it is. Simply that a woman’s witness is, historically, without value. The stories she tells are not worth listening to. We know what she is and, importantly, where. Some have been brought up to believe this. Some find themselves in a situation in which the only way to be in it is to play yourself back as, or become, its symptom. Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty (1999) portrays the figure of a voiceless woman. Apparently in a catatonic state, she stares mindlessly ahead. Unsurprisingly, she is the wife of a volubly angry guy. Many ‘voiceless’ women, in the sense that they are culturally powerless, have been portrayed as themselves voluble, Charles Dickens’ Mrs Bumble from Oliver Twist (1837), for example, and Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennett from Pride and Prejudice (1813). Each scrupulously observed and drawn, these are women well able to voice their frustrations, although both authors have the insight and ability also to give them a twist of pathos. Mrs Bumble, for example, as interpreted by Caroline Quentin (actor) and Tony Jordan (writer) in Dickensian (2015), forever implores Mr Bumble to ‘raise her up’, while Mrs Bennett ceaselessly attempts to rescue her five daughters from the genuinely disastrous possibility of failing to make a good marriage. These figures represent real women locked into a culture that rendered them completely reliant on the agency of men. In this context, frustrated energies turned them into nagging wives, ultimately figures of fun that continued as such across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the butt, for example, of the mother-in-law joke. Mrs Frank Fitts in American Beauty, however, represents a different symptom, an altogether darker figure who, taken in another direction, might be aligned with the mad woman in the attic, Rochester’s first wife Bertha Mason in Charlotte

142 Voice Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’s prequel of 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea, or, in another incarnation with a different back story, Mrs Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Sam Kriss (2021) reminds us of Freud’s original thesis that a mental (psychogenic) illness may not all ‘be in the head’, and that social and other circumstances may have everything to do with our behavioural and emotional traits. This Freud discovered in the early days of his practice as he listened to the voices of hysterical patients at the Saltpêtrière. Kriss exhorts us once again to look beyond the individual psyche and to recognise how our problems may in fact be systemic and that, more than this, we can become society’s symptom as, Freud recognised, was the case with hysteria. Kriss observes that, although today we are very good at acknowledging symptoms, being expert patients, at our peril do we ignore the ways in which ‘a damaged world has made being ill the only way of being a person’ (Kriss, 2021: 12). Victoria Glendinning draws on the same point in relation to the great-aunt she never knew, Winnie Seebohm, whose voice we hear through her heartbreakingly eloquent last letters (Glendinning, 1969). *** Early in the evening the struggle for breath began again … It lasted nineteen hours – all through that night and through most of the next day … [she] never lost control … The final remedy (tincture of opium?) … sent her gently off to sleep soon after two o’clock, still sitting in the same position, her head resting on the table before her, as she had been all the weary hours since the evening before. She did not wake again. (Glendinning, 1969: 102) Winnie Seebohm, a student at Cambridge, died of asthma on 18 December 1885, aged 22, after one term of study at Newnham College. In A Suppressed Cry, Winnie’s biographer Victoria Glendinning portrays her as a ‘person of enormous potential, both of mind and heart’, teasing out the pressures that Winnie encountered in being a young woman of ‘high intelligence and an enquiring mind’ (1969: 6). Glendinning describes how Winnie was the ‘victim of a system’ (1969: 105) for, although much loved personally, such love was ‘not enough to give life a shape for most adults’ (1969: 105). As it was for her (near) contemporary Dora, Winnie’s ‘only way out was to get married – and that changed nothing except her status and her surroundings. Her life was still circumscribed by rules, conventions and rituals’ (Glendinning, 1969: 105). The ones who suffered most were those who, like Winnie, had talent, ambition, and a passion for life – ‘they seemed like lonely bonfires, burning away their frustrations and emptiness into their diaries and private letters’ (Glendinning, 1969: 6). Nowhere in Winnie’s biography does Glendinning suggest that asthma is related to hysteria but, staying close to the narrative of

Voice  143 contemporary documentation (letters and diaries, etc.), the image she presents is also one of suppression, the dousing of bonfires, and the voice of agency itself. An attack of asthma has the significance of a suppressed cry. It has been found that if patients can be induced to indulge in unrestrained crying, they are often eased and the asthma abated … but Winnie aimed at self-control … the nearest she ever got to crying out and putting into words the conflicts which were, quite literally, choking her was in a letter to her friend Lina … yet she apologised for writing it. (Glendinning, 1969: 107) Unlike such young women as Augustine (or ‘Louise’, or ‘X’) who at that time were inmates at the Salpêtrière, Winnie was living a sheltered and materially comfortable life. Glendinning points out how ‘studies of asthma patients [show] that they have generally been overprotected children, with a dominant parent to whom they are particularly attached’ (1969: 107). Winnie’s potential was, as Glendinning observes, to have been one of those bonfires that lit the suffrage movement. ‘There were hundreds in the same predicament before her’ (Glendinning, 1969: 105). *** There are forms of speech and ways of speaking and using the voice which are designed to disguise our whereabouts. Throw sand in the face. But the motivation for using these ways is so deeply buried that expert excavation is necessary to dig it out. This task has fallen not only onto psychoanalysis, those perspectives emerging since Freud, but also to the philosophers discussed here, Dolar, Bakhtin, Barthes, and others, and the linguists and artists who have also looked, listened, and attempted to understand. It is a matter of how the voice travels between the telling and the receiving, between the writing and the reading, and between picturing and seeing. But what that voice carries is also important. Susan Sontag makes a link between illness and metaphor, the rhetorical device that displaces. In metaphor, this becomes/is that. For her, ‘the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking’ (Sontag, 1978: 3). Perhaps all the metaphors around the hysteric are what has made her seem ill, stigmatising her and leading her away from being freed of her symptoms. Sontag refers to Xavier Bichat, an eighteenthcentury physician, who called health ‘the silence of organs’, [and] disease ‘their revolt’. Disease is the will speaking through the body, a language for dramatizing the mental: a form of selfexpression. Groddeck described illness as a symbol, a representation of something going on within, a drama staged by the It. (Sontag, 1978: 44)

144 Voice But is it helpful to equate disease with revolt or, as Georg Groddeck, pioneer of psychosomatic medicine does, with drama? In her reflection on ‘Writing in place of speaking’, Jane Rendell (2003) uses words that indicate the importance of placing and positioning. Writing in the place of speaking thus becomes a matter of space (here/there) and time (one, then another). Who is telling, who is listening, and what happens in between. The angle of one thing to another. The articulation of memory, of being. Embedded within writing, how these are told. And how they are read. Rendell describes the shifts that inevitably take place between the experience, assimilation of that experience at any given time (which may fluctuate with changes of context and circumstance), and the telling, which, in the case of the Salpêtrière hysteric, may consolidate formally as gesture or pose. In this way we can assume writing in the place of speaking as analogical to performing in the place of speaking, both being a means of articulation that may, through re-reading, perceiving, and telling, be several times removed from the articulating subject, who can in this way become fugitive. ‘That the listener will tell again, somewhere else, helps to dissipate the omnipotence of the writer or speaker’ (Rendell, 2003: 27). Rendell cites critical theorist Homi Bhabha’s work The Location of Culture (1994), where he speaks of performative time (implicating place) in the ‘multiple points of telling’, and shifts between ‘the one who is telling, or “articulating”, to where this articulation is taking place’ (Rendell, 2003: 27). Claire Kahane, citing Judith Butler, argues that in the Oedipal drama of the hysteric, the rivalry with the father, is not over the other, but, rather, over the place of the father as a public speaker, and this results in her mutism (Kahane, 1995: 9). But it is not simply a matter of time and space. For the Salpêtrière hysteric, performance is not a deliberate escape route. Far from it, for her, the only way out is a consciously provocative performance conforming to the demands of the gaze, driven, however, by an unconsciously acknowledged and prohibited ‘truth’ formalised as extreme body gesture, for example, arched spine, inwardly turning hands. Such gestures, in their turn, are informed not by an originating memory but by something seen nearby. This is acrobatics of the psyche driven by unconscious prohibition and disavowal, somatised and manifested in the twisted flipped-over upside-down body, the inability to breathe. *** Thus we may read pose (as symptom) in place of person. Ergo figure. Arc. Supplication. Backward flip. Rendell weaves Bhabha’s ‘performative time’ in relation to the cultural positioning of telling and being told (receiving/reading) (2003: 27). Bhabha sees both a temporal and spatial element in ‘telling’, in that the time between telling and being told is also the place between here and somewhere else. Bhabha thus proposes ‘a scene which demonstrates that the very condition of cultural knowledge is the alienation of [that] subject’ (Bhabha, 1994: 150). Such a ‘double scene’ of

Voice  145 shifts between players presupposes a telling/articulating subject who is thus distanced or removed (othered) (alienated), and the one ‘being told’ is both passive receiver and active reader. If the shifting trajectory between teller, reader, and symptom were to be traced, the structure of such a double scene might manifest as some kind of folding form. In her study on pain and voice, Elaine Scarry writes that ‘to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt’ (Scarry, 1985: 7). Yet, this certainty is not easily expressed, as ‘pain has no voice’ (Scarry, 1985: 3). When it finds one, though, it tells a story of the difficulty of expressing pain, the political implications of this, and the nature of creativity. She captures the experience of the hysteric we have wanted to show: physicians do not trust (hence, hear) the human voice, that they in effect perceive the voice of the patient as an ‘unreliable narrator’ of bodily events, a voice which must be bypassed as quickly as possible so that they can get around and behind it to the physical events themselves. (Scarry, 1985: 6) These physical events are the articulation of hysteria in a language, which Charcot so well captured in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. But to bypass the voice, as voice, not language, is to bypass the hysteric. Dianne Hunter explores Anna O, Bertha Pappenheim’s ‘linguistic disruptions’, which she defines as ‘speechlessness and her communication in translation, gibberish and pantomime’ (1983: 467–468). During her hysteria, Bertha spoke in several different languages, English, French, and Italian, and forgot her mother tongue. She became deprived of words, painfully forming sentences out of all the languages that came to her: ‘Jamais acht nobody bella mio please lieboehn nuit’, as Ann Elwood reconstructs out of Breuer’s account (1975: 502). To his credit, Breuer, who had a profound respect for his patient’s suffering, did hear Bertha. He listened attentively and thus the talking cure emerged. And it is in the voice itself that lies the power of the hysteric: ‘the translation of pain into power is ultimately a transformation of body into voice’ (Scarry, 1985: 45). It is not enough for the hysteric to embody her symptoms; to rebel, she must envoice them. This comes with a particular challenge in the case of the hysteric. In Television, Jacques Lacan addresses the question of whether a cure is a fantasy: ‘The cure is a demand that originates in the voice of the sufferer, of someone who suffers from his body or his thought’ (Lacan, 1990 [1974]: 7). The cures at the Salpêtrière – elicited by the voices of hysterics – were often described as having traces of the miraculous, and Didi-Huberman writes that this ‘miraculous healing is not a cure but a symptom – a hysterical symptom, of course’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 242). He also claims that hysterics performed these feats because their bodies were capable. So, can we really admit that, in hysteria, Scarry’s map of the body as the locus of pain, and the voice as the locus of power (Scarry, 1985: 51), is at play?

146 Voice The first and the last of our list of traits – body and voice – may be considered dialectically and reciprocally related, in that one binds while the other liberates. *** but the unlived life was held in the throat in the breath and bending, folding, the secretion erupted, more violently each time *** Along with Žižek, Mladen Dolar considers the voice as a physical entity operating between sound and meaning, individual and culture, body and language (Dolar, 2006). In these terms, Dolar argues that the voice is already inclusive of difference, and, assuming this, the heard-as-hysterical voice opens up and re-frames meaning. So far we have referenced the voice in terms of sound, or its absence. mute scream suppression held in the throat crying out choking Traditionally, hysteria screams or wails, an eruption of sound and gesture. In Samuel Beckett’s work, however, the hysterical voice becomes uncanny as Winnie, in Happy Days, up to her neck in sand, obsessively removes and replaces items from her handbag. The wall of speech that we, the audience, encounter prattles, but does not scream. It is not apparently in pain. However, the accumulated effect as she carries us along in the stream of her inconsequential thought is that it goes nowhere, piling up around her like the sand. It is pressured into being an object that we, the audience, have to deal with. The second character, her husband Willie, in a deckchair ‘off’, has long been indifferent to the voice, as we are also indifferent. Defended. But here’s another thing. ‘There is of course the bag. (Turns towards it.) There will always be the bag. (Back front.) … (Pause.) Can you see me from there I wonder, I still wonder. (Pause.) No? (Back front.)’ (Beckett, 1961: 27–28). the meticulous crafting of breaths and gestures, she scrabbling, fishing in the handbag for what can only be to reassure, displacement by interrogation and placement of objects toothbrush gun gaps between words (bracketed) directions breaths in parenthesis repetitions of a simpleton thrown out with the precision of one who maintains order Meantime, Žižek posits the voice as an object that may be out of place, freefloating, untied to a subject, and in this sense uncanny. The same idea can be thought to drive another of Beckett’s plays, Not I, in which the woman’s presence

Voice  147 is represented only by her mouth, normally staged as a freely hanging entity in complete darkness so that the voice is all we see. Like the wandering uterus, the voice is another drifting organ. ‘The path from voice to uterus is prepared by the clinicians, who repeatedly signal affinities between the female vocal and sex organs’ (Beizer, 1994: 44). The othering of female parts as synecdoche, animalistic, wayward, and unpredictable, usefully erodes female authority and womb metonymically serves as woman. This has been the case, clearly, since ancient times. For example, here the historian Francis Adams cites the Greek physician Aretaeus, a contemporary of Galen in the second century AD: In the middle of the flanks of women lies the womb, a female viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks, also upwards in a direct line to below the cartilage of the thorax, and also obliquely to the right or to the left, either to the liver or the spleen, and it likewise is subject to prolapsus downwards, and in a word, it is altogether erratic. It delights also in fragrant smells, and advances towards them; and it has an aversion to fetid smells, and flees from them; and, on the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal. (Adams, 1856: 285–286) The narrative itself in Not I is mundane. ‘I/she’ is not an out-of-the-ordinary woman, and it is in Beckett’s staging and reframing of her as ‘Mouth’ – ‘brightly lit’, ‘fluttering … at the back of a pitch-black stage’ (Thomas, 2013) – that Beckett creates his voice-object. People sometimes report strange experiences watching it, some convinced that the mouth is moving backwards and forwards or side to side. In fact, it’s rooted to the spot. The actress has to be strapped down, as the slightest movement can cause the mouth to move out of the pinprick of light. (Thomas, 2013) Perhaps it is possible to assume here that, as Thomas suggests, ‘implicated in the act of spectatorship’ are ‘traces of the body of the viewer’ (Thomas, 2013). Such movement can also be found within the othering structures of seeing discussed by Kathleen O’Gorman in relation to Not I. This othering is defined by the male gaze, against which the glance, as posited by Norman Bryson in Vision and Painting (1983: 89–131), is defended. We see evidence of such evasive body language in the drawn figures of Paula Rego, which deflect our gaze by, for example, twisting away. Side-stepping. However, more commonly Rego’s figures deflect the gaze not through violent movement but when, in the stillness of a family tableau, a handbag suddenly snaps shut. The uncanny image created does not hide her story but deflects our attention away from it. The mouth is a decoy, and thus we are led away from the reality of an unhappy woman to something that reframes and intensifies it. Makes it strange.

148 Voice

Figure 5.2  Eleanor Bowen, ‘Study for Hysteria’, digitally photographed assemblage.

*** Freud’s 1919 essay ‘The “Uncanny”’(1955 [1919]) relates closely to aesthetics, theorising qualities of feeling. The word used by Freud in the original German version is das Unheimlich, literally, the unhomely, and refers to those things that, because they are normally in a familiar context, can, if seen differently, become frightening. Freud finds, however, that not everything that is unhomely and unfamiliar is also uncanny. To be uncanny, something which ought to have remained hidden has come to light. There is an ambivalence, a little two-step dance back and forth. In the uncanny, the link between imagination and reality is effaced; it is something familiar which has become alienated through repression, but which insists and returns. In this return, it provokes anxiety. The cry. If the cry is represented in thought, she will be an obsessive neurotic; if it is related to the outside world, she will be a phobic. If it is only in the body, she is our hysteric (Nasio, 1998).​ Freud explores the uncanny further through ETA Hoffmann’s tale ‘The Sandman’ (1816), a character who tears children’s eyes out. The idea of being robbed of one’s eyes recurs in the essay, as well as the doppelgänger, the double, and the figure of the automaton. In all of these, we are reminded of the hysteric, through the workings of her body, her somatic distance, her trances, her

Voice  149 somnambulism, and her mimetic traits. But instead of having her eyes torn out, an invisible globe is placed in her throat. The suppressed cry. Art can be complicit in this. The Somnambulists is an art installation and a book – a compendium of source material – created and edited by Zoe Beloff (2008). Five miniature wooden theatres have moving images projected on them, each representing a hysterical drama and ‘staging the unconscious’ (Beloff, 2008: 6). There is the ‘History of a Fixed Idea’ and ‘A Modern Case of Possession’, featuring two of Pierre Janet’s patients singing their delusions, and films of actual hysterics, made by doctors. The book collects the materials that inspired the visual work: photographs of hysterics, essays about surrealism and clinical case histories, film stills, and facsimiles. Beautiful as Beloff’s curation is, it focuses on the visual and gives space only to the voice of the doctors. The hysteric’s natural voice remains silent to the ears, an ‘involuntary, inarticulate vibration, a wordless cry’ (Beizer, 1994: 224). Where do words go when they cannot be uttered? The repressed voice always returns, that is a certainty articulated in the hysteric. Perhaps it returns in the form of the insistent question that has been posed in so many different ways. Che vuoi? – What do you want from me? What is it to be a man or a woman? Renata Salecl writes that ‘[w]hen the hysteric subject posits the question of her being, questioning what she is for the Other, the subject does not get an answer. The Other does not answer’ (1996: 201). So the hysteric seeks outside words, converting things – behaviours, acts, gestures, parts of the body – into voice. And when the Other does not answer, she interprets what this answer might be. The conversation, even when there are two people present, is one-sided. We saw this with Dora. She was, apparently, the speaking subject, telling her piecemeal story to a privileged ear, her voice issuing from a body under scrutiny, read as a text (Kahane, 1995: 17). Roberto Cavasola refers to Lacan’s seminar on anxiety (2014: 123) in which he addresses the hysteric’s behaviour, linking it to the term ‘acting out’. Cavasola defines this as: a symptom exhibited in a museum. Acting out is a pantomime played out using the proceedings of comedy to circle around the question of desire. In reality, when she acts out she shows something that cannot be grasped, and this is one of the most frequent symptoms in hysteria. The hysterical staging attempts to show us something and yet it orbits around what cannot be seized. (Cavasola, 2015) under the spotlight, strapped in place, the mouth moves backwards and forwards, side to side Voice is a sound we utter, a sound we may invest with meaning that is communally agreed upon. It is supported by a silence that carries it. Even if it cannot be heard, the sound of a voice when uttered might be carried very faintly. We may feel it as a faint air caressing our skin. The museum, the pantomime and the comedy are things we have invented around hysteria to assuage our fear when the hysteric ghost touches us with her voice: Francesca, Dora, Winnie in Happy Days

150 Voice and Winnie in A Suppressed Cry, the mouth in Not I. Their figures are clearly drawn. It is we who cannot grasp them. Acting (out) madness is a way of displacing the potential reality of clinical madness by distancing (Phillips, 2012). It masks the reality that drives the acting out and often turns inwards. Thus the body/self may be self-cut, emotionally self-abused, or otherwise injured in a possibly unconscious attempt to attack the displaced other. Hamlet would recognise such an impulse, as sadly would many distressed teenagers today. Dora was now ‘in the first bloom of youth – a girl of intelligent and engaging looks’ (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 23). Her character had, however, undergone an alteration. She had become chronically depressed and unfriendly towards the father whom she had hitherto loved, idealised, and identified with. She was ‘on very bad terms’ with her mother (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 23), for whom she felt a good deal of scorn. As girls often are in a patriarchal culture. Female values are not worthy of recognition, or of acting upon. Girls brought up in such a culture can have scorn for women, especially their mothers, while they tend to idolise their fathers. Among the symptoms from which she suffered were dyspnea, migraine, and periodic attacks of nervous coughing, often accompanied by complete loss of voice during part of the episode. Dora had in fact first been brought by her father to Freud two years earlier, when she was 16 and suffering from a cough and hoarseness (Freud, 1953 [1905]: 22). panic attack shooting awake from deep sleep unable to expand the windpipe enough to breathe surfacing from a deep place in an airless zone sporadic sneeze precipitating flu-like symptoms shooting spores though the body stop you living your life catatonic state of passive resistance Dora, it seems, is able to see beyond herself. On being handed over to Freud by her father, she becomes strangely more neurotic, and a feeding frenzy follows. Freud witnesses ‘a feverish attack that [mimics] appendicitis, a periodic limp, and a vaginal catarrh or discharge’ (Marcus, 1981: 184). Then she leaves him. It is possible, in a patriarchal culture, for the family unit to become a microcosm of intensified patriarchal values, and for one of its children – the one who does not succumb to those values, who is not sacrificed – to become a scapegoat. According to ancient Syrian and Judaic practice, one goat dies in appeasement to the power that is god, while the other is sent into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people. fallen angel ***

Voice  151 The interrogative mode of writing (Gibbs, 2005) disrupts habitual reading. But in order to open up new spaces of discourse around a subject that has been around as long as humankind, we must learn to ask the right questions. For that, only trial and error articulation works. Who gets to be a hysteric and who doesn’t? Who gets the right to speak and in what way? How does the history of hysteria enter the voice? What has to die to give birth to something different in the hysteric? How can the voiceless rebel and resist? Who negotiates the hysteric’s body and her voice? Is it peaceful or not? What is the hysteric’s utterance? What is she saying to us with this insistence? What is the message encoded in the hysteric’s voice? Where do words go when they cannot be uttered? Where do words go when they cannot be uttered? *** With reference to the hysterical figure, Johanna Braun uses ‘the term performance broadly and inclusively, to describe the hysteric as performing (doing) an action in front of an audience’ (Braun, 2020: 208). But there is a stain in this performance. It is more like a ghostly séance, a game of Chinese whispers, a translation. The message is veiled and the truth is elsewhere. In the young student Winnie Seebohm’s case, not one of clinical hysteria but one that exemplifies typical conditions for hysteria, the subject is reified and put on a pedestal. Victoria Glendinning writes of Winnie who, as one of the first female students at Cambridge in the 1880s, suffered and died from asthmatic symptoms. Glendinning attributes these directly to systemic prejudices within the patriarchal culture she had been raised by and from which she emerged as a ‘bluestocking’ – the derogatory term applied to early female students at Oxford and Cambridge universities’. This was enough to put intolerable pressure on the body/ self, enough to stop the breath. Family letters following Winnie’s death depict somebody whose life was exemplary. Glendinning portrays the ‘grief machinery’ (1969: 104) in the sending of photographs and the request for Winnie’s letters to be returned so that extracts could be circulated to family and friends. The passages they chose to send were those most edifying and spiritual, and a certain (probably romantic) episode of 1882 was ‘erased’ in the authorised version of Winnie’s short life. Thus, we hear from her sister in a letter to Winnie’s friend Meta: I think it is true … what someone has said, that her life was perfect in its incompleteness; and so many besides ourselves find the little they know of her so inspiring that indeed we cannot but feel that ‘the good die not’. (Glendinning, 1969: 105)

152 Voice Winnie’s suppressed, frustrated, and somatised energies (intellectual, sexual, creative) were hinted at only in letters to a close college friend shortly before she died, and Glendinning links these with the exacerbation of her asthma. Winnie’s letters to Lina were the final flares of energy and desire, a face-off with the inevitable force that she could not (or would not) name, and this struggle was often couched in religious language (Glendinning, 1969: 78). The face-off was, for Winnie, ostensibly with the will of God. You were quite right about my making myself worse those last days – I did – and when I got home, collapsed altogether. … I always want everything so frantically, and I’m always just the person that can’t have them! … [O]ught I to have … given up wanting things? I’ve always been like that, from my infancy; and now, after twenty-two years, each disappointment is as keen … Forgive me for growling to you, dear Lina, but I can’t show it to any of them here. And if you know any solution to the problem, or any numbing influence, tell me. … one must have a safety valve, and I have used my letter to you as one. (Glendinning, 1969: 93–94) Glendinning points out that, although Winnie expressed in letters to Lina some sense of her underlying frustration and anger, to another close friend she projected ‘chiefly her cerebral and saintly side’ and, sadly, Lina ‘could not know what Winnie so desperately needed’ (1969: 107). Would Winnie have been thought mad if she had voiced these feelings, for example, to her family? Once again, the secretion erupts from deeply embedded systemic pressures, removing that life’s potential and its authentic voice, making it incomplete as the folds close over it. My idea of heaven – a place where one need not breathe. (Diary entry, Winnie Seebohm, 26 October 1895, 2:30 am, in Glendinning, 1969: 78) *** Art, which allows questions to remain at the level of asking, has taken on the mystery of the hysteric without any demand for answers, especially in dark, confused times: Charcot and his students tended to see asymmetrical movements and irregular rhythmic choreography as pathological, retrospectively diagnosing not only demoniacs as hysterics, but also Ancient Bacchic dancers and other entranced performers, including the priestesses of Apollo at the Delphic Oracle, all of whom typically exhibited an initial seizure when otherworldly forces moved through their bodies … In contrast, German, Austrian, and Swiss dancers

Voice  153 and musicians of the interwar period shared a virtual obsession with the ‘Dionysian’ ideal represented by such phenomena, with Dalcroze, Wigman, Laban, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and many others celebrating Greek ritual performance as a precedent for their own projects of cultural and corporeal renewal. Dark times demanded violent, even hysterical, responses. (Marshall, 2020: 73) The hysteric, and the artists who represent her, allow us to glimpse at bodies – for it is all in the bodies – manifesting a subjective incoherence in their own times with symptoms showing overdetermined roots to the problem of gendered conflict (Marshall, 2020: 79). Thus, the hysteric, both in the clinical and artistic settings, is ‘a field of investigation almost without limitations’ (Wajcman, 2003). So can we look again? Not at bodies but at the figures of bodies because that is our subject. What would it have been, we asked, for Beckett’s Winnie to have heaved herself out of the pile of sand, like a cork unscrewing itself from the bottle? Looking again, we might notice how this figure is structured to corkscrew back on itself, and how this disposition can be linked to the idea of a figure/subject that is formed by its own looking, by the swallowing of its voice. We’re looking at the asymmetrical movement of a figure turning like a corkscrew, whose structure leads us to believe it simultaneously raises and lowers itself. Such a figure folds back thus, perpetually, upon itself. Everything about it is not straightforward, for it depends – leans away – from its subject (Casey, 1999: 86), preferring, rather than holding that subject within its gaze, to forage for it by constantly glancing, out and back, before it is seen. Shooting out and at once withdrawing to protect itself, the glance gathers its subject, irregularly, rhythmically, its barbs efficiently eroding the suffocating surface of a dominating gaze. A figure like that depicted in Paula ‘Rego’s Possession I-VII, a set of seven canvases in pastel, bends away and backs off, while in the image The Cadet and his Sister (1988), her open handbag is lying beside her, ready to be snapped shut. I once saw Rego say that, articulating the words snapped shut with a broad grin, placing her tongue against her teeth as she said it. Voice-glancing. Foraging, in her case a little hungrily. the look snapped shut clasp snap of a handbag placing replacing pitting the surface again and again to get at the substance the meat of it Like Dora, snapping her reticule open and shut, open and shut. So what is this look that loops back on its subject, this folded form? Edward Casey uses the analogy of a glance at the self in a mirror. I see myself before me thus emplaced, but at the same time ‘I’ am dis-placed, for my glance shoots out to join ‘my-self’ at my own reflection, but instantly it returns to me, as Casey puts it, ‘augmented’ (1999: 86) by my own (act of) look(ing). As the structure of the glance is a two-beat act of looking (Casey, 1999: 86), so the hysteric figure can be imag(in)ed similarly folded back on itself.

154 Voice a baroque twist like those paper mobiles, turning and turning and structured by its very disempowerment to empower its vision, its voice Empowerment is agency grown out of enforced passivity, freedom from entrapment (We have noticed how her movement and her voice can be imagined as a little wave returning, or a vast undertow, an unerringly targeting multiplicity of small looks collecting information that becomes and never ceases becoming.) So. What would it have been – for Augustine’s backward flip, Blanche’s arc, Winnie’s grounding, Taylor-Johnson’s silently screaming actress, the de-pent head of Grunewald’s exorcised girl – to have looked, again, again, again, to have spoken back – or to have laughed? Where do words go when they cannot be uttered? La Ribot’s performance installation Laughing Hole (2006) is a durational piece, first shown at Art Basel 37 in Switzerland. It was produced by Galería Soledad Lorenzo in Madrid, originally performed by La Ribot, Marie-Caroline Hominal, and Delphine Rosay, and contained sound design by Clive Jenkins. One of its iterations lasted six hours. A room is filled with cardboard placards face down. Three performers dressed in cleaners’ overalls and flip-flops pick up these rectangles from the floor. Words are hand-written on the other side. The performers hold the placards up high while laughing hysterically, letting the body do as the body does when laughter takes over. They fall, they rise again, they roll, they trip, they continue to laugh as they pin the cardboard to the walls with tape they carry around as bracelets in their arms, as high as they can get the placards by themselves, all fully legible, ‘abandoned to mere visibility’ (Kelleher, 2008: 59), without overlapping. Laughing is exhausting them. It is despairing, mad. There is also ‘a sound artist who records and electronically morphs the laughter, amplifying the piece’s already conflicted atmosphere’ (La Ribot, 2021). The work combines poetics and politics as the words written on the placards come from media coverage of the Guantanamo prison. Chopped-up words, fragmented, angry, tendentious. ‘Die there’, ‘lost politicians’, ‘brutal hole’, ‘Gaza party’, ‘secret death’, ‘shit spectator’, ‘immigrant on sale’, ‘impotent terror’, ‘fuck me gently’, ‘disturbing strip’, ‘this is brutal’, ‘sell me’, ‘feed terror’ (La Ribot, 2021). Once the words are deciphered, their inhumanity and violence, pushing in from the outside, is in contrast with the performer’s body, even though laughter has its own form of violence in the performance. The constant sound of laughter is at times closer to crying, wailing, and the body’s gestures are reminiscent of those in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. The laughter here is very different from another work by La Ribot,

Voice  155 40 espontáneos, performed each time by an untrained community. ‘There the laughing looked and sounded … like difficult labour’ (Kelleher, 2008: 58). But the laugher in Laughing Hole is ‘a performative assertion of a right to insubordination’ (Burt, 2008: 21). It might be contagious to some, but, like hysteria, it is not funny (Joy, 2014: 80). Laughter is a contradictory manifestation of voice: it is violent, contagious, and complicit, tense yet elastic, a gesture, a stumble, linguistic in many ways, and also operating where language fails. There is a message, yet it is scrambled, convulsed, and, at times, perverse. It is the perfect hysteric symptom, which, in the past, doctors thought was ‘remarkable not only for its effusiveness but for its incoherence’ (Beizer, 1994: 43). It disrupts the cardboard pinning of the performers and takes over the bodies and the performance. For Jon Kelleher, who saw Laughing Hole in London, the worlds of the performers and the audience felt not quite shared, but the work – like any good hysteric performance – raised a question in him: how to act, how to spectate? We are back onto the ethics of looking, talking, and writing about the hysteric. The anthropologist Mary Douglas points out how laughter can start very small and has the potential to take over the whole body (1971: 388), which happens in La Ribot’s performance. She also notes how laughter is normally social, with private laughter being a different matter (Douglas, 1971: 388). As social, laughter can also be a critical tool (Burt, 2008: 22). The laughter in this piece ‘critiques the function of laughter’ (Joy, 2014: 82). The juxtaposition of laughter and text – the labour aspect of the performance (the lifting of the cardboard signs and the taping at the wall) and the stumbling, falling bodies – is uncomfortable because it undoes meaning. ‘Her laughing mouth becomes a black abyss, so open, so stretched that her eyes squint’ (Joy, 2014: 85). Isn’t this black abyss like Augustine’s blacked-out shape in the Salpêtrière photograph ‘The Cry’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 113)? At the same time, the sound of the voice displaces the visual in Laughing Hole, the violence of the written messages and the falling performers, and by doing so, it brings attention to both. How should we respond? Perhaps the separation Kelleher saw between performers and audience is not there, as something is elicited from us. Whether we laugh with the performers or not, we are complicit in the violence. This is also dance scholar Jenn Joy’s view. She cites Slavoj Žižek’s work on violence, where he elaborates on the concept of fetishistic disavowal: ‘“I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know.” I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know’ (Žižek, 2008: 53). This is our history with the hysteric. Yet, the sound of laughter and the voices of the hysterics – those coming from their bodies and those held in the messages carried in their hands – transform the innocuous white gallery space. ‘Wherever the hysteric goes, she brings war with her’ (Safouan, 1980: 59).

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156 Voice Bachelard, Gaston (1969) The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon. Barthes, Roland (1977) ‘The Grain of the Voice’. Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana. 179–189. Beckett, Samuel (1961) Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Grove Press. Beizer, Janet L (1994) Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in NineteenthCentury France. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Beloff, Zoe, ed. (2008) The Somnambulists: A Compendium of Source Material. New York: Christine Burgin. Benvenuto, Bice and Roger Kennedy (1986) ‘The Mirror Stage (1936)’. The Works of Jacques Lacan. New York: St Martin’s Press. 47–62. Bhabha, Homi K (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Blakey Zara (n.d.) ‘Female Authors of the 19th Century “Locked Down” under Male Pseudonyms’. In Time of Lockdown: Reflections on Locks, Lockdown, Isolation by Marlborough College. https://issuu​.com​/marlborough​_college​/docs​/mc​_0421​_ reflections​_final​/s​/12403283. Accessed 5 December 2022. Braun, Johanna (2020) ‘Hysterical Cure, Performing Disability in the Possession Film’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited By Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 207–222. British Library (n.d.) Letter from Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë, 12 March 1837. https://www​.bl​.uk​/collection​-items​/letter​-from​-robert​-southey​-to​-charlotte​-bronte​-12​ -march​-1837. Accessed 4 March 2022. Broeckmeyer, Mariske (2020) ‘Impulsive Incantations – Voicing Migraine’. Journal for Artistic Research, 22. https://www​.researchcatalogue​.net​/view​/788484​/1015518​/0​/0; https://doi​.org​/10​.22501​/jar​.788484. Accessed 02 December 2021. Bronfen, Elisabeth (1998) The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9781400864737 Bryson, Norman (1983) Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Burt, Ramsay (2008) ‘Preferring to Laugh’. Parallax, 14.1 Installing the body: 15–23. Casey, Edward (1999) ‘The Time of the Glance, Toward Becoming Otherwise’. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Edited by Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 79–97. Cavasola, Roberto (2015) ‘A Reading of Contemporary Hysteria from Lacan’s Teachings’. European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Number 03 – 2015/1. Feminine Pathologies. Edited by Fernando Castrillón & Jamieson Webster. https://www​.journal​ -psychoanalysis​. eu​/ a​- reading​- of​- contemporary​- hysteria​- from​- lacans​- teachings/. Accessed 11 May 2021. Campbell, Jan (2005) ‘Hysteria, Mimesis and the Phenomenological Imaginary’. Textual Practice, 19.3. 331–351. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/09502360500196318 Chion, Michel (1999) The Voice in Cinema. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Cixous, Hélène (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs, 1.4. 875–893. https://doi​.org​/10​.1086​/493306 David-Ménard, Monique (1989) Hysteria from Freud to Lacan. Body and Language in Psychoanalysis.Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1997) ‘Immanence: A Life…’. Theory, Culture & Society, 14.2. 3–7. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/026327697014002002

Voice  157 Didi-Huberman, Georges (2003) The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Dolar, Mladen (1996) ‘The Object Voice’. Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. 7–31. Dolar, Mladen (2006) A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi​ .org​/10​.7551​/mitpress​/7137​.001​.0001 Douglas, Mary (1971) ‘Do Dogs Laugh? A Cross-Cultural Approach to Body Symbolism’. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 15.4 December. 387–390. Draper, Jessica (2014) ‘Virginia Woolf meets Francesca Woodman’. https://draperjessica​ .wordpress​.com​/2014​/09​/02​/virginia​-woolf​-meets​-francesca​-woodman/. Accessed 13 April 2022 Elwood, Ann (1975) ‘First Person on the Couch – The Beginning of Psychoanalysis’. The People’s Almanac. Edited by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace. Garden City, NY: Doubleday 502–504. Fink, Bruce (2004) Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits closely. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Fisher, Mark (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Alresford: Zero Books. Freud, Sigmund (1940 [1922]) ‘Medusa’s Head’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press. 273–274. Freud, Sigmund (1953 [1905]) ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press. 1–122. Freud, Sigmund (1955 [1919]) ‘The “Uncanny”’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press. 217–256. Freud, Sigmund (1966 [1950]) ‘Extracts from the Fliess Papers’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I (1886–1899): PrePsycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London: The Hogarth Press. 173–280. Gibbs, Anna (2005) ‘Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences’. TEXT: Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, 9.1. Available from www​ .textjournal​.com​.au​/april05​/gibbs​.htm Accessed 13 September 2021. Glendinning, Victoria (1969) A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Heath, Stephen (1978) ‘Difference’. Screen, 19. 3 (Autumn). 51–112. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1093​/screen​/19​.3​.51 Joy, Jenn (2014) ‘Violent Desire: Writing Laughing’. The Choreographic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 69–116.

158 Voice Kahane, Claire (1995) Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kelleher, Jon (2008) ‘How to Act, How to Spectate (Laughing Matter)’. Performance Research, 13.4. 56–63. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/13528160902875630 Krauss, Rosalind (1999) ‘Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets’. Bachelors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 161–177. Kriss, Sam (2021) ‘It’s Not All in Your Head’. First Things. December. https://www​ .firstthings​.com​/article​/2021​/12​/its​-not​-all​-in​-your​-head. Accessed 12 November 2021. Lacan, Jacques (1990 [1974]) Television. Edited by Joan Copjec, translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelsen. New York: W W Norton. Lacan, Jacques (2006a [1966]) ‘The Mirror Stage and Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York and London: W W Norton. 75–81. Lacan, Jacques (2006b [1966]) ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York and London: W W Norton. 82–101. Lacan, Jacques (2014) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X: Anxiety. Edited by JacquesAlain Miller, translated by A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press. La Ribot (2021) Laughing Hole. https://www​.laribot​.com​/work​/10#. Accessed 18 October 2021. Marcus, Steven (1981) ‘Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History’. Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Perry Meisel. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. 183–211. Marshall, Jonathan W (2020) ‘Traumatic Dances of “The Non-Self”: Bodily Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive’. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Edited By Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press. 61–83. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​.ctv18dvt2d.7 Metcalfe, Andrew and Lucinda Ferguson (2001) ‘Half-Opened Being’. Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. Edited by John May and Nigel Thrift. London and New York: Routledge. 240–261. Nasio, Juan-David (1998) Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis. Edited and Translated by Susan Fairfield. New York: The Other Press. Nobus, Dany (1999) ‘Life and Death in the Glass: A New Look at the Mirror Stage’. Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Edited by Dany Nobus. New York: The Other Press. 101–138. Phillips, Adam (2012) ‘Acting Madness’. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. London: Penguin. 169–200. Price Herndl, Diane (1988) ‘The Writing Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna O, and “Hysterical” Writing’. NWSA Journal, 1.1 (Autumn). 52–74. Rendell, Jane (2003) ‘Writing in Place of Speaking’. Transmission: Speaking and Listening. Edited by Sharon Kivland and Lesley Sanderson. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University and Site Gallery. 15–29. https://www​.janerendell​.co​.uk​/wp​-content​/uploads​ /2009​/03​/writinginplace​.pdf. Accessed 14 December 2021. Safouan, Moustapha (1980) ‘In Praise of Hysteria’. Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Edited by and translated by Stuart Schneiderman. London: Yale University Press. 55–60. Salecl, Renata (1996) ‘I Can’t Love You Unless I give You Up’. Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. 179–207.

Voice  159 SCAD (n.d.) Self Portrait Talking to Vince. https://www​.scadmoa​.org​/permanent​ -collections​/pieces​/self​-portrait​-talking​-to​-vince. Accessed 20 April 2021. Scull, Andrew (2009) Hysteria: The Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Showalter, Elaine (1993) ‘On Hysterical Narrative’. Narrative, 1.1 (January). 24–35. Smith, Ali (2017) Winter. London: Hamish Hamilton. Smith, Natasha B C (n.d.) ‘American Beauty Through the Lens of Social Anxiety’. https://25yearslatersite​.com​/2019​/12​/12​/american​-beauty​-through​-the​-lens​-of​-social​ -anxiety/. Accessed 03 March 2022. Sontag, Susan (1978) Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sundell, Margaret (1996) ‘Vanishing Point: The Photography of Francesca Woodman’. Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art In, of, and from the Feminine. Edited by Catherine M. De Zeghler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 125–133. Taylor, Jasmine (2020) ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, Literary Ladies Guide. https://www​.literaryladiesguide​.com​/literary​-musings​/biographical​-notice​-of​ -ellis​-and​-acton​-bell/. Accessed 03 December 2022. Thomas, Simon (2013) ‘Not I: The Stage Poetry of Samuel Beckett’. Exeunt Magazine, 13 May 2013. http://exeuntmagazine​.com​/features​/not​-i/. Accessed 31 August 2021. Sacks, Oliver (1995 [1970]) Migraine. London: Picador. Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press. Wajcman, Gérard (2003) ‘The Hysteric’s Discourse’. The Symptom, 4 (Spring) https:// www​.lacan​.com​/hystericdiscf​.htm. Accessed 08 February 2021. Wolfreys, Julian (2013) ‘Preface: On Textual Haunting’. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. New York: Bloomsbury. 69–74. Wood, James (2018) ‘The Power of the Literary Pun’. The New Yorker, 29 January. https:// www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2018​/01​/29​/the​-power​-of​-the​-literary​-pun. Accessed 13 April 2022. Woodman, Francesca (2015) On Being an Angel. Edited by Anna Tellgren. London: Thames & Hudson. Woolf, Virginia (2015 [1929]) A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj (1991) ‘Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears’. October 58, Rendering the Real (Autumn). 44–68. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/778797 Žižek, Slavoj (2001) On Belief. London: Routledge. https://doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9780203167090 Žižek, Slavoj (2008 [1997]) The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj (2008) Violence. New York: Picador.

Interlude 0.3 Laura González, ‘Ghost’, composite photograph. DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-8

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Interlude 0.4 Eleanor Bowen, ‘Blueprint for a Ghost iii’, reframed photograph from family album of 1919.

6

Rebellion and persistence (envoi)

Nothing is definitive about the hysterical figure we have outlined. As an old graffito in Montevideo reads: when we found the answers, they changed the questions. What we have attempted in this book has been to interrogate, challenge, and change certain questions surrounding the hysteric figure. Since the beginning of this figure’s history, there has been a curiosity regarding the cause of hysteric symptoms, and a desire to make them stop. Important as a cure is, it has been more desirable historically to gain an understanding of what these strange symptoms articulate, for the hysteric is indeed suffering. In this respect, we want to return to Anna O and to Breuer’s approach to his patient: what is the hysteric’s utterance? What is she saying to us? What is the message encoded in her symptoms? How can we listen to the hysteric? Where do words go when they cannot be uttered? So we offer our envoi. An envoi sends forth. It suggests an opening onto new territory, a different way of looking at the ideas that have been written. A gathering of these ideas too. We retrace the outline of the hysteric. We reflect on our process, its implications and challenges, and perhaps extend those a little here. It is a reopening. We are attempting to send us on our way from here with a better sense, and means, of approaching the hysteric. If there was a concluding argument to our work, it would be found in the last chapter, ‘Voice’, perhaps the hysteric’s most elusive trait. What would happen if we changed the hysteric’s question from Che vuoi? – What do you want from me? to Where do words go when they cannot be uttered? Instead of the detective novel’s maxim of cherchez la femme, we propose, to solve the hysteric’s mystery, cherchez la voix – look for the voice. However, ‘Voice’ is also not the concluding chapter, for each is expandable so that one can imagine re-tracing the figure’s outline ad infinitum. Gérard Wajcman writes, There doesn’t seem to be anything medicine has not said about hysteria: it is multiple, it is one, it is nothing; it is an entity, a malfunction, an illusion; it is true and deceptive; organic or perhaps mental; it exists, it does not exist. (Wajcman, 2003) DOI:  10.4324/9781003092407-9

Rebellion and persistence (envoi)  163 The movements we made as we traced the five traits of the hysteric demonstrate this constant folding, which hides and reveals at the same time. Hysteria’s wanderings are an exodus. It has always been, and, we venture, will be in popular imagination tied to the uterus, the organ of reproduction, a place of transit, a temporary home from which things are ejected and move on. Elaine Scarry, however, wonders what would happen if we were, instead, to tie hysteria to voice, to the word, the very locus of power (Scarry, 1985: 51). ‘[C]ast your mind forward, Winnie, to the time when words must fail.’ Samuel Beckett gives voice to Winnie. As hysteria and the uterus have been inextricably linked, this has made the image of the hysteric – although not the hysteric themselves – a woman. Yet the psychoanalytic vocabulary and the history of hysteria have been particularly negative for women, so reclaiming and rehabilitating hysteria is perhaps not desirable (Showalter, 1993: 33). ‘Is there a woman in this text?’ asks Mary Jacobus in an essay exploring whether there is something that could be called feminine writing (1986: 83). We could ask the same of many substantial writings on the hysteric and the works that represent her. And the question is worth asking if we consider, as we did in Chapter One that, for Freud, a hysteric is unable to ‘give an ordered history of their life’ (1953 [1905]: 16). Instead, the hysteric scrambles the history in mysterious bodily symptoms interpreted and made legible only by the doctor, who gets to tell the story. Jacobus’s conclusion is: If the woman in the text is ‘there,’ she is also ‘not there’ – certainly not its object, not necessarily even its author. That may be why the heroine of feminist critical theory is not the silenced Irma, victim of Freudian theory, but the hysterical Dora whose body is her text and whose refusal to be the object of Freudian discourse makes her the subject of her own. Perhaps the question that feminist critics should ask themselves is not ‘Is there a woman in this text?’ but rather: ‘Is there a text in this woman?’ (Jacobus, 1986: 109) Is there more text in the hysteric? Do we have anything new to say? Perhaps not, although it is necessary to keep reminding ourselves of who the hysteric is right now, what form she has adopted, and what she is resisting. Even if little new content can arise from the hysteric, her image, the form, remains paramount but continues to shift. This is why we trace her with words, ours and those of others, folding each piece into an exquisite corpse. ‘Failing to recognize the mimetic essence of desire, Freud has allowed himself to be entrapped by a woman’ (Jacobus, 1986: 105). Far from entrapping, the hysteric impels us. She sends us forth to discover our limits, what we would resist and revolt against, and what we are made of. If we take the idea of envoi not, as in English, potentially a summation but, as in French, a sending out or transmission, then she is herself the envoi. All women, and all hysterics, are clearly not Dora, and yet archetypally, they can be considered as such, for Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément define the hysteric through this archetype. A hysteric is:

164  Rebellion and persistence (envoi) the one who resists the system, the one who cannot stand that the family and society are founded on the body of women, on bodies despised, rejected, bodies that are humiliating once they have been used. And this girl – like all hysterics, deprived of the possibility of saying directly what she perceived, of speaking face-to-face or on the telephone as Father [?] B. or Father K. or Freud, et cetera do – still had the strength to make it known. It is the nuclear example of women's power to protest. It happened in 1899; it happens today wherever women have not been able to speak differently from Dora, but have spoken so effectively that it bursts the family into pieces. Yes, the hysteric, with her way of questioning others … is, to my eyes, the typical woman in all her force. It is a force that was turned back against Dora, but, if the scene changes and if woman begins to speak in other ways, it would be a force capable of demolishing those structures … The source of Dora's strength is, in spite of everything, her desire. (Cixous and Cléments, 1986: 154) For them, as we propose in this book, it is a matter of embracing hysteria rather than treating it. If we continue to consider it a sickness, as Sam Kriss states and we argued in ‘Voice’, we are passing over the fall in values in our society and the systemic injustices that are harming us: ‘[w]e validate specific pains and symptoms, and ignore the ways in which a damaged world has made being ill the only way of being a person’ (2021). We have to embrace the hysteric to find out what she can tell us about desire, conflict, systems, the body, femininity, and society. We can also usefully embrace Jacques Lacan and his hysteric’s discourse, for he too is mysterious. the murderer struck at: i. the ideal of the master within herself (is Lacan’s idea the same?) ii. her own disempowerment (by incestuous abuse, lack of parenting, inheritances of chronic conditions, epilepsy, death by suicidal depression, poverty) A case studied by Lacan in 1933 is that of the two Pepin sisters who were diagnosed insane, having brutally murdered their domestic employers in the family home, apparently without motivation and declaring no animosity towards them. In Lacan’s response to this case are some of the roots that give rise to his conceptualisation of hysteria as a structure rather than a medical condition and, in public perception, simply insanity. Lacan did not publish his lectures. He spoke his ideas, hence our understanding of his teaching is largely through notes taken at the time. Thus the four discourses we discussed in Chapter Three were mapped out during his lectures, manifested as mysterious diagrams, which is perhaps why, as interpretations, these diagrams can appear obscure and somewhat pretentious, especially to those who have direct or indirect experience of chronic trauma, abuse, and/or deprivation. However, Lacan clearly found these listenedto, notated responses to his own teaching highly insightful and personally useful,

Rebellion and persistence (envoi)  165 for ‘it was in his οwn Seminar … that he felt he was really analyzed’ (Roudinesco, 1997: 75). Crucially, however, as Elisabeth Roudinesco points out, Lacan worked not to undermine Freud’s teaching but to ‘found a system of thought based on his belief that the modern, post-Auschwitz world had repressed, obscured, and diluted the essence of the Freudian revolution’ (1997: xvi). From our own perspective, the mystery of the Pepin case perhaps brings us to some understanding of Lacan’s own mystery, his position in relation to his master Freud and the apparent obscurity of his own teaching. Unlike Freud, Lacan had undergone psychoanalysis which, in his terms, places him at an advantage over Freud, for he is not thus the progenitor of analysis, the all-seeing one. Instead, as both analyst and analysand (Lacan’s own word for a patient), he partakes in the same structure or rather is empowered thereby to envision a previously medicalised state of mind such as hysteria as a structure of interchangeable relationships serving the same system, the same ends. Putting this into practice at the time of the Pepin case, Lacan rejects the ‘bourgeois cruelty’ (Roudinesco, 1997: 63) of those who sought to condemn the maidservant sisters as hysterical monsters, assuming a logic to their madness which, seen from the perspective of the disempowered recipient of abuse, that of the analysand, could be expressed as ‘the ideal of the master within herself’ (Roudinesco, 1997: 64). Accounting thus for the apparently contradictory actions and responses of the sisters, placed in the dock as insane and hysterical, Lacan’s logic, visualised in diagrammatic structures, helps us to see how these were the logical sane outcomes of insanely disempowering circumstances. These, literally at the flick of a switch, had like a tidal wave within the two at the same time driven them to take control, for the unconscious drive would have been, Lacan can see, to become the master. The circumstances, he notes, were that there had been a power cut preventing one sister from finishing the ironing, which in turn invited the wrath of her employer returning home (Roudinesco, 1997: 62), and the rest was history. As they tried to explain, it wasn’t personal. The recurrent return is inherent to the structure of hysteria. Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink describes this structure of return as working to keep desire unsatisfied (1997: 51) which shows in the hysteric’s symptom as a forgetting of the thought with a persisting affect (1997: 113). She wishes to be the cause of desire but not the object that satisfies it (Fink, 2016: 99). And this creates a loop of repetitions, ever-changing mimetic symptoms, and persistently unsatisfied desire. To get around this, Lacan suggested fostering hystericisation as a way of harnessing the questioning power of the hysteric, just enough to move forward, without the impasse of calling everything into question. Hystericisation opens possibilities: ‘can I find or bring out a lack in another to which I myself correspond? Can I be the cause of another’s desire and come into being as a desiring subject myself?’ (Fink, 2016: 139). But it is ‘fragile and short-lived’ (Fink, 1997: 131). The hysteric finds a way to question even hystericisation. Perhaps the problem with Lacan’s suggestion is that his own work follows the very structure of hysteria, creating a system to override all systems, and then immediately calling it into question, never accepting authority, not even his own (Fink, 1995: 125, 149).

166  Rebellion and persistence (envoi) [Lacan] … There you are! I think I’ve done enough for this evening. I do not want to finish on a sensational peroration, but the question that, yes, it is well enough written. Necessary, impossible … X – We can’t hear anything! Lacan – Huh? Necessary, impossible, possible and contingent. X – We can’t hear anything. Lacan – I don’t give a damn! There you are. This is a way of opening things up. (Lacan, 1972: 18) Marie Pierrakos writes as ‘a disgruntled keybasher turned psychoanalyst’ (2006) about the student/audience experience of transcribing Lacan’s seminars. She cites the preceding transcription of audience/master exchange (2006: 8) in order to demonstrate how power was maintained by the exasperating one who created such disarming structures. Yet, for the hysteric ‘in her position as the one who points out or demonstrates the lack in the Other’s knowledge, she becomes a living exception or enigma, always one step ahead of any known theory or technique’ (Fink, 1997: 132). The hysteric allows her enigma to remain an enigma, without a desperate need for explanation, answers, and solutions, with current or potential knowledge (Fink, 1995: 134). She doubts an answer is even possible and yet the question must be asked. This is what makes her a persistent figure, a mystery never solved. Fink also writes about love triangles and their meaning for different psychic structures. Of the hysteric, he says: the hysteric ostensibly seeks to divine the reasons for her own man’s interest in another woman, but is actually more interested in unearthing the secret of femininity through this other woman so that she can become like her, thereby becoming the very essence of Woman. The obsessive wishes to defeat and replace the Other man, the hysteric to study, imitate, and become like the other woman – at times to the point of virtually falling in love with she whom the hysteric believes holds the secret of her own femininity. (Fink, 2016: 14) As with the idea of the feminine, the hysteric figure has been undergoing a transformation over the course of its history since its first mention in Egyptian papyri (Veith, 1965). Dominik Zechner offers a view of the hysteric as someone who undergoes ‘a fundamental crisis of understanding provoked by a profound defiance against reigning master codes’ (Zechner, 2020: 89). She is, potentially, an interrogator and changer of those master codes. As a figure, she also has been resistant to treatment and cure which, according to Johanna Braun, has given rise to ‘a new self-consciousness of the self-reflective media figure of the hysteric’ (Braun, 2020: 223).

Rebellion and persistence (envoi)  167 Far from portraying hysterics as people who foolishly manufacture symptoms in a doomed attempt to buck the system, they are here seen as people who refuse easy answers, resisting commonplace idiocies put forward in the form of accepted laws and norms. They use their dissatisfactions and discomforts as a means to interrogate the Other, to make it say something back, to attempt to unsettle it. It’s in this sense that the hysteric can be seen as a seeker after truth. It may seem a counter-intuitive leap from the idea of the Victorian malingerer, but the two could be said to be in direct relation. By virtue of their very unhappiness, hysterics found ways to attack the status quo, their ‘illness’ offering a form of resistance. (Grose, 2020: 17) Where are we with the hysteric right now? We have alluded in previous chapters, especially when discussing Freud’s case ‘Dora’, to Shannon Bell’s proposal for a move from hysteric to posthysteric (2014). This is not necessarily a transformation, because her new name still ties the hysteric to her history. It is a course correction: The name alteration indicates that the posthysteric has gone beyond the hysteric’s positioning as a servant to Freud and psychoanalysis: in the nineteenth century, the tracks of psychoanalysis were laid on the back of the hysteric. In the twenty-first century the posthysteric drives a gold spike through these tracks and in so doing reroutes the way and destination. (Bell, 2014: 189–190) The routes and destinations Bell traces lead to a renewed figure, perhaps a newly perceived female body, refusing to accept the old one that was constructed for her. Bell proposes ownership of the hysteric symptom as classically described because ‘in an exquisite sexual encounter a posthysteric can experience’ most of these symptoms and phenomena: ‘vision abnormalities, blindness, spasms or neurasthenia, sexual dysfunction, speech impediments, biting the tongue, nausea, rapid palpitations, multiple personalities, fugue states, absences and amnesia, hallucinations, temporary paralysis, thumb-sucking, and the involuntary passing of urine’ (Bell, 2014: 197). Yet, if we consider that ‘nervous diseases, hysteria most notably among them, were’ – and are – ‘diseases of civilization’ (Scull, 2009: 48), a new dimension is opened, even beyond the posthysteric: that of a hysteric figure seen not as an individual, but in terms of mass hysteria. Thus the outline we have traced is not only around a body with a torso and limbs, but also the amorphous and shifting body of a crowd. Zechner attributes such an expansion to the concept creep we discussed in previous chapters: As an additional facet of its concept creep, the dilution of hysteria in ordinary speech has caused an odd effect of massification according to which hysteria is never applied to a singularly lived-through state or situation, instead

168  Rebellion and persistence (envoi) always invoking a circumstance that affects a crowd or mass of people; ‘hysteria’ nowadays means mass hysteria. (Zechner, 2020: 88) Isn’t this the case with, for example, the 2017 #MeToo movement and some aspects of the covid-19 pandemic? Such dilution as Zechner describes can be seen as the rapidly connecting spread of justified anxieties and anger between digitally connected people into amassed emotion. But writing about contemporary hysterics is notoriously hard, as Elaine Showalter has reflected: Recalling a NATO workshop she attended after, and in response to, the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack in the US, she notes how ‘one delegate proposed the term “catastrophic reaction syndrome” for the psychological symptoms of a disaster’ (Showalter, 2020: 33) – another name for a form of hysteria that could also be applied to the pandemic. The covid-19 pandemic brought about a large number of bodily symptoms, from fever and tiredness to what became known as covid tongue and toes (ZOE Study, 2021). The virus infected the body while the idea of the pandemic also infected the minds of some and was displayed in behaviour such as panic buying, which was mimetically spread. Long covid is somewhat mysterious, a response to trauma, although medical research likens it to a post-viral condition such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and chronic fatigue (O’Neill, 2021). However, even the literature around this reminds one of the hysteric, as accusations of malingering and the complaint of not being taken seriously resurface. In fact, some, such as Sam Kriss in his review of contemporary books Leave Society by Tao Lin and The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery by Ross Douthat, understand chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia as placeholder diagnoses, suffering with no apparent physical cause, closer to the existential nature of the hysteric casting their ‘own terrible veto on the sickness of the world’ (2021). The pandemic’s disturbance of the planet’s day-to-day life gave rise to a new normality in which it seemed to disappear, only to appear again as cases fluctuated. The articulation around control measures and vaccines can be thought of as voice-qua-object, utterances outside of language. This contemporary form of hysteria, mass hysteria, is not new and has been recorded for centuries, for example, as the medieval dancing hysteria during the plague. What we refer to here is not only mass hysteria per se but also a manifestation of the concept creep that Zechner observes (2020). It looks and feels different from Charcot’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière and Elaine Showalter’s Hystories (1997), not least because of something she alludes to when revisiting her experience of her seminal book’s reception: terrorism and social media (Showalter, 2020: 34). The threat – and actuality – of global terrorism after 11 September 2001 and the social and psychological effects of social media since the launch of Facebook and Twitter in 2004 and 2006 have resulted in new forms of hysterical mutation. In his exploration of Don DeLillo’s depictions of crowds in the novel Mao II, Sean Metzger understands mass hysteria as ‘a process of envisioning and a commentary on the visual bombardment that

Rebellion and persistence (envoi)  169 marks the current historical moment’ and which is characterised by confusion, loss, and terror, manifesting as amnesia, hallucinations, and problems of vision (Metzger, 2020: 147–148). Or, as Marshall characterises, latent non-meaning, ‘a symptomatic expression of subjective and corporeal non-sense and fragmentation’, a breakdown of subjective experience (Marshall, 2020: 79). In Performing Hysteria, Johanna Braun has investigated this striking new appearance of the hysteric as a group: While the hysteric in historical and previous artistic sources was dominantly represented as a woman or girl, it becomes evident … that the hysteric is currently manifesting beyond those presumed gender boundaries and also appearing more strikingly in the form of group or mass hysteria. (Braun, 2020: 13) But even before 2001 and social media, hysteria found its way to the crowd with media, which without the social aspect attached was still ‘an area of concern among psychologists, sociologists, educators, broadcasters, government policy makers and the general public’ (Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001: 13). Lisa Blackman and Valerie Walkerdine explore the examples of responses to Rosemary West, the life and death of Princess Diana, and the coming together of revolutionary crowds, amongst others, as phenomena of mass hysteria. I stood up and began to dance too, and one by one so did almost all of us … The following afternoon the sisters began to laugh … ‘Our sisters have all gone quite mad.’ ‘No,’ she said. … ‘I have seen this before. In a convent in France. It is something that happens to women and girls. … They must be left. It will blow over. They will exhaust themselves and the devil-spirit will go from them.’ (Glendinning, 2018: 146) Thus the novice nun Agnes Peppin describes events at Shaftesbury Abbey during the process of its dissolution in 1539, and consequently that of their order. Historically, the hysteric has been seen as passive. She is the inverse of the feminist orator with an active subject position in relation to the power of the voice. The hysteric, on the other hand, passively acts out ‘through her body what her voice could not speak’ (Kahane, 1995: 8). Kahane argues that this is the split that exists within the hysteric: a revolutionary with a suppressed voice. But we need to learn to listen to the murmurs of her voice, even if faint. In order to understand the hysteric as a figure of rebellion and resistance against oppression and inequality, it is worth remembering Freud’s formulation of hysteria as a defence against trauma, which we outlined in our introduction repli. Defence and resistance: these are both clinical and political terms where concept bleed is at play. James Strachey summarises Freud’s and Breuer’s writing, defining defence as

170  Rebellion and persistence (envoi) an unconscious mechanism that involves ‘repressing ideas from consciousness’ (1955 [1893]: xxix), resulting in a splitting from present experience, an exclusion. He links this to resistance to treatment, the hysteric’s ‘unwillingness to co-operate in their own cure’ (1955 [1893]: xvii). The problem with this characterisation of the hysteric as resistant is that it can look, from the physician’s perspective, a lot like failure. This is demonstrated in the conflicting portraits of Dora, including the famous one by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (Bell, 2014: 197). The poet Anne Stevenson (as cited by Showalter, 1993: 33) defends her reference to Sylvia Plath’s work as hysterical: Hysteria is the very stuff of revolutions – and not only female revolutions. In its place it can be useful. It calls attention to what may be intolerable conditions and issues, an either-change-it-or-die ultimatum which is impossible to ignore. How would [the reader] define ‘hysteria’? As a passionate, single-minded psychological condition which, immune to humour as to reason, fails to achieve the detachment essential for self-criticism? As my liberal and generous-minded American mother used to warn us, ‘Always remember, girls, there are some good Republicans.’ And some – many – good men too! (Stevenson, 1983: 961) By drawing an outline through the five traits, we argue that such active, albeit unconscious, resistance is not a failure on the part of the hysteric, but resistance against a form of traumatic oppression that results in a refusal to comply, a rebellion against what is being asked. If there is a failure, it is on the part of those attempting to diagnose her – in the case of Dora, this/she was Freud’s failure. But there is still suffering. It is the driving force. There is no impulse to resist and protest if there is no suffering, as Vivian Delchamps observes. For her, the ‘performance of diagnosis’ in medical texts led to a ‘performance of rebellion’ in artistic representations (Braun, 2020b: 19), resisting the ideology of cure (Delchamps, 2020: 106). In our consideration of the hysteric, whether historical, clinical, in mass hysteria, or in works of art, the question of ethics prevails. We have of course edited and curated, not, we hope, occluded. Even when aware that archives are occluding (see what we had to say about the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière in Chapter Two) we have searched for the ethical dimension in relation to these archives. Nothing is straightforward with the hysteric. There are readings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper that draw out nationalism and alliance with eugenic ideas (see, for example, Seitler, 2003; Nadkarni, 2012). Mark S Micale writes that ‘hysteria studies as a body of scholarly writing have to date been disparate, fragmented, and uncoordinated … despite its volume, the historical scholarship on hysteria is being pursued concurrently along several very active but almost wholly isolated lines of investigation’ (1995: 11). He terms the writing in the humanities as faddish, uninformed, and irrelevant, that of the doctors as uncritical, self-serving, and unsophisticated, and outlines an ethical and conceptual blueprint for future hysteria studies. This, consisting of ten requirements, is what we have followed within our work. Even if we are not located within the

Rebellion and persistence (envoi)  171 historiographical field Micale aims to change, we have benefitted from what he termed the interdisciplinary moment of hysteria (Micale, 1995: 12): • •

• • • • •

• • •

The need for definitional clarity: starting from a definition of hysteria as clear as possible, understanding the implications of our definition, and tracing its manifestation in the hysteric Beyond the ‘historical hysterics’: broadening the empirical foundation of knowledge to cultural and artistic manifestations, even if still taking into consideration ‘articulate sufferers’ (Porter, 1985: 176) such as Anna O, Dora, the women in Charcot’s Iconographie photographique, and literary figures like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Virginia Woolf From theory to practice: going beyond an intellectual-historical methodology into an artistic and fictocritical one Beyond the Freudian historical teleology: even if still acknowledging Freud’s contribution to psychodynamic therapy and hysteria Towards socio-somatic synthesis: balancing out internal and external analytic categories with our fictocritical repli The ‘doctor-patient relationship’: considering and presenting this complex network of influence and power, transference, and countertransference The de-dramatisation of hysteria: paradoxically, we have done this by acknowledging the dramatic history of the hysteric and contextualising her within drama and theatre discourses, as well as channelling her dramatic energy towards resistance and rebellion. We have also looked at la grande hysterie and its drama, as well as manifestations of ‘petite hysterie’, ‘hysterie ordinaire’, and ‘hysterie vulgaire’ (Micale, 1995: 153) in the life of Winnie Seebohm and the work of La Ribot, for example. Although we have been careful to point out that Victoria Glendinning does not allude anywhere to hysteria in Winnie Seebohm’s symptoms, her symptoms were of a systemic nature, perhaps part of concept creep The question of social class: even if we have not provided an analysis of class and diagnosis, we have considered class as an essential factor in our questioning hysteria and in our trace of the hysteric. More work on this remains to be done Hysteria – the male malady: as with class, we have questioned the relation between hysteria and gender, raising issues beyond the female/male binary and we have identified this as a pending subject for psychoanalysis On the rise and fall of nervous diseases: by outlining the hysteric, we have attempted to create a pattern to allow her recognition in the contemporary context, tracing her (dis)appearance as a fundamental trait

What are the implications of witnessing such suffering, if underlying it is a spirit of resistance and rebellion? What is our responsibility in listening to, reading, and writing the hysteric? Do we have any responsibility, and to whom? These are questions that have underpinned our work, especially after reading Dianne Hunter’s account of her re-staging of Charcot’s hysteria shows (1998). As suggested in Jenn Cole’s recent monograph on hysteria in performance (2021), the

172  Rebellion and persistence (envoi) question of hysteria is an intensely contemporary one and one that encompasses not only personal but cultural and political mass trauma. We have attempted to be sensitive to the ethical questions, taking the position of Sharon Kivland’s and Claire Kahane’s reading of Freud’s Dora where, unlike him, they acknowledge the countertransference of the effects of her voice (Kivland, 1999; Kahane, 1995: xiv). We have taken into account how reading and listening to the hysteric plays on our desire and its articulation in this text. In this context we turn to Paula Rego’s powerfully drawn hysteric figures, Possession I–VII (2004). These pastel drawings on canvas, shown in the 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain, are self-reflexive works in which, as discussed in Chapters One and Five in relation to the work of Francesca Woodman, the artist performs, or directs another to perform, herself. In these works, Rego consciously evokes, in each of the single figures depicted, the idea of hysteria as possession, the inhabitation of one person or idea by another. This is decidedly not in any way ghostly or metaphysical, or even for the figure herself conscious, but can be said to evoke becoming in the mimetic sense originating with Gilles Deleuze, and described by Braidotti as ‘neither a reproduction nor just an imitation, but rather emphatic proximity, intensive inter-connectedness’ (Braidotti, 2014: 182). Thus Rego finds ‘similarities between the images of those women diagnosed with hysteria and poses of female saints traditionally seen in Roman Catholic religious paintings’ (Tate, 2021). miming the classical paintings they see on the hospital walls – a benevolent goddess (agent of desire) or the Virgin Mary gazing heavenwards … However, Rego’s female figure, like Woodman’s, has a strong sense of selfidentity that demonstrates an engagement with her own reality. This is evident through gesture, posture, action, and look. What we see is nothing like fantasy, which is inevitably self-conscious, but something real, found through a re-staging of trauma – something longed-for to stop the pain – a goddess, the Virgin Mary, somebody along the corridor whose suffering shows on the outside more than yours. Perhaps (is this possible to say?) we see an analogy in footage of First World War soldiers whose body language seems to mimetically re-enact the moment of impact, the shell whose shockwaves ricochet through the body for the rest of that individual’s life. This is one moment frozen into the body, but surely the impact of emotional and physical assault and abuse born of poverty and disease can be similarly somatised? Locked into such grasped-for mimesis is the original trauma, albeit unlikely to be a single act but ongoing abuse on the person. In Rego’s works, again and again, in many guises, animal and human, and in the way she makes, we see mimetic gestures and actions born of the ‘fragmented reality’ of her Portuguese childhood spent ‘under a dictatorship, the Estado Novo’ (Tate, 2021). Mimesis in these works is a form of defence but also defiance. As a small child internalising the social impact of that brutally repressive regime, in later years Rego consciously chooses to bear ‘witness to injustice’, and her mode of making taps deeply into the ‘rage and anguish’ necessary to do that authentically (Tate, 2021). Thus she presents the complex subjects of oppression and survival, including herself and her husband, the painter Victor Willing, who lived

Rebellion and persistence (envoi)  173 with multiple sclerosis, and for whom she cared for many years. Rego’s visceral mark-making makes stabbing contact between body and surface. The artist uses pastel, a more resistant tool than the more typically used paintbrush: ‘The stick is fiercer, much more aggressive’ (Tate, 2021). woman figure stabbed with the soft end of a chalk pastel against the sharp tooth of canvas finding resistance stretched out for something softer going at the resistant surface making marks I hear the mark making at the … on the back of the skirt and I realise here now is an image not told to us in more illustrative works this isn’t to make the illustration of an idea this is for real this is the … the putting into here … it is the voice Yet in these transformations of hysteria throughout history, there are constants, and within this constancy, or consistency, we offer the five traits of hysteria on which this book is founded. But there is another side. The poses that Charcot declared to be phases of an attack were, it has been suggested, a manifestation of prohibition, of prohibited feelings. The repressed returns in the symptom as ‘so many “materialisations” of words’, indeed ‘of the very words that repressed them’ (Abraham and Torok, 1990: 63). This return could be interpreted as an act of prohibition on the part of the subject herself, a negation of access to her own agency. It is a denial that calls ‘desire by the very name of its prohibition’ (Abraham and Torok, 1990: 64). Thus we see, and read inscribed into body language, that which was, for its subjects, beyond language. And returning to the root of the hysteric symptom as a form of defence, Lacan established a relation between desire, defence, prohibition, and transgression. The hysteric defends herself in her desire; ‘desire is essentially the desire to transgress, and for there to be transgression it is first necessary for there to be prohibition’ (Evans, 1996: 102). This has a consequence for the hysteric, who although mute, speaks. Her jouissance, which we described as her secretion in Chapter Three, is prohibited: We must keep in mind that jouissance is prohibited [interdite] to whoever speaks, as such – or, put differently, it can only be said [dite] between the lines by whoever is a subject of the Law, since the Law is founded on that very prohibition. (Lacan, 2006 [1966]: 696) Yet, jouissance is the way out. Apart from the return of the repressed in the hysteric, something is also being reproduced and returned in the discourses around hysteria, and around the hysteric figure, something we don’t seem to be able to escape. Who exactly is this popular figure that we persist in and insist on returning to? Reviewing artworks, writings, and research on the topic, it strikes us that her image is recurrent. Throughout our discussion, we have referred to a unified, gendered figure that is subject to the gaze, a cypher and a convenient peg on which to hang historically attributed properties. We have characterised her inheritances in terms of body, mimesis, mystery, disappearance, and voice.

174  Rebellion and persistence (envoi) So is she now mutating, this ancient figure? Surely in this day and age, she may dump her baggage and disappear for good? Pipilotti Rist is a twenty-first-century artist whose voice perhaps characterises a human experience common to many. ‘I’m always struggling with myself, no matter what I do … It’s like a quest for the lost body’ (Jones, 2006: 216). Here she could be speaking for some of those (post-)millennial generations brought up on digital/social media, and also for the inter-media generation who have lived half their lives in the twentieth century and who currently straddle pre- and post-digital worlds. Both demographics, with their different histories, negotiate between physical and virtual worlds, with implications for the temporal and spatial stability and reassurances that human beings have historically sought. Rist’s figures, rooted in the pursuit of her lost ‘never to be found’ body, are, in Amelia Jones’s terms, ‘anti-fundamentalist’ (2006: 216), fundamentalism here being that binary concept cleaving together the essential elements of the gaze in which female, whose attributes are in patriarchy deemed other, is subject to male, whose attributes constitute the ‘common-sense’ (Bryson, 1983). Jones describes Rist’s subjects as ‘parafeminist’ (2006: 213), in maintaining a ‘volatile energy and power’ not associated specifically with any gender, so that ‘the binary logic of the gaze has itself dissolved’ (2006: 237). Rist is drawn to the notion of the hysteric figure as one that pushes back. ‘I glorify hysterical actions. They are powerful gestures, a form of resistance when one is in a weak position … Hysteria is at the same time a falling apart into many pieces, an ecstasy, a personal exorcism’ (2006: 237). Many of her works are brief and to the point, like gestures. In this they become surreal. Ever Is Over All (1997) features a young woman in a brightly coloured party frock swinging confidently down a street of parked cars carrying a giant flower which, as she approaches the camera, she uses in one movement to smash in a car window. In the video for her 2016 single Hold Up, Beyoncé chose to include her own version of Rist’s work. Her album Lemonade, amongst other things, chronicles the relationship between Black women and American society (Robinson, 2016), so it is perhaps possible to assume the significance of this brief sequence for her, and for her massive audience. It’s another recurring image, this time carrying forward the ancient stick-hitting gag which is potentially an act of war, but, given different timing and a passive object, the aggression is harnessed. Think Punch and Judy to Vaudeville, Charlie Chaplin, and John Cleese, and, as many of those dark male gags are taken up by others, now hitting back. And again there is still in our midst the arc, the long hair, the white gown, the persistent contours of an ancient form.

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Index

#MeToo 12, 103, 107, 124, 168 abreaction 4–5, 47–48 aliénistes 56, 66, 92 American Beauty 53, 92, 137, 141–142 amnesia 47, 108, 113, 167, 169 anamorphosis 120 Anna, O. 3–4, 47, 87–89, 109, 111, 145, 162, 171 see Pappenheim, Bertha appearance 13, 25, 50, 55, 67, 106, 109, 121–122, 124, 139, 169, 171; see also disappearance; reappearance arc de cercle 21–22, 30–32, 34, 60; arch of hysteria 13, 30, 122; Arch of Hysteria 34, 82, 116, 123 archive 2, 14, 21–22, 30, 54, 60–63, 65, 118, 121, 170; see also Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière articulation 55, 69, 75, 81, 85, 90, 95, 137–138, 144–145, 151, 168, 172 asthma 14, 142–143, 151–152 attitudes passionelles 25, 30, 40, 51, 61, 69 Augustine 22, 60, 69, 78, 135–137, 143, 154–155 authority 57, 68, 86, 107, 117, 123, 147, 165 Barthes, Roland 65–66, 76–77, 118, 130, 132, 137, 143 Baudrillard, Jean 63–64, 76 Bauer, Ida 14, 102, 106, 109; see also Dora Bausch, Pina 8, 13, 32–33, 41, 57 Beckett, Samuel 22, 117, 140, 146–147, 153, 163 becoming 8–9, 53, 55, 95, 131, 154, 172 Bell, Shannon 82–84, 86, 90, 167 la belle indifférence 3, 58 Bellmer, Hans 24–25

Bhabha, Homi 144–145 Blanche 60, 103, 154 body 1–3, 6, 10, 12–14, 21–35, 37–42, 47, 49–55, 59–62, 64–65, 67–69, 74–78, 81–83, 87–92, 95, 104–106, 118–121, 123–125, 130–134, 136, 138, 140, 144–147, 149–151, 154–155, 163–164, 167–169, 172–174 Bollas, Christopher 39–40, 57 Bourgeois, Louise 34, 41, 82, 116, 123 Braidotti, Rosi 53, 54, 172 Braunstein, Néstor 55, 58–59, 84 breath 29, 51, 89, 106, 142, 144, 146–147, 150–152 Breton, André 24, 26, 78 Breuer, Joseph 3–5, 13, 32, 47, 87–88, 92, 145, 162 Brouillet, André 22, 31, 59–61, 82, 103 butoh 34, 123–124 Café Müller 32–33, 57 Campbell, Jan 46–48, 50, 54, 57, 59, 84–85, 102, 108, 118, 138 Caruth, Cathy 75 case 14, 35, 87–92, 95–96, 104–122, 125, 149, 164–165 Charcot, Jean-Martin 1–4, 6–7, 12, 27, 29, 47, 50, 57, 59–62, 122, 135 Che vuoi? 85–86, 114, 135, 149, 162 choking 59, 136, 143, 146 Cixous, Hélène 82, 95, 105, 112–113, 139, 164, 170 clitoris 110–111 clownism 30, 34, 50 collage 9, 11, 25–26 concept creep 6–7, 31, 57, 102, 167–168 contagion 52 conversion 4, 29–30, 41, 48, 74, 90, 101, 106, 118, 124

180 Index convulsion 24, 26, 29, 47, 133, 136 countertransference 58, 111, 113–114, 124, 171–172 covid-19 pandemic 124, 168 ‘The Cry’ 135–136, 138, 155 culture 6–7, 9, 21, 29, 32, 101, 124, 130, 140–142, 146, 150–151 cure 3–5, 8, 13–14, 24, 26, 30, 37, 40, 48, 61, 63, 66, 68, 76, 84, 88–89, 95–97, 105, 107, 111, 121, 145–146, 162, 166, 170 Dalí, Salvador 25 dance 21, 32–34, 39, 54, 57, 62, 118–119, 123, 148, 153 dancing mania 25, 169 death drive 82, 124; thanatos 120 de Clérambault, Gaétan Gatien 92 defence 3–5, 108, 169, 172–173 definition 1, 21, 27–29, 31, 52, 78, 131, 171 Deleuze, Gilles 53, 90–91, 94–95, 131–132 DeLillo, Don 168 desire 7, 30, 52, 55, 58–59, 79, 81–82, 85–88, 90, 107, 132, 164–165, 173; desire to know 77, 83; graph of desire 85, 135; mimetic desire 48, 50, 53, 67, 163; object cause of desire 58, 79–81, 86, 165; the Other’s desire 85–87, 165; unsatisfied desire 58, 165 detective 13, 92–94, 96, 117, 162; detection 93; detective story 93, 115 diagnosis 8, 13–14, 28, 37, 56, 60, 63, 82–83, 93, 101, 170–171 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 8, 28, 30–31, 101; American Psychiatric Association 89 Didi-Huberman, Georges 2, 12, 24–28, 30, 32, 37–40, 46, 61, 63, 67, 75, 135–137, 145 disappearance 77, 106, 118–119, 121–122, 124, 130, 173; from diagnostic manuals 6–7, 13–14, 101; of Dora 105, 107–109, 111, 113 discourse of the hysteric 6, 13–14, 50, 79–80, 83–85, 87, 95, 109 dissociation 1, 4, 30, 32, 47 disturbance 11, 68, 87–88, 130, 168 documentation 22, 41, 65, 118, 143 Dora 5–6, 14, 58, 82, 88, 102–121, 124–125, 131, 143, 149–150, 153, 163–164, 170–172; see also Bauer, Ida drawing 9–10, 25, 35–36, 60, 81, 105, 170, 172; drawings of the Salpêtrière 14, 30, 41, 50–52, 66

dream 24–25, 59, 83, 105, 134; Dora’s dreams 106, 108, 110–112, 114, 117 echo 10, 23–25, 33, 83, 108, 125, 130–131, 137 embodiment 12–13, 43–54, 85 enigma 40, 75, 86, 94, 166 enunciation 52, 85, 113 epistemology 112 Ernst, Max 25 ethics 155, 170, 172 Études Cliniques 30, 50, 52, 60, 75 evenly hovering attention 88, 112 exquisite corpse 10, 25, 94, 163; cadavre exquis 25 failure 11, 37, 83, 89, 106, 108, 111–112, 123, 170 fainting 51 fantasy 12, 48, 58–59, 80, 86–87, 108, 111, 130, 145, 172 female sexuality 110–111, 119–120 feminism 7, 12–13, 31, 54, 82, 85, 87–88, 106–107, 112, 119, 163, 169 fictocriticism 9–12, 14, 171 figure 1, 3, 7–10, 13, 21–25, 29–30, 32, 34–35, 46, 51, 53–54, 60–62, 65, 69–70, 78, 81, 102, 109, 131, 136–138, 141–142, 145, 148–151, 153–154, 162, 166–167, 169, 171–174; disfigured 124 fold 8–12, 25, 32, 34, 37–38, 53–54, 66, 74, 82–83, 90–91, 94, 122, 145–146, 152–154, 163 Fort/Da 124 four discourses 13, 79–81, 164 fragment 10–11, 23–25, 32, 34, 42, 83–84, 90, 102–103, 154, 169–170, 172; of an analysis 5, 14, 103, 105, 108–110, 114, 117, 124 free association 88, 110 Freud, Sigmund 1, 3–7, 10–11, 13–14, 30–32, 35, 39–41, 47–49, 52, 55, 58–59, 62, 75, 77, 82–83, 88–89, 92–93, 96, 102, 105–115, 117–124, 134–135, 138–139, 142–143, 148–150, 163, 165, 167, 169–172; see also Breuer, Joseph; Dora; Oedipal theory; seduction theory; trauma; uncanny gender 4, 7, 29, 63, 107, 121–122, 136, 141, 169, 171, 173–174; genderambiguous 140; gendered conflict 153 ghost 102, 109, 117, 125, 150–151, 172; phantom 125

Index  181 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 14, 90, 95–97, 102, 107, 110, 130–131, 170–171; see also The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman, Sander L. 12–14, 55–57, 60–64, 66–68, 104, 123 Girard, René 48–50, 61, 67 Glendinning, Victoria 8, 108, 142–143, 151–152, 169, 171 globus hystericus 136, 138 goddess 69, 172 la grande hysterie 2, 29–30, 39, 50, 60, 138, 171 Grose, Anouchka 8, 13–14, 32, 46, 59, 61–62, 65, 80–81, 84, 95, 104, 111, 118, 121, 167 Grunewald 35, 78, 154 haunted 10, 102 hearing 26, 41, 46, 57, 59, 74, 76, 87, 103, 107, 110, 121, 133–138, 142, 145–146, 150, 152, 166, 173 Hijikata Tatsumi 123 hysterie virile 122 Hystories 7–8, 35, 90, 168; see also Showalter, Elaine Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière 2, 8, 14, 22, 30, 59–63, 65–67, 77, 80, 122, 137, 145, 154, 168, 170–171 image of hysteria 22, 32; image of the hysteric 13, 60, 62, 104, 163 the Imaginary 49, 65, 80, 115; see also the Real; the Symbolic insistence 57, 63, 104, 124, 132, 149, 151 interference 121; see also interruption interpretation 28, 76, 89–90, 104, 107, 110–112, 114, 116, 164; of dreams 105, 110, 114 interruption 134; see also interference intersemiotic translation 38, 95; see also translation Irigaray, Luce 8, 11, 13, 53–54, 76, 85, 88–89, 134–135 jewel case 112 jouissance 32, 58–59, 79–83, 173 Jung, Carl 13, 47 Katerina 4, 6 Kivland, Sharon 8, 106, 115–118 knowledge 10, 12–13, 22, 27–28, 30, 33, 35, 37–38, 56, 62–64, 74, 79–84, 87, 89,

91–94, 102, 107–109, 112, 116, 118, 121, 132–133, 145, 155, 166, 171 La Ribot 8, 154–155, 171 Lacan, Jacques 6, 8, 11, 13–14, 23, 27, 47–50, 55, 58–59, 65, 77–91, 94–95, 102, 109–111, 114–118, 120, 132, 135, 145–146, 149, 164–166, 173 language 11, 28, 31, 37–38, 41, 54–55, 57, 62, 74, 76, 81, 84–85, 88–90, 94–96, 101, 111, 113, 120, 130–134, 138, 144–147, 152, 155, 168, 172–173 Laplanche, Jean 75–76 Laughing Hole 154–155 laughter 32–33, 154–155 lay analysis 14; wild analysis 93 love 31–32, 52, 86, 90, 123, 139, 142; triangles 166; of truth 8 Lucy, R. 4, 6 Lyotard, Jean-François 8, 13, 40–41, 65–66 male hysteria 14, 121–123 malingering 55–58, 168; malignant hysteric 57–58 marriage 110, 125, 141 mass hysteria 9, 25, 31, 101, 107, 124, 167–170 message 31, 39, 74–76, 89, 151, 155, 162 Micale, Mark S. 13, 28, 32, 34, 50, 101–102, 122, 170–171 mimesis 10–14, 29, 32, 46–48, 50–55, 59–68, 74–75, 84–85, 87, 102–103, 121, 124, 131, 133, 136, 139, 149, 163, 165, 168, 172–173; mime 11–12, 34, 41, 50–51, 53–54, 68–69, 85; mimetic desire 48, 50, 53, 67; mimicry 10–11, 50, 55, 65, 131 mirror stage 49–50, 132 misreading 103, 115–116; misrecognition 119; mistranslation 111 Mitchell, Juliet 13, 95–96, 118 montage 11 mouth 22–24, 35, 42, 52, 80, 106, 109, 120, 130–131, 134, 136, 140, 147–148, 150, 155 movement 9, 22, 24, 26, 29–30, 33–34, 39–40, 50–51, 53, 61–62, 64, 66–67, 75–77, 81, 95, 103, 119, 123, 138, 143, 147–148, 153–154, 163, 168, 174 mutation 50, 168 mystery 3, 9, 11, 13–14, 26, 35, 48, 68, 74–75, 83, 87, 89–90, 92–93, 96–97,

182 Index 105, 115–117, 120, 125, 136, 139, 152, 162, 165–166, 173 Nachträglichkeit 75; afterwardness 75–76; après coup 75 Nadar 68–69 narrative 10, 31, 33, 35, 66, 74, 88–89, 91, 93, 96, 101, 106–115, 117, 120–121, 123–124, 143, 147 nervous disease 167, 171 neuro-physiological model of hysteria 1–2, 135 neurosis 1, 4–6, 27–29, 35, 85, 101, 112 Oedipal theory 5–6, 112; Oedipus complex 48 On Being an Angel 22–23, 32, 80 ontology 118–119 opisthotonos 21, 34, 60, 122; emprosthotonos 122 oppression 7, 82, 96, 138, 140, 169–170, 172 Other 53, 58, 79, 85–86, 88–89, 91, 104, 134, 149, 166–167 pain 22, 32, 47, 76–77, 82, 87, 106, 113, 145–146, 164, 172 see suffering Pajaczkowska, Claire 8, 14, 114–115, 118–120 Pappenheim, Bertha 3, 47, 87, 95, 109, 145 see Anna, O. paratext 54, 113; marginalia 111, 113–114 patho-anatomical model of hysteria 1 patriarchy 7, 51, 82, 85, 96, 104, 121, 130, 141, 150–151, 174 Pepin sisters 164–165 performance 2, 6, 8, 13, 21, 24, 27, 31, 33–34, 38–41, 51, 53–55, 62, 74, 77, 84, 95, 118–121, 123, 131–133, 144, 151, 153–155, 170, 172; performative time 144–145; performativity 8, 10, 40, 51, 54, 60, 144–145, 155 période 13, 29–30, 40, 69 persistence 8, 14, 74, 85, 165–166, 174 perversion 27, 58, 92 photography 2, 14, 22, 24–25, 27, 30, 32, 41, 52, 60–61, 63–70, 76–78, 80–81, 92, 102–105, 118, 124, 130–132, 135–136, 149, 151, 155 Poe, Edgar Allan 93, 115–116 political 32, 37, 50, 54, 82, 118, 121, 132, 145, 169, 172 Possession 33, 153 172; see also Zulawski, Andrej; Rego, Paula

possession 1, 21, 25, 30, 33–37, 47, 50, 53, 62–63, 67, 75, 102, 115, 124–125, 133, 136, 149 posthysteric 82–83, 86, 90, 167; discourse of the posthysteric 83, 90 present moment 9, 46–48, 53–54, 68, 75–76, 88–89, 118, 137, 149, 170 prohibition 27, 144, 173 protest 121, 133, 137, 164, 170 psychoanalysis 4, 6, 12–14, 31, 39–40, 47–48, 62, 66, 84, 88–90, 107, 112, 119, 143, 165, 167, 171 psychosis 27 punctum 76–77 ‘The Purloined Letter’ 115–117 question 14, 31, 38, 59, 84–88, 90, 92, 95, 117, 124, 135, 149, 155, 162–163, 166; interrogative mode 11, 135, 151; see also Che vuoi? radical negativity 121 Raphael 62 reading 9, 41, 51, 77, 85, 88, 90, 96, 102–106, 108, 110–112, 114–117, 119–121, 143–145, 151, 171–172 the Real 49, 80, 115–116; see also the Imaginary; the Symbolic reappearance 3, 7, 102, 124 rebellion 8, 13–14, 31, 40, 48–49, 51, 53, 59, 74, 104, 109, 118–119, 124, 137, 169–171; insurrection 41 Rego, Paula 8, 13, 22, 147, 153, 172–173 religion 61; religious 21, 28, 30, 40, 61, 63, 152, 172 repertoire 8, 54, 60–62, 118 repetition 9–11, 22, 30, 32–33, 51–54, 57–58, 75, 81, 88, 92, 112–113, 117–118, 124, 135, 138, 147, 165 repli 9–10, 12, 53–55, 94, 169, 171; ritournelle 94 representation 2, 8–9, 12, 15, 22, 28–29, 33–34, 39, 41, 47–48, 50, 53, 56, 60–61, 63–67, 84, 88, 90, 94–96, 102–104, 107, 120–121, 131, 137, 144, 170 repression 4–5, 25, 27, 29, 40, 47–48, 50, 52, 107, 112, 122, 139, 148–149, 165, 170, 172–173 resistance 7–8, 10, 13–14, 25, 46, 48–49, 51, 53, 58–59, 69, 96, 104, 107, 109–111, 114, 118–119, 121–125, 150, 167, 169–171, 173–174 return 9, 12, 27, 48, 52, 57, 75–76, 94, 114, 117, 124, 131, 140, 148–149, 154, 165, 173

Index  183 Richer, Paul 30, 35, 50–51, 60, 69, 130 riddle 14, 74, 76–77, 87, 107, 113, 118, 124 scream 109, 136–137, 146, 154 secretion 33, 37–38, 82–83, 94, 134, 146, 152, 173 seduction theory 4–6, 40, 112 Seebohm, Winnie 14, 142–143, 150–152, 171; see also Glendinning, Victoria Showalter, Elaine 1, 6–8, 31, 35, 68, 89, 91, 95, 101–102, 106–114, 121–123, 125, 130, 136, 163, 168; see also Hystories silenced 87, 133, 137, 163; silent 38, 52, 76, 120, 130, 136–138, 149 Silverman, Kaja 65 social media 61, 168–169, 174 somnambulism 33, 88, 149; see also vigilambulism Sontag, Susan 64, 143 speech 79, 87, 102–104, 107–108, 112–113, 130, 133, 136–138, 143, 146, 167 speechlessness 69, 145 mute 87, 125, 137, 146 spell 59, 115 split-off state of consciousness 1–2, 4–5, 47, 138, 169–170; second state of consciousness or twilight state 4 split subject 80–81, 86 structure 28, 53, 66, 74, 91, 94, 116, 121, 131, 147, 153–154, 164; of collage 25; of desire 87; of hysteria 79, 81, 85, 121, 124, 164–166; psychic 23, 26–27, 64; of writing 9–11, 54, 120, 131, 145 subjectivity 49, 90, 118–119, 131, 136 suffering 2, 8, 14–15, 22, 26, 29, 41, 56, 59, 61, 68, 75, 78–79, 82, 87, 122, 137, 145, 150, 162, 168, 170–172 suppression 14, 52, 111, 124, 143, 146, 149, 152, 169 surrealism 6, 11, 24–26, 78, 89, 131, 149 the Symbolic 9, 49, 80, 86, 115–116; see also the Imaginary; the Real symptom 1–4, 6–8, 11, 13–14, 21–23, 26–32, 34, 37–40, 42, 46–48, 50–53, 55, 57, 60–64, 66–69, 74–75, 77, 79–83, 87–92, 94, 97, 101, 103–104, 106, 109–111, 113, 122–124, 136–138, 141–142, 144–146, 149–151, 153, 155, 162–165, 167–169, 171, 173 talking cure 3–4, 14, 30, 88, 107, 145 tarantismo 25 tarantella 25, 82

Taylor, Diana 54, 60, 62, 118 Taylor-Johnson, Sam 8, 13–14, 22, 52, 137–138, 154 Taylor-Wood, Sam see Taylor-Johnson, Sam terrorism 168 text 9–10, 54, 55, 62, 90, 92–93, 95, 102, 104–105, 108, 113–119, 133, 135, 149, 155, 163, 170, 172; see also writing theatre 12–13, 21, 27, 31–32, 39–41, 47, 52, 54–55, 65–66, 131, 171 throat 131, 136, 146, 149 Tisseron, Serge 64 torque 24 torture 24, 41 trace 7, 9, 13, 50, 61–63, 66–69, 75, 82, 92, 94, 102, 104, 118–119, 125, 135, 140, 145–147, 162–163, 167, 171 transference 35, 57–58, 77, 88, 90, 105, 111, 113–114, 121, 124, 171 transformation 14, 29, 38, 68, 104, 145, 166–167, 173 translation 38–39, 80, 95, 118, 133, 145, 151; see also intersemiotic translation trauma 1–6, 13, 29, 41, 47–48, 57, 75, 78, 89, 106, 122–124, 137, 164, 168–170, 172 uncanny 134, 146–149 unreadability 104, 107, 116; illegible 28, 116 uterus 1, 123, 147, 163 utterance 84–85, 136, 151, 162, 168 ventriloquism 10–11, 84, 133–134, 138, 140 vigilambulism 33; see also somnambulism violence 8, 35, 61, 96, 154–155 voice 10–11, 13–14, 26–27, 34–35, 49, 52, 69, 78, 83–84, 89, 95–96, 106, 108–110, 112, 114, 117–118, 121, 125, 130–143, 145–147, 149–155, 162–164, 168–169, 172–174 voiceless 89, 130, 136, 141, 150–151 von R, Elisabeth 88, 92 war 7, 30, 156, 174; shell shock 6, 68, 122; war neurosis 6, 102, 122, 125, 172 witness 5, 52, 54, 61, 87, 122, 141, 150, 171–172 womb 1, 6, 10, 13, 23, 55, 67, 122–123, 147; wandering womb 1, 23, 28, 32, 37, 56, 106

184 Index Woodman, Francesca 8, 13–14, 22–24, 27, 32, 41, 80–81, 130–132, 135, 137, 172; see also On Being an Angel Woolf, Virginia 8, 22, 81, 92, 95, 97, 131–132, 140, 171 words 10, 12, 31, 35, 39, 50, 53, 74, 76, 78, 81, 88–89, 92, 115, 117, 120–121, 124, 132, 136–138, 143–145, 147, 149, 151, 153–154, 162–163, 173 work of art 9, 13, 21, 41, 65, 84, 90, 106, 115–116, 137, 170, 173 writing 9–14, 29, 38, 50, 55, 67, 77, 82, 85, 90, 93–97, 102–104, 106, 108–112,

114–115, 117, 119, 131, 133, 135, 139–140, 143–144, 151, 155, 163, 168, 170–171, 173; écriture féminine 95–96, 139; see also text; interrogative mode of writing 11, 135, 151 The Yellow Wallpaper 14, 90, 95–96, 103, 107, 110, 114, 121, 170; see also Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Žižek, Slavoj 6, 13, 49, 85–86, 134–137, 146–147, 155 Zulawski, Andrej 33; see also Possession