Being embodied is a mixed fate for the hysteric, who does not want to be excluded by anyone from anything, and yet, given the shocking secrets of sexuality – revealed by the self’s won developing body knowledge experiences this body and what it knows as a depraved epistemology. This fact is a vital constituent in the format of the hysteric because in so many different ways – enervation in the nineteenth century, fatigue in the twentieth century – hysterics indicate trouble with the body. It imposes the unwanted, and the response to the body’s invasion of the self varies from irritated indifference to paranoid grudge.

Christopher Bollas, Hysteria, p. 19

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.

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.

Che Vuoi from Marina Roy on Vimeo.

A Dangerous Method, by David Cronenberg

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!

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.

So, with the clues I have been giving you, through my recents texts, works and my PhD, you probably have figured out that what my current project is about is hysteria.

Forgive me if my writing is inarticulate. This is something that started forming in my head barely three months ago, and I have not done, thought, or written much about it. It does not have words of it own, yet. I am testing the waters here but if there is anything I learned from my PhD is that it is good to do that, as it helps to organise muddled thinking.

Hysteria, well, a hysteric this is something one cannot be, medically speaking. It is an outdated diagnostic category, now translated as post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociation or conversion disorder (and these are only some of its many names). Hysteria is the physical manifestation of psychological traumas. The first accounts of hysteria relate a ‘wandering womb’. Swooning, convulsing, contracting, fainting, and aphasia – loss of speech – are some of its common symptoms. It is related to gender roles, to sexuality and, like everything in psychoanalysis, to the Oedipus complex.

What led me to explore hysteria – apart from my own hysteric episode in 2009, for which I was treated – was a re-encounter with a scene of a film. In Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 film Possession, Anna (or Helen), played by Isabelle Adjani, has a violent hysteria attack on a tunnel of a Berlin U-Bahn station. She throws herself against the walls and self harms, savagely. What is her body reacting to? What does it know that the rational (conscious) mind does not?

Since the French aliénistes and even before, hysteria has had an air of mystery about it, even trickery. The conflict between mind and body in hysteria, as Zulawki’s film shows, relates to a ‘depraved epistemology’ as Christopher Bollas names it, an understanding of womanhood and a choice of sexual objects.

The viewing of this film showed all my perversions, for the more violent and gruesome it became, the more I enjoyed it (a little like Isabelle Adjani herself). My interest in hysteria is about its history, gender and the performance of a psychological issue. Also its place in the history of psychoanalysis and the link to perversion. PTSD does not have that clear link. Does this diagnosis need to be revived?

So, what next? Well, I have been invited to the Sensuous Objects conference, which will take place at the Medical Museum in Copenhagen in at the end of September. The aim is to speak of hysteria by interacting with the objects in their collection, and link it to seduction. The objects I have chosen will not surprise you: a leather restraining belt and a photographic camera.

Watch this space.

Opening 6.30 to 8.30 p.m.
29 June 2011 to 4 September 2011

The Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens
London NW3 5SX
www.freud.org.uk

Dimitris Dokatzis
Maria Finn
Eve Fowler
Sharon Kivland
Linder
Jeff Ono
Paul P.

The Freud Museum presents ‘Les paris sont ouverts’, curated by Caroline May, a group exhibition which brings together eight international artists, some of whom are showing for the first time in the UK. All the artists explore sexuality and desire, inclusion and exclusion, repression and trauma in a way that challenges normative thinking and proposes alternative modes of thinking about the self and ‘the other’. The title can be literally translated as ‘the bets are open’, while a looser translation suggests that ‘everything is possible, anything can happen’. The exhibition addresses the idea of openness and possibility in gender and sexuality.

A year ago Sharon Kivland paid her then fifteen-year-old son to copy indexical references to mother-son relations in the works of Sigmund Freud. These he has written in pen and ink on the pages of old French school exercise books, line after line, as though it were a punishment. Writing lines is usually meted out by one in authority in response to misbehaviour, a breaking of a rule. Kivland made the mistake of paying up front — of course this has meant many confrontations about unfinished work and lack of discipline. The last book, the pale pink of which depicts a modern aeroplane, behind which in an oval vignette there is a much earlier model, with the word ‘progrès’ underneath, contains the sentence: ‘Mother, boy’s incestuous feelings for’ (it is from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume 17). Kivland’s son wonders if this is not rather unhealthy; also he feels that he has been underpaid for his laborious work.