The Comforters, Muriel Spark, page 138

Georgina wielded the bigamy in terrified triumph. Her terror lest Eleanor should take public action against the bigamist was partly mitigated by the fact that Eleanor had a reputation to keep free of scandal. ‘But my name would suffer more than hers. I’ve always been respectable whereas she’s a dancer,’ Georgina declared.

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Here is a little more of my current jumbled thinking on hysteria and perversion, influenced by what I have been reading.

Sharon Kivland’s work A Case of Hysteria is a feminine detective story telling of a dependence to Freud’s case history (which I also suffer from, and I have been trying to avoid speaking of Dora until now). In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, published in 1905, Freud writes of his encounter with an 18 year-old patient whom he saw for only three months, after which she flew, abandoning treatment. Dora, whose real name is Ida Bauer has aphonia. She has lost her voice but there is no physical reason why this may be so.

The case is famous for two reasons: first, because he discovered the power of transference (the love relation between a patient and her doctor) and, second, because it was a failure. You can read about the case directly from Freud, or from Jed Rubenfeld, who, in the Interpretation of Murder, gave a rather trashy, B-series but very perversely enjoyable fictional account, which makes the links between Freud’s case histories and detective cases admirably.

Claire Pajaczkowska also revisited Freud’s most famous case in a film.

And then, there is perversion …

Kivland’s most recent work Le cri de la soie is also related to the nineteenth century, which, together with hysteria, saw the rise of female perversion, especially in relation to the touch of fabrics such as velvet, silk and velour and the consequent public display of pleasure that ensued. The materiality of the object was the conduit to the psychical manifestation of symptoms, and the result was their internment in psychiatric penitentiary units, accused of kleptomania. Gaétan Gatien De Clérambeau tells about these women in his work Passion érotique des étoffes pour la femme.

Are perverts so far away from hysterics? Freud and Lacan see them as opposites in their relation to questioning and fantasy. I guess this is something I will find out in my project, as it is my main concern. The performativity of hysteria, its exhibitionism is a pervert trait but that has not been addressed by analysts. Artists, as you can see, have had a go. Which is where I am heading.

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In the Nineteenth Century, Doctor Charcot worked at the Salpetrière in Paris, a hospital dedicated to treat hysteric women through hypnosis and other like treatments.

Charcot’s Tuesday lectures were very famous and well attended and Brouillet’s painting shows what was then named ‘La Grande Hysterique’ (believed to be a patient called Blanche Wittmann). Watch her and remember her, for something of her will return to my writing on this blog.

Freud had a print of this painting in his study in his house in London (now a museum). You can see it is placed above the couch.

These are some of the sources I have been exploring, especially the first book, Georges Didi-Huberman’s The Invention of Hysteria, around how Charcot used photography to enhance the performativity of the illness. For both doctor and patient performed for each other, believe me (and remember Brouillet).

I encountered these books during my study of seduction (my PhD), so I cannot say that this constitutes a new project. It is a tangential strand, a free association of some elements of my PhD.

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The conference was an outstanding success.

It all started early on, as I walked through a warm September Copenhagen towards the stunning Medical Museion.

The two day workshop took place in the apt and rather elegant medical theatre, a comfortable learning space with a great colour palette. Everything looked beautifully put together to me, from the decor to the Danish pastries we had for breakfast.

Sensuousness started with Lucy Lyons and Thomas Söderqvist’s welcome. It continued with the conference proper, at 9.40, with Mats Fridlund’s airmindedness and gas masks, and with Secil Ugur’s stress technology. Jan-Eric Olsén really impressed me with his thinking in action about the blind collection – which, incidentally, one could not touch – and his conversation. To the sources! he urged, and he liked Pessoa.

After lunch James Edmonson took us through the history of medical examinations, the distance between the hand and the ear of the doctor to the skin of the patient. He mentioned the Salpétrière and the word ‘embonpoint’ (plumpness, nice!) and his work told of a very curious study on relations. This was picked up by Linda Thomson, who explored if patient’s wellbeing was enhanced through handling museum objects by using a PANAS (Positive affect and negative affect) and VAS (Visual Analogue) scales. The qualitative material reported by the patients was very moving.

Then, after coffee, I wore a hysterics restraining belt (an absolute fantasy of mine), watched a little bit of the film Possession and looked through a speculum. My day just got better. I received generous responses, people suggested books – which I have followed up and thanks to their thinking, found some gems – and, overall, what I did enhanced conversation. It was a joy, and a privilege. Thank you for inviting me, Lucy.

Bernd Kraeftner followed, with squirrel pillows and recordings of the laughter of coma patients and, at this point, it dawned on me just how important the work of artists in hospital is. In vain, I tried to sway him towards the unconscious and Freud. He is from Vienna so I thought it would be easy … Jennifer Nomura van der Grinten was the perfect closure before the drinks reception. She spoke of vibrators in Japan, but not the ones you are thinking: face vibrators and the cult of the image. It was, simply, fascinating and I could have listened to her all day. She had great images and objects too. It was disturbing to handle them, as their weight and shape reminded me of kitchen mixers and other cooking implements. A lot of the conference was uncanny, though, the homely made strange and the strange brought peculiarly close …

Day two began with Ansa Lønstrup take on sound and one of my favourite artists: Pipilotti Rist (who currently has a solo show in London at the Hayward Gallery and which I will visit in November). She was followed by Eduardo Abrantes who took sound a step further and devoided it of image, of direct image in any case, as he manipulated an object away from our eyes, magnifying the sound. It was sensuously uncomfortable, as things in a medical theatre should be. Successful and interesting, like his PhD thesis. Brian Dougan made coffee taste better by engaging in the phenomenology of creating cups to drink it. I had a very strong reaction to one of them, so strong that I did what I rarely do: I asked him if I could keep it. Coffee does really taste better in his cup and I owe him one.

Per Roar made us move and brought a dancer with him. How lucky to be amongst kindred spirits. Could you get any more sensuous than a dancer exploring the body?

Carsten Friberg made us play and think about the room we were in by giving us mischievous games: to touch the shoulder of the person we knew the longest, of the person whose dress we liked best, of the last person we spoke to yesterday … In this way, he brought to attention the most astonishing object we handled during the workshop: the room we were in.

After lunch, Marlene Little’s presentation allowed us to think and touch something I had no concept of: a hip replacement. She showed it in X-ray, object form and artistic photograph in a way that reminded me of the language games of Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art work. Her paper was meta-linguistic and made me think a lot about the conference format itself. Louise Whiteley also made us work by making us travel to different rooms and handle and look at a rich variety of objects related to X-rays. We handled heavy, very present, phantoms and spoke of ghosts. She recommended me two awesome novels and, with her work, I think she has enormous potential to write her own. Her presentation made me dream. Coffee brought me back (a little reluctantly).

Anette Stenslund followed the narrative theme. She got the director of the museum to lay down on an operating table and play corpse while she spoke of life and death in relation to the green medical paper covering bodies. Her narrative worked, oh boy, it did work. She wrote her paper beautifully, she delivered it even better. I really hope to listen to her again. She also puts us on the scent of smell, which Anne Krefting followed. She brought us back to the here and now, to corporate research on smells and how they make us feel, to the performance of smell in cultures, in the high street, to Actor-Network theory. And to art. It was wonderful.

A speaker cancelled at the last minute and the end of the conference could not have had a better turn: a collegiate, communal sharing of a view of Lucy’s drawings, which I had not seen since her excellent PhD exhibition. Now, that was as much of a celebration as the beers we had afterwards. I hope the idea of the book gets off the ground, so this work can be shared beyond the 45 privileged people who were there.

Photos by Lucy Lyons, Louise Whiteley and others. More photos of the event here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/64255892@N03/

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The hysteric asks a question to the Other: Che vuoi? (What do you want from me?). And even though hysteria seems to be a condition impairing the mind’s judgment, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses, developed in his seventeenth seminar of 1969–1970. The hysteric knows what the master, the university and the analyst do not.

Che Vuoi from Marina Roy on Vimeo.

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Hysteria, by Tanya Wexler

A Dangerous Method, by David Cronenberg

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This looks so interesting. Love. Love, that eternal question. How do we chose our love objects? Where does adult love come from?

ADULT LOVE AND ITS ROOTS IN INFANCY
Day Conference

at the Anna Freud Centre, London NW3

This conference investigates adult love by bringing together the worlds of psychoanalysis, literature, and performance. The most sublime, exhilarating and painful of emotions, love puzzles the intellect and almost defies description. It motivates the best and worst of us, overwhelming us with the ferocity of its demands, while thwarted love and perverse love are at the heart of much violent behaviour and neurotic suffering.

Psychoanalysis unlocks the mystery of love by tracing its roots to childhood. The conference will be of interest to anyone involved in adult psychotherapy or counselling, and anyone who has ever been in love.

SPEAKERS

Lisa Appignanesi (Chair)
All About Love: Introductory Remarks

Bernard Barnett
Psychoanalytic Love, Real Love and Love in Anna Karenina

David Morgan
Destroying the Knowledge of the Need for Love: The Perverse and Addictive Transference

Anna Furse
When I touch the keys my flesh melts: On writing Don Juan.Who?

Estela Welldon
The Dangers of First Love

Click here for speaker biographies, booking details and abstracts. And if you go, let me know how it was!

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I will be presenting a performative paper at the Sensuous Object conference on the 29th September 2011 at Medical Museion, Copenhagen. For my object, I have chosen a restraining belt. What is even better is that I will be allowed to use it. The pervert in me cannot wait, the hysteric is a little more scared but still up for it. Here is my abstract. Check for updates nearer the time, as it is going to be a distinct and very interesting event.

Hysteria is an outdated diagnosis for a neurotic condition where the patient manifests psychic traumas in the body. In the nineteenth century, Dr Jean-Martin Charcot established the Salpetrière, a hospital in Paris dedicated to the treatment of hysterics – then mainly women. This is also where Sigmund Freud trained and discovered a passion for neurology, leading him to develop psychoanalysis. Charcot left a legacy of medical practices involving photographs and drawings to support his clinicaoanatomic method, and the objects he produced demonstrate the performativity involved in hysteria, and its research. As with any performance, objects, and their sensuousness, are important props.

The first accounts of hysteria relate a ‘wandering womb’, and fits, swooning and violent convulsions are some of the common symptoms reported. Restraining belts were often used in hospitals to keep patients safe. But how much was the contact of the leather – and sometimes the chains – a stimulant for the contractions in the body? How much did this limp object, only coming alive when in touch with the patient’s body enable the hysteric to ask her question – known as Che Vuoi?, what do you want from me?

Hysteria and seduction are inextricably linked. The hysteric is a performer, displaying some of the scopophilic characteristics of the pervert in their pleasure derived from being looked at. The alienist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault worked with kleptomaniac women, interns in psychiatric units because of the sensuous reactions they had to fabrics such as velvet, silk or velour. The materiality of the object, as with the leather belt, was the conduit to the manifestation of their symptoms. What happens when the belt is not used is evident in a scene of Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 film ‘Possession’ which I will show and discuss. Through it, I will also explore the positions of the hysteric and the pervert in relation to objects, seduction and being seen.

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2HB Vol. 10 is in my hands. Lovely as always and the black cover is a nice touch given the mysteriousness of the texts. It fits well with my contribution, The Scene of a Crime. Thank you to Francis McKee and Louise Shelley.

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The hysteric asks a question to the Other: Che vuoi? (What do you want from me?). And even though hysteria seems to be a condition impairing the mind’s judgment, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses, developed in his seventeenth seminar of 1969–1970. The hysteric knows what the master, the university and the analyst do not.

http://vimeo.com/15657030

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