10.final Bowen and Gonzalez FD LG

 
Between Laughter and Crying
Eleanor Bowen and Laura González
Abstract
Despite its disappearance from the diagnostic manuals and the consulting room,
hysteria has had a recent cultural resurgence, as films, books and papers update its
meaning for our society, marked by dissent, struggle and uncertainty. Its migration
into new, more medically manageable conditions (including dissociation,
conversion or post-traumatic stress disorder) highlights the common elements to all
forms of hysteria: a struggle with gender, a manifestation of symptoms in the body,
and the asking of a question—Che vuoi, or ‘What do you want from me?’1 We put
forward the idea that hysteria is a process, a state of mind, rather than a condition,
and that its relationship to femininity and the body—following Juliet Mitchell’s
argument—is the reason it has disappeared from the medical vocabulary.2 Yet, this
state captures something inherently human, ambivalent and conflicted. It names,
defines and understands something elusive. Our chapter questions hysteria as
madness in relation to an epistemology, which, according to Christopher Bollas is
depraved.3 Even though it seems to be a state impairing the mind’s judgment as the
body takes over, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed the production of
knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses.4 The hysteric
knows what the master, the university and the analyst do not. We will argue that
hysteria as madness relates to the visionary aspect of the state, to the fact that
hysterics articulate and know, in the body, what does not want to be known. In
order to safeguard a symbolic universe, hysterics are labelled mad, possessed,
delusional or, simply, as acting out their symptom. The outcome of this struggle is
visual and performative, so we will draw on visual examples—from our
production, and that of others. These implicate the body and the gaze, and
therefore, a witness, creating a space for discourse.
Key Words: Hysteria, Augustine, madness, psychoanalysis, performance,

photography, possession, drawing, the fold.
***** 
1. Auratic Prodrome
We start our quest towards each other with a simple question: what is hysteria?
Despite numerous publications on the subject, this question is surprisingly difficult
to answer. In its simplest form, hysteria is the physical manifestation of a
psychological trauma; a patient might lose her voice, yet, there is nothing in her
larynx that points to a possible cause. Hysteria is of historical significance, of
 
2  Between Laughter and Crying
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social importance, and of cultural relevance. It has inspired works of art, visual,
written, on the screen and the stage. We could start by noting that a common
element to all these contexts and uses of hysteria is its designation as a disease.
Elaine Showalter refers to it as a disorder that ‘mimics culturally permissible
expressions of distress.’5 Augustine, Jean Martin Charcot’s star patient,6 and Dora,7
Freud’s most famous case history, remain an example of the binding of culture and
distress, as shown in the responses of Dianne Hunter, Hélène Cixous, Claire
Pajaczkowska and Sharon Kivland.8
However, our purpose goes beyond surveying cultural manifestations of the
concept, at least in their breadth. We want to assess the condition of hysteria as
malady, and to see whether it is a disorder of the mind, or the affliction lies in the
context in which it appears. We also ask whether hysteria is a category that needs
to be recovered. In order to do this, we consider the issue of voice and ways to
express hysteria through text, through the speech of the hysteric.
Epistemologically, this speech and the hysteric’s question—Che Vuoi?, what do
you want from me?—are concerns of importance.
Our text is divided into three sections, the second of which was written first, as
a work in which our voices met. Therefore, we started our process in the middle,
adding a beginning and an end in single voices. The beginning, then, relates
hysteria to the discourse on madness, the context for which has already been set in
this book, in particular in the eloquent chapters by Bruce Cohen, and by Bernadette
Russo and her concept of the damning complicit. 9 Hysterics have been often
termed damned women. The section will discuss performance, and, with the help
of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Four Discourses,10 what the hysteric knows and
the fall of this knowledge. Augustine’s case will be the threaded throughout,11 and
she will be joined by others. The midpoint, where our voices meet, is a response to
the acts of looking and being looked at. The text becomes a cadavre exquis,
hystericising itself by performing Lacan’s discourse.12 We explore the images
created by doctors at the Salpêtrière hospital in the late 1800s, in particular those
of Augustine,13 and extend to contemporary artworks including a video piece by
British artist Sam Taylor-Wood.14 The first section introduces and contextualises
these visual references.15 We then move away from each other, re-establishing a
distance. The third section examines the form developed in the second, analyses
Victoria Glendinning’s moving account of Winnie Seebohm’s life and practices
the concept of the fold.
2. Charcot’s Hysteric as Mad

In Invention of Hysteria, Georges Didi-Huberman writes:
… something was constructed at the Salpêtrière, something

resembling a great optical machine to decipher the invisible
lineaments of a crystal: the great, territorial, experimental,
 
Eleanor Bowen and Laura González  3 
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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.16
In the nineteenth century the time that saw the rise of alienistes (proto
psychiatrists) and the birth of psychoanalysis, women deviating from normal
patterns of behaviour—specified in over 75 pages of symptoms17—were admitted
into the sanatorium, where they were observed, studied, cared for, hidden,
separated, controlled. To do this, doctors used the latest technological advance of
the time, photography, as well as their public case expositions, the most famous of
which was immortalised by André Brouillet in his 1887 painting Une Leçon
Clinique à la Salpêtrière.18 Serge Tisseron argues that photography has made the
discourse of illness possible by liberating the look from horror and shame, through
constructing a protective screen between the illness and oneself, and thus
facilitating the introjection of what was seen first in medicine and then in society.19
Hysterics, already performing for the doctors (as shown in Brouillet’s painting and
Didi-Huberman’s analysis)20 had their elusive symptoms recorded and then played
back, classified, and converted into icons of crucifixion, beatitude, ecstasy, for an
eager public.
The essence of hysteria evaded doctors, despite documentation of these poses.
As a condition, the pervasive presence of hysteria ensured much of the progress
made in the treatment of mental conditions, especially when Freud abandoned
Charcot’s preference for hypnotism in favour, firstly, of suggestion, and then of
listening to the patient talking. Later his patient Dora opened the door to the
theorising of another mystery, that of the particular relation between patient and
physician, which Freud termed transference.21 Bafflement about the condition of
hysteria lasted until 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association dropped the
term, 22 replacing it with other diagnoses (post-traumatic stress and somatic
disorders, for example). After this, hysteria remained confined mainly to the
theoretical and the creative.
Hysteria comes from hystera, the Greek word for womb. 23 Before the
alienistes—from Ancient Egyptian times, in fact—the belief was that the
disturbance in behaviour and in the body was due to a wandering uterus, causing
havoc wherever it went.24 This bound the condition to the female gender and its
connotation meant that, although strictly speaking there were male hysterics—as
Katia Mitova writes in her chapter 25 —the tendency was to identify these as
hypochondriacs.26
It is worth mentioning three comprehensive accounts of the history of hysteria.
Ilza Veith’s classic text Hysteria: the History of a Disease27 charts the condition
from Egyptian times to end, rather than start, as is the case in most publications,
with psychoanalysis. Elaine Showalter’s Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and
 
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Modern Media28 combines theoretical insights with case histories and Andrew
Scull’s Hysteria: The Biography29 accounts for the disease from a sociological
perspective. It would be impossible to do justice here to the convoluted and
conflicted history of the diagnosis, nor is this the purpose of our text. We want to
write on hysteria rather than about it.30 Yet we will examine the stages of the
hysterical attack as defined by Charcot, and which Augustine and other patients
performed as if it was a score.
Hysteria forms part of the psychopathological group known as the neuroses,
complementing the psychoses and the perversions to form a triad.31 Other neuroses
include obsession, compulsion, and phobia.32 In a neurosis, reality and pleasure
enter into conflict. While reality is existent in the mind of the sufferer, she has
repressed it.33 To put it more simply, the neurotic knows but hates what she knows,
and therefore ignores it. This is different in the case of psychosis—or madness
proper—where the reality principle is absent or, more precisely, has been
foreclosed; and in perversion, where pleasure takes over. In Mad, Bad and Sad,
Lisa Appignanesi describes the five stages—or périodes—of the full hysterical
attack as conceptualized by Charcot. In a poetic and vivid way, she explains the
body’s agency and the visual elements of the attack:
• Aura, or the Beginning of the Attack:
This can consist of a seething pain in the right ovary, and is

quickly followed by the sense of a ball rising from stomach to
throat to form a knot, all accompanied by palpitations, agitation,
speeding heart, difficulty in breathing, rapid eye movements.34
• Epileptoid phase (tonic rigidity):
Augustine’s muscles contract, her neck twists, the heels turn out,
her arms swing round wildly several times in a row, then her
wrists reach towards each other while the fists gyrate outwards.
She grows rigid, lies immobile, plank-like, eyes directed at
space, unseeing.35
• Clownisme: ‘circus-like acrobatics.’36

• Attitudes passionelles:
enacts seduction, supplication, erotic pleasure, ecstasy and

mockery in a series worthy of silent film. Hallucinations often
accompanied this stage. Augustine hears voices, is terrified, in
pain, sees blood, rats.37
 
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• Delirium: ‘hallucinations often take on the shape of her rapist, lover or
family. She pleads, says the scarf around her throat is choking her, refuses to
drink, howls her pain.’38
‘At the end,’ Lisa concludes, ‘there are tears and laughter, both of which
Charcot saw as a release before the patient comes back to herself.’39 This conflict
between mockery and sorrow, relates to the mimetic nature of hysteria. Attacks
tended to adopt the symptoms of a particular context, and this is especially evident
in Charcot’s phases.40 At the Salpêtrière, hysterics shared the ward with epileptics,
from whom they learned to internalise and project their symptoms.41 This mimetic
character of hysteria put the hysteric under suspicion and brought accusations of
fabrication, a misgiving only strengthened by the nature of two other main phases
of the attack—the extravagant provocations of clownism, and the phase of
passionate attitudes.
Hysterics are considered mad insofar as they deviate from what is the
acceptable norm. They push the boundaries of what is culturally permissible to
express distress, mimetically adopting contradictory symptoms and luring viewers.
Their mysterious bodies rebel against something (we will see what) and react in a
way that is incomprehensible. The mind and the body split, and the body takes a
life of its own. If the image of a fainting, convulsing or mute nineteenth century
woman is too difficult to relate to, let us expand it to include group hysterics: the
cries, tears and swooning that that followed Rudolph Valentino’s death, and that,
years later, also greeted the Beatles in America.42 This is not to say that the
hysteric’s symptoms are easy to live with, that the men and women are not
suffering, but what we want to raise here, as a question, is whether the trouble of
hysteria is within—a madness—or outside—an impossible demand.
3. The Discourse of the Hysteric

Let us now stay in Paris, but advance forward from the days of the Salpêtrière
to 1969, a year after the famous student revolts. Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst
promoting a return to Freud, a reading of his texts to the letter, delivers his
seventeenth seminar, titled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.43 He spends the year
exploring intersubjective aspects of transference—that peculiar relation between
two people, which manifests itself most commonly as love or hate—and its
relation to knowledge. He does this through studying the social bond, that which
unites us in situations of power or conflict. He delineates his theory of the Four
Discourses, exploring the possibilities of what it is to speak, what gives us a place.
His Discourses are dynamic, a flirtation between algebra and language.
In them, Lacan ascribes knowledge production to the Discourse of the
Hysteric.44 Examining an agent in relation to an other, he sets four stable positions
and four wandering elements, which he assigns to the different places, usually
through an anti-clockwise movement, starting from the Discourse of the Master
 
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and finishing with the Hysteric.45 The elements of the Discourse are: a split subject
(represented by S), a symptom or a signifier that does not make sense (S1),
knowledge (S2), and the object cause of desire (a).46 This is what the positions and
the Discourse of the Hysteric look like:
Fig. 1: Positions of the Four Discourses and Discourse of the Hysteric
agent –––––––> other S –––––––> S1

–––––– ––––––––––– ––– –––
truth < ––//–– production a < ––//–– S2
The hysteric speaks, as a split subject (she knows this) from a position of
desire. She addresses her question (what do you want from me?) to the other, her
symptom, which binds her to who she is. One of the relations—between agent-
hysteric and other-symptom—is impossible, and the second—the lower one,
between knowledge and desire—is impotent. Knowledge is the product, but the
product is lost.47 She is bound to her symptom; the hysteric wants a master over
whom she can reign.48
It is important to stress this loss dimension of the knowledge produced and
revealed in the hysteric’s body, as disciplines outside of psychoanalysis have
applied and misappropriated Lacan’s theory of the Four Discourses. Dany Nobus
and Malcolm Quinn warn us against the problems of using the Discourses as an
interpretive tool:
they have an operative function, not an interpretative one. They

reveal an unconscious that is present and at work, but they are
not a means to describe and analyse the unconscious workings of
discourse. […] The introduction of Lacanian discourse theory
ought to have a limiting or circumscribing effect on knowledge
itself. It should produce a better account of the irreducibly
obscure and not be used as a means of producing a kind of
hyper-academic knowledge out of a ‘real world situation.’49
Discourses, as ways of understanding each other, have a dimension of enjoyment;

they give us a primary a sense of existence, through the sharing of a symbolic
code. It has always struck me that Lacan, although he was very interested in art
and drew from it in his theories, did not create a Discourse of the Work of Art,
even though engagement with art is also a way of revealing the workings of the
unconscious and the fall of knowledge. Why is that? Well, a thread of argument
has led some artists and theorists to ascertain that the a in the Discourse of the
 
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Analyst refers also to the work of art, that is, that the work of art occupies the same
place as the analyst in the consulting room.50 Another thread follows the path that
art operates at the limits of discourse, precisely where discourse fails. Art is in
between, in the place where discourse is not yet constituted, and plays with what
discourse cannot fix. Could this be a way in which the hysteric masters her
symptom?51
4. The Voice of the Hysteric: Augustine and Sam Taylor-Wood

The symptom the woman in Sam Taylor-Wood’s short film Hysteria attempts
to master is connected to the globus hystericus, a lump in the throat thwarting
expression of what goes on inside the body.52 I can only guess this, of course, for
the moving image is complex and she has no voice to tell me. The woman—let us
call her Augustine shall we?—seems to be at the last stage of the attack, after the
delirium, where tears and laughter collide, about to come back to herself. Or, is
she? If a diagnosis of hysteria existed today, what would she be miming? I suspect
that, rather than epilepsy, clownisme or passion, it would be a sense of abandon
and control, a rage coupled with pleading, a display of all the personalities
demanded of her, coming to the fore and acted out: caring, sexual, funny and
sensitive. The voice, denouncing the impossibility of compliance, is stopped. I can
also imagine that she has reached a point in which all this is not contained, a kind
of an overdrive. The old Augustine turned to epileptics, religion and doctors for
her voice. The new Augustine faces a screen. She looks at us, not knowing we will
be there and opens her mouth to show us inside, perhaps her womb.
What this work shows is so characteristic of the condition: the struggle to find a
voice—or to make that voice heard. However, this is not madness; it is a perpetual
battle enacted by those faced with intolerable demands as, for example, those
mentioned in Bruce Cohen’s chapter. Louis Aragon and André Breton wrote in
Hysteria’s Fiftieth Anniversary: ‘Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and
can, in all respects, be considered as a supreme means of expression.’ 53
Conceptions of madness have evolved greatly since the time of the Salpêtrière, and
madness as a disorder has disappeared from the concreteness of medical records.
Hysteria, however, or the mysterious side of suffering, is still present in our time,
despite the fact that it is not a valid diagnosis.
Hysteria, with its fluctuating symptoms, is par excellence the

disorder that best expresses women’s distress at the clashing
demands and no longer tenable restrictions placed on women in
the fin-de-siècle.54
If the historical reference is removed, and the hysterical accepted, is this not
applicable today? The crystal Didi-Huberman writes of does not break in any odd,
abnormal way: ‘it comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose
 
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boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s

structure.’55 For this reason, he argues, the hysteric knows more about psychic
realities, revealing them through the body and showing us something of ourselves
that would otherwise remain invisible.
Hysteria and art are inextricably linked and there is comfort in that certain
works of art, for example Taylor-Wood’s Hysteria, become, in the returning words
of Luce Irigaray, a speculum, ‘an instrument to dilate the lips’—literally—‘the
orifices, the walls, so that the eye can penetrate the interior’ of the self, ‘tracking
down what there is to be seen of female sexuality’.56
I can see you now, close to me, and through the intersubjective, I want us to
look into the interior of hysteria. The beginning of our text is auratic, a prodrome
of context, the beginnings of a discomfort, as we move to the staccatos of epilepsy,
acrobatics and passion. Will we end in a confusion of laughter and crying? I hope
so.
5. An Exquisite Corpse
I watched Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 film Possession last night.57 I return
to it often, about once a year, and every time, I am stuck in the same
scene. I mean that, even though I sit until the end credits roll, my mind is
thinking about a three-minute segment. Anna (or Helen, for this is a
strange film), played by Isabelle Adjani, comes off a U-Bahn train. While
walking on the underground passages leading into the street, something
odd happens to her. The episode starts with laughter, which becomes
more and more extreme. She throws herself against the walls and the
floor. She is carrying some shopping, eggs and milk, which spill all over
her. They even come out of her mouth as she kneels on the floor, uttering
guttural cries from her stomach and holding on to her blue dress, to the
bit of fabric between her legs. This image of her, and the sound—which I
can only describe as when laughter is not so funny anymore—haunt me
for days afterwards. I am fascinated and repelled by it. I should not be
surprised, for the title of the film alludes to this. Possessions can be both
liberating—for one can let go, let someone else do the work—and scary—
one is not oneself anymore. Yet her eyes, her mouth, her whole body, in
fact, seem to react as if she suddenly attained insight, there and then. It
feels as if she got a joke that no one else did. Jokes, it is known, are a
manifestation of the unconscious. 58 She reminds me of Blanche or
Augustine, Dr Charcot’s star hysteric patients, whom he treated at the
Salpêtrière hospital in Paris in the nineteenth century.59 Like them, Anna
seems to know something that amuses her.60
 
 
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I’m looking at the kneeling figure of a girl in a drawing I made
many years ago. The 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) actually depicts a saint healing a young girl of 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 her lower jaw, opening the mouth,
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.
In Invention of Hysteria, Georges Didi-Huberman61 problematises
the role of photography as deployed at the Salpêtrière to
demonstrate the physically distorting symptoms of hysteria. I'm
looking now at a photograph of Charcot’s star patient the fifteen-
year-old Augustine, posed for a portrait ‘in her normal state’. 62
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.
However, photography then was a slow process and states of
normality tended to be taken under the duress of waiting.
In the moments of waiting I try to do what he says but my arm and
neck are aching, so I keep moving and that makes him sharp. ‘Be
yourself’, he snaps. I am myself, but time is going by. My jaw hurts
and my face is beginning to freeze.
When you go, leaving the chair (and a memory of somebody
holding the back of your dress) you're so thankful to be away from
the endless need of that man for your time. ‘Stay just as you are’ he
says.
For what? What is it he’s after?
 
‘What is it he’s after’ echoes the question Lacan put in the hysteric’s
mouth: Che vuoi?, translated as ‘What do you want from me’? 63 It is
addressed to the Big Other, whomever that might be.64 In your drawing, it
could be a certain kind of knowledge, represented by the doctor, the
voice of authority. The young girl might be a bona fide hysteric going
through the epileptoid phase Charcot described. 65 Doctors used what
 
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they called ‘pelvic massages’ to induce a ‘hysterical paroxysm’ as a

potential treatment.66 A way, as you put it, to release the demon.
Note that we are writing very defined gender roles for hysteria. Its
feminine specificity, its relation to the womb, might be the main reason
one—man or woman, for there were and there are many hysteric men—67
cannot be a hysteric anymore, as the condition has left diagnostic
manuals. Others think that it was simply not a helpful word. It was just
too much, so it was chopped up into sizeable chunks and replaced with
the more medicalised conversion, somatic, and post-traumatic stress
disorders. Nitza Yarom, however, writes that hysterical—a term she
favours over hysteric—‘is a state of mind and an interpersonal,
intersubjective event with unique characteristics.’68 From this, it follows
that hysteria might be a way of being inherent and possible in every one
of us, given the right context. Therefore, the hysteric is not mad, just
hysterical. Why then hide her, admit her long term at the Salpêtrière or
treat her as possessed, epileptic, dependent?
However, I do not want to deviate from the visual and into the
psychological too much, for we are both artists who want to demonstrate
that the visual and the hysteric can unveil knowledge. Did you know that
Sam Taylor-Wood made a work on hysteria in 1997?69 Like your drawing,
it has body but not voice. Someone has stuck a thumb in her throat70 but,
like Anna/Helen, she also appears to be laughing.
In Taylor-Wood’s 8-minute film Hysteria, a woman 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-Wood 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, although one notices a
turnaround in the woman’s demeanour, an entropic inwardness
corresponding with the exhaustion of the actor. This is a breach in
the image, a cutting off as if a giving up of the self. To what? To the
director’s instruction, the demands of the role. Broken in two, she
is beside herself.
 
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This is 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.
Didi-Huberman examines the photographs, those ‘indisputable
documents’ 71 that Charcot used as proof. He detects a ‘certain
moment’72 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,’73 and ‘consent turned to hatred.’74
In The Cry, Augustine is starting an attack, on her back, face
upwards and mouth open in a perfect crescent (somebody has
blacked in the shape).75 In other images, such as Ecstasy and The
Call, she is more specifically posed. 76 At first, inmates were
complicit mediums for the voracious researching gaze, happy to
perform such subjects to camera, but Didi-Huberman believes there
came a turning point.77 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.’78
From laughter to crying, from ecstasy to wailing, all in the space of

eight minutes. How? Why? Hysteric patients have a reputation of
malingering, of being untrustworthy, of inventing symptoms and talking
nonsense. They were seen—and sometimes taken advantage of—but not
heard.79 Like Taylor-Wood’s video, their track is silent to others. Julia
Borossa argues that hysteria comes from a relationship to gender where
the sufferer appears either to conform too well—a victim—or to reject her
role—a rebel.80 This ambiguity of position provides the key to a state that
is visionary. Possession is not only possession by a spirit; it can also mean
custody and ownership. The hysteric has something the doctor wants,
and this she both desires and rejects. Remember Lacan’s Discourse of the
Hysteric …
How can the hysteric articulate knowledge other than through her
symptom? What is she to do with that knowledge? Is the hysteric mad, or
too dangerously insightful to be taken seriously? Perhaps this is the
‘depraved epistemology’ Christopher Bollas wrote about. 81 Yet, this
knowledge is a mystery, an effort not only to be seen, pretty as the
 
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symptoms are, but also heard. As Gérard Wajcman wrote, ‘while

knowledge cannot articulate the hysteric, the hysteric ushers the
articulation of knowledge. Intending to talk about hysteria, we found that
hysteria made us talk.’82 We have become patients again.
 
So, my turn. How to reply...
Reply—repli, a folding back, withdrawal or return—like our
conversation, which strikes me as being like little waves, over and
back. Without an image, I’m slightly panicky and wonder how to
find a way forward. What you've given me is a backward/forward
diagram, threading of articulacy. From this I 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. Seeking an image, I remember ‘The Waves,’ 83 Virginia
Woolf’s anti-novel which she envisaged as an image,84 setting off
circular rhythms across the page like a little ship turning and
turning. This (as Lacan would say, following the trajectory of
discourse ‘as a signifying articulation’)85 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. 86
Taken out of the big picture, it is a language of relations.
Paul Richer’s synoptic table of the great hysterical attack, 87
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 the 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, you are
showing off, sticking your feet in the air or behind your head, doing a
backward flip.
Manic, mad, insensible. The body’s articulation here is (unlike
the straight-forward line of Lacan’s speech act)88 distorted, speech-
less. 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. Charcot’s inscription of
symptoms is a text that speaks in the doctor’s voice: ‘Période de
clownisme, Période les attitudes passionelles, Période de délire’.89
And yet she is miming something.
 
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‘The agent suffers the truth rather than delivering it’.90
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.91
And now a series of staccato images, like a little filmstrip, comes

to mind. First, there is my grandmother, blowing raspberries in the
middle of conversations, making silly noises, repeating what my
grandfather says incessantly, going on and on. Even as a small
child, I'm embarrassed on her behalf. It isn't funny. Then there is
the catatonic wife of the angry guy in American Beauty,92 who says
nothing and stares ahead indifferently, and the American housewife
in The Hours 93 (based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway) who is
reading Mrs Dalloway in the 1950’s and who bins a birthday cake
in front of her young son. The filmstrip goes on, and still we are left
with our question. How will the hysteric ever articulate knowledge
other than through her symptom, and what will she do with that
knowledge?
Writing, talking about hysteria is our symptom. What does this

chapter want from us? We perform, to each other and for others, in
waves, like the hysteric attack. We go through the phases, the Périodes of
Charcot, but after one spiral, we arrive at the same place. The arrows in
the Discourse of the Hysteric have motion but the double oblique lines
make us retrace our steps; go back to where we came from. Each time you
reply, I write 300 words and, because we have to stop our text becomes
more a snapshot, an impression of the here and now, than a worked out
solution to the problem of the hysteric and her knowledge. We could go
on forever.
The hysteric may be considered mad, but in the strict sense of the
term, she is not. She is neurotic, not psychotic; she has not foreclosed the
reality principle. For Augustine, Anne/Helen and all the other hysterics
in our conversation, the battle between reality and pleasure—the two
principles of mental functioning94—plays out in their bodies, with reality
 
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swept under the carpet when they rebel, and pleasure mortifying them
from the inside when they take up the role of victim. But the conflict,
both intrapsychic and intersubjective, is what brings unconscious
knowledge, and that can also be found in the works of art we make, and
in those discussed here.
What would you say if we gave voice to Sam Taylor-Wood’s video? Its
lack still troubles me. By silencing her, she is made to look mad, but she
is not. Here is my proposition: let us watch Hysteria with the soundtrack
to Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s AAA-AAA95 and, as viewers, return the
voice to the woman while expressing our own in a kind of shouted
conversation. If this had happened at the Salpêtrière, if Charcot, Freud
and the other [male] doctors had taken up the position of the one who is
only supposed to know,96 the history of hysteria might have perhaps worked
out differently. Nevertheless, we cannot change that. Let us listen and
express at the same time, let the sound move us. The encounter, I hope,
will make us laugh and cry too. By living this experience in the body, by
bearing this contradiction, we may come to know.
6. Unfolding the Exquisite Corpse

The ‘supposition of knowing’ displaces ‘actual knowing’.
What would you say if we gave voice to Sam Taylor-Wood’s video, to return the
voice to the woman? If this had happened at the Salpêtrière, if Charcot, Freud and
the other doctors had taken up the position of the one who is only supposed to
know, the history of hysteria might have perhaps worked out differently. But we
cannot change that. Let us listen, and we may come to know.
* * *
I am re-reading this, the final paragraph of our initial piece, in order to continue
the development of our theme. We are travelling, you forward and I back, towards
the central core, which is our original chapter, chapter within chapter. We are
encasing it, not displacing but enfolding. Emailing back and forth, each reply was a
reading of the other and a form emerged that (we imagined) reflected an exquisite
corpse, that incongruous folded body of visual consequences drawn out by blind
players.97
That the supposition of knowing [displaces] actual knowing forms an echo in
my mind, for 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
 
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to conceal, but at the same time to envelop. Knowledge is not discarded but kept
within the fold. Thus secrets are made.
* * *
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.
* * *
We could say (because we like to make images) that our way opposes that of
the doctors who, credited with the ‘supposition of knowledge’, had none, while
those female patients who awaited the expert knowledge in fact possessed it
themselves, a fact that Freud eventually pursued.
Thus, in consequence of that lack of knowledge (substituted by treatment) the
knowledge that could truly have moved things on remained encased within the
symptom. We could therefore say that the symptom in our terms, as artists who
require image or form is represented by the fold, that which drives the game of
consequences and forms the exquisite corpse of our conversation. We can also ask
what role an image might play in developing such a conversation, and in what
ways, and why, contemporary visual artists and writers have taken to hysteria,
reinstating it as a subject that signifies something lost, and still sought. So now we
are on our own, no longer in conversation but on either side of an insurmountable
dialogue that we performed. But on our own we can no longer see or hear one
another. I wonder how we will fare?
* * *
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.98
Winnie Seebohm, a student at Cambridge, died of asthma on 18 December

1885 aged twenty-two, after one term of study at Newnham College. 99 In A
Suppressed Cry, Winnie’s biographer Victoria Glendinning portrays her as a
 
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‘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.’100 Glendinning, writing in 1969, describes how Winnie was the
‘victim of a system’101 for, although much loved personally, such love was ‘not
enough to give life a shape for most adults.’102
‘Her 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…’103
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…’104
Nowhere in Winnie’s biography does Glendinning suggest that asthma is
related to hysteria but, staying close to the narrative of 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 her letter to Lina … yet
she apologised for writing it.105
Unlike such young women as Augustine (or ‘Louise’, or ‘X’), who at the same
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’.106 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.’107
* * *
but the unlived life was held in the throat

in the breath and bending, folding,
the secretion erupted, more violently each time
* * *
 
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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.108
An actor acting mad, acts like a mask, displacing the potential reality of actual
madness by distancing. We have seen the mechanics. Hysteria could be distanced
by scrutiny, as at the Salpêtrière where subjects were considered curiosities or
specimens but also, as in Winnie’s case, 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
a positioning of madness puts into question whose madness.
Family letters following Winnie’s death depict somebody whose life was
exemplary. Glendinning portrays the ‘grief machinery’ 109 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.’110
‘… her life was perfect in its incompleteness …’111
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. The face-off was, for Winnie, ostensibly with the
will of God.112
If you ask me how I am—h’m, I'm as cross as a Kentucky cat …

you were quite right about my making myself worse those last
days—I did—and when I got home I collapsed altogether. … I
always want everything so frantically, and I'm always just the
person that can't have them! Ought I to have given up wanting
things? I've always been like that, from 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 …113
Would Winnie have been thought mad if she had voiced these feelings, for
example, to her family?
 
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…the people we call mad are, of necessity … people who are

unable or unwilling to live conventional lives … that is, by the
conventions of their given cultures …114
In addition, can we say that Winnie’s asthmatic condition was hysterical? If

not, it certainly shares the symptom if not the pose as—sitting in the same position,
her head resting on the table before her. Winnie was not acting, but defiantly in
control of her condition and, during the final hours, experience told her to sit it out.
We can imagine that this is the first of two images emerging from our reading
of (hysteria in relation to) the body’s position. The second, which we will look at
soon, is that of la grande hysterie. Here collusion between observer and histrionic
patient115 engenders a serial image, a string of grandiose poses signifying the
presence of that which Charcot hoped he could prove were neurological lesions.116
* * *
Recent works depicting hysteria such as those we have discussed, the

underground tunnel sequence in Possession or Taylor-Wood’s video, characterise
hysteria in terms of isolation, ambivalence and a sense of being torn, of being in
two minds.117 Contemporary audiences will have little problem recognising a state
of mind that is violently conflicted and alienated against itself. However, there is
something here that is beyond expectation, a wordless confusion that is articulated
violently and unexpectedly through the body, neither other-directed nor self-
directed.
So, what is the state we are looking at?
What is it we’re after?
In the piece Hysteria, a woman’s state of mind develops from an image of
laughing that moves to something between laughing and crying.
Between ‘laugh’ and ‘laughing’, ‘cry’ and ‘crying’, the pose develops although,
shuttling between the noun and the ‘progressive aspect’ (the continuous form) is a
little rotation—repli—a development of the pose that is quickly returned, folded
back into position. The movement does not progress. It goes nowhere.
* * *
Hysteria misses a beat.

It attempts to collapse time by escaping it.
Its object is immediacy, its medium visual.
Hysteria does not tolerate duration, the lived time of its subject, the time
it takes to achieve an object.
It relies on images.
Its terror, and its secret, is loss.
 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
* * *
The poses that Charcot declares to be phases in la grande hysterie rely on the
performance of images to make their (or rather, his) point. The impulse of hysteria,
however, is not expressive but entropic. What we see in the performance and in the
drawn taxonomy is, for the subject, a conflicted sign.
In 1885, the second edition of the Études Cliniques sur la Grande Hysterie118
was published in Paris. Commissioned by Charcot, this was a synoptic table of
small drawings set out in columns with the aim of showing the sequence of
symptoms manifest by the phases, named by Charcot, of la grande hysterie.
One hundred years later, at Trinity College Connecticut, a group of performers
set out to explore the symptoms of hysteria119 as drawn by Paul Richer in the
synoptic table. Their research 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, that each seemed to have been performed with an unseen spectator in
mind, each embodying a double movement that was simultaneously a movement
towards this figure, and a withdrawal.
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.120
These readings of the body through re-description seem to support the notion
that ‘hysteria manifested itself as both a pathological effect of patriarchy and its
subversion’. 121 As Freud describes, ‘the battle is between reality and pleasure
played out in the body, the two principles of mental functioning’.122
* * *
duplicity
you don’t know whether you're coming or going
always changing your mind
* * *
 
__________________________________________________________________
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.
anger contempt fear ridicule desire
The drawings graphically depict desire and repulsion, positioned adjacently in
the same body, side-by-side, or end-to-end. As in Hysteria, the image is breached,
cut off as if the pose is a giving up of the self to the director’s instruction, the
demands of the role. She is swallowing her impulse, making one move forward
and two back. Broken in two, the actors find that she is beside herself.
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.’123
The poses that Charcot declared to be phases of an attack were, it has been
suggested, 124 a manifestation of ‘prohibition’, 125 of prohibited feelings. It is
suggested that the repressed returns in the symptom as ‘so many materialisations of
words,’ indeed ‘of the very words that repressed them’.126
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 prohibition…’127
Her eyes twist back and sideways, as though something in her mind is
convulsing also, turning inward.
In Medical Muses, Asti Hustvedt observes that ‘in an era without demons and
before Freud’s unconscious’ 128 the female body became the site of external
symptoms that had ‘no internal reference, no location’, that were ‘revelatory of
nothing’.129
The symptom read by Charcot and his colleagues as a sign of 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’ 130
in that it is not a coded attempt on the part of the patient to transmit secret
knowledge or to instigate a guessing game. The knowledge signified is conflict
itself, and the pose an illegible sign.
* * *
In Andre Brouillet’s 1887 painting A Clinical Lecture at the Salpêtrière, Dr

Charcot is seen demonstrating a phase of la grande hysterie through the person of
Blanche Wittman who is collapsed backwards, spine arched and hands bent back at
the wrists into the arms of a doctor. It is a pose that captivates the crowd of
fascinated doctors and other professional men.
 
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There is no guile. The pose is made in good faith, on trust. It operates between
actor and director and, for the drama to work, there has to be mutual trust, although
we hear from Blanche herself as she lay dying that ‘it’s not as though it was
pleasant!’131
A spectator of the 1987 reconstructed performance of Charcot’s clinical
lectures observes how the actors succeeded in
…capturing and in capturing us in the profound discomfiture that

moves both hysterics and their doctors ... seductive because
suffering, the hysterics’ theatrical symptoms fascinate and
frighten by their very contagion. The only way to control the …
force of emotion seems to be to stand off and observe, to turn
hysteria into an object … a show.132
The roots of hysteria are not expressive but entropic. What we see in the
performance of hysteria, and in the drawn taxonomy of poses, is a double negative.
Desire signifies agency, but desire is representation only. It is not action. It has no
affect. It bears no witness.
The enactment of hysteria at the Salpêtrière was not an intentional collusion in
that ‘… the hysteric does not get as far as to intend a reality’,133 in fact, she had no
conscious intention for there was no pre-existing idea to be expressed, and thus no
secret.
* * *
I am reading a double negative, two images of folded bodies. One bent forward
to ease the flow of breath, the other back, performing a pose that signifies nothing.
* * *
We have been travelling away from our core piece, the one we performed, but
in so doing we have inevitably re-approached it, and are now back at its
insurmountable face.
What would you say if we gave voice to the woman?
Our folded form could, as you said, go on forever as we draw out the body of
our exquisite corpse (did you know ‘exquisite’ also means ‘rotating’? Cadavre
exquis.)134
* * *
In his obituary of Charcot, Freud describes him as a visuel, someone for whom
sight is ‘the dominant channel of knowing…’135 Taking visuality as a channel for
 
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knowledge, the American research team ‘used physical replication to generate

meanings, energies and motivations for the Salpêtrière hysterics.’136 Driving their
research was the notion of liberation through movement, that performance itself
could unlock the image. Mindful of Helene Cixous’ proposition that the women’s
liberation movement was pre-figured by those drawn ‘threshold figures’137 of the
Études Cliniques, they posited through performance the idea that the hysterical
body might be reclaimed from its paralysis, from its ‘enclosure in fixed images’.
They sought to find ‘where the energy and power [seen] in the Salpêtrière poses
would go if it were free to move.’138
* * *
However we said we would listen, so that we might come to know. The image
is unravelling, collapsing as time enters the frame.
We suggested, to start with, that ‘art is in the place where discourse is not
constituted yet, and plays with what discourse can’t fix.’ Moreover, remembering
Lacan’s discourse, ‘another thread follows the path that art operates at the limit of
discourse, precisely where discourse fails’.139 Could it be that, in the Hysteric’s
Discourse, Lacan’s a stands not only for art (as some have suggested) but also
articulation?
Once again we go back in order to move forward.
I sometimes think there is no use bothering myself so about

learning things. I certainly don’t know why I do try to learn so
many things, but I feel a great impulse to do it, therefore I think I
must … but I am only a woman.140
(Anne Clough, later Principal of Newnham College, diary entry,
1841).
Passion, intellect, moral activity—these three have never been

satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional
atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied.141
(Florence Nightingale, 1852).
One of the things I very much wanted to discover by going to

Newnham, was whether ‘knowledge’ per se was really all-
sufficient for some of the women of this age, or whether they
were only trying to drown their hearts in it, as I half suspected
both of them, and of myself. 142
(Winnie Seebohm, letter to Lina, Sunday November 22, 1885).
 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
If she is the woman of the future I am sure the world will do very
well…143
(Winnie Seebohm of Mrs Alfred Marshall, lecturer at Newnham
College, who ‘chose to find no conflict between her
independence and her feminine role’).
Winnie was left stranded on the shores of the nineteenth century.

Her portrait, which stood on the drawing room piano until the
Hermitage was dismantled, saw most of the people she loved go
forward into the twentieth …144
Woolf stood up in Girton and Newnham in Cambridge in the late

‘20’s and talked about a room of her own and in doing so, 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…145
Let us listen …
Notes
 
1
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the
Freudian Unconscious’, in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton,
2006), 671-702. 
2
Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (London: Basic
Books, 2000), 24.
3
Christopher Bollas, Hysteria (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 19.
4
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis (Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVII: L’Envers de la
Psychanalyse), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2007).
5
Elaine Showalter, Hystories. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London:
Picador, 1997), 15.
6
For the story of Augustine, see, for example, Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention
of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans.
Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA. and London: MIT Press, 2003) and Asti Hustvedt,
Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: WW Norton,
2011).
 
 
__________________________________________________________________
 
7
Dora’s real name was Ida Bauer and Freud published her story in ‘Fragment of an
Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (Bruchstück Einer Hysterie-Analyse), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7, ed.
and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001 [1905]), 1-122.
8
Dianne Hunter worked at the interface between performance and psychoanalysis,
exploring the relationship between Charcot and Augustine in The Makings of Dr
Charcot’s Hysteria Shows: Research through Performance (New York: Edwin
Mellen Press, 1998). Hélène Cixous, Claire Pajaczkowska and Sharon Kivland
studied Freud and their own relationship to Dora through scripts, a video piece and
book art. See Hélène Cixous, ‘Portrait of Dora’, trans. Sarah Burd, Diacritics 13.1
(Spring, 1983): 2-32; Jay St. Collective, ‘Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken
Identity’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media, Issues 15-17 (Summer
1981): 75-80 (for the film script of Sigmund Freud’s Dora, A Case of Mistaken
Identity); Sigmund Freud’s Dora, A Case of Mistaken Identity [Film], directed by
Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall, and Jane Weinstock
(Lux, 40 minutes, 1979); Sharon Kivland, A Case of Hysteria (London: Book
Works, 1999).
9
See Bruce M.Z. Cohen and Bernadette V. Russo’s chapters in this volume.
10
Lacan, Other Side.
11
Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria; Hustvedt, Medical Muses.
12
Lacan, Other Side.
13
The Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (l’Iconographie
Photographique de la Salpêtrière), from 1878, contained photographs of hysteric
patients taken by Dr Jean-Martin Charcot, physician of the Parisian hospital. Art
historian Georges Didi-Huberman studied these in Invention of Hysteria. Our
chapter draws on Didi-Huberman’s idea of hysteria as a culturally constructed
concept, performed both for the camera and the eye of the doctor, whose
commissioned images (drawings as well as photographs) act as a trigger for
complicity.
14
Sam Taylor-Wood, Hysteria (1997), viewed January 23, 2013,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKAA9lgxges.
15
We are mindful that we jump from Charcot and Augustine to Lacan and Sam
Taylor-Wood, avoiding Sigmund Freud’s Dora. A wealth of material has been
written on this case and we feel our argument is better sustained by going in-depth
into some of the earliest and then more recent expressions of the hysteric. Since
Freud’s original case history (Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis’) much secondary
material has been dedicated to Dora. For example, Charles Bernheimer and Claire
Kahane, In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990); Helène Cixous, ‘Portrait of Dora’; Jay St.Collective,
‘Freud’s Dora’; Sarah French, ‘Re-imagining the Female Hysteric: Hélène Cixous’
 
 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
 
“Portrait of Dora”’, Traffic 10 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2008): 247-
262; Sharon Kivland, A Case of Hysteria; Patrick Mahony, Freud’s Dora: A
Psychoanalytic, Historical, and Textual Study (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996); the 1979 film Sigmund Freud’s Dora, A Case of Mistaken Identity.
16
Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 9-10.
17
Georges Beard catalogued the variety of these hysterical symptoms in A
Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (New York: William Wood &
Company, 1880), 11-85, and a discussion of them in relation to hysteria as a legacy
diagnosis can be found in Laura Briggs, ‘The Race of Hysteria: “Overcivilization”
and the “Savage” Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and
Gynecology’, American Quarterly 52.2 (2000): 246-73.
18
Drawing was also a means of recording, both from direct observation on the
wards, and as a means of classifying what the photographs depicted (see Hunter,
Charcot’s Hysteria Shows, 2).
19
Serge Tisseron, Le Mystère de la Chambre Claire. Photographie et Inconscient
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1996), 24. The title translates as The Mystery of the
Camera Lucida, Photography and the Unconscious.
20
A reproduction of Brouillet’s painting can be found in Didi-Huberman,
Invention of Hysteria, 238.
21
In the postscript to Dora’s case, Freud writes: ‘What are transferences? They are
new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and
made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity,
which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by
the person of the physician. … [T]ransference cannot be evaded, since use is made
of it in setting up all the obstacles that make the material inaccessible to treatment,
and since it is only after the transference has been resolved that a patient arrives at
a sense of conviction of the validity of the connections which have been
constructed during the analysis. … Transference, which seems ordained to be the
greatest obstacle to psycho-analysis, becomes its most powerful ally, if its presence
can be detected each time and explained to the patient. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment
of an Analysis’, 116-117.
22
Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm, Hysteria, the Vibrator and
Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1999), 2.
23
Ilza Veitz, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1965), 1.
24
Veitz, Hysteria, 2-8.
25
See Katia Mitova’s chapter in this volume.
26
Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine
Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993), 13 and 293. For male hysteria, see Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Men: The
 
 
__________________________________________________________________
 
Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008). Katia Mitova writes about the hysteria of Fernando Pessoa in this
book.
27
Veitz, Hysteria.
28
Showalter, Hystories.
29
Andrew Scull, Hysteria: The Biography (Oxford University Press, 2009).
30
Hysteria could be said by this account to ‘write on’, or inscribe, the person.
31
This triad is Lacanian. Freud maintained that perversion was not a
psychopathology.
32
Sigmund Freud attempted a classification of the neuroses in several of his texts,
the most notable being his Little Hans and Rat Man case histories. See ‘Analysis of
a Phobia in a Five-year Old Boy’ (Analyse der Phobie eines Fünfjähringen
Knaben), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud 10, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001 [1909]), 3-149,
especially pages 115-116; and ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’
(Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose), The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 10, ed. and trans. James
Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001 [1909]), 153-318.
33
Our definition of the psychopathologies, and in particular the neuroses, is, of
course, reductive. For a fuller explanation of the mechanisms of the neuroses in
relation to reality and pleasure see, for example, Sigmund Freud, ‘Formulations on
the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,’ (Formulierungen über die Zwei
Prinzipen des Psychischen Geschehens), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 12, ed. and trans. James Strachey
(London: Vintage, 2001 [1911]), 213-226; Sigmund Freud, ‘Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis (Part III),’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud 16, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage,
2001 [1917]); and Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ (Jenseits des
Lustprinzips), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud 18, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001 [1920]),
3-64.
34
Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind
Doctors from 1800 (London: Virago Press, 2009), 160.
35
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, 160.
36
37
38
39
40
Paul Richer, Études Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Épilepsie,
cited in Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 292.
 
 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
 
41
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, 149, 152.
42
See, for example, Allan R. Ellenberger, The Valentino Mystique: The Death And
Afterlife Of The Silent Film Idol (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005);
Ian Inglis, ‘“I Read the News Today, Oh Boy”: The British Press and the Beatles’,
Popular Music and Society 33.4 (2010): 549-562.
43
Lacan, Other Side.
44
Lacan, Other Side. In the other discourses, desire (the Discourse of the Master),
symptoms (the Discourse of the Analyst) and split subjects (the Discourse of the
University!) are its product.
45
For clarity and analysis purposes, the other three discourses are the Discourse of
the Master:
S1–––––––> S2
––– –––
S < ––//–– a
The University:
S2–––––––> a
––– –––
S1 < ––//–– S
The Analyst
a –––––––> S
––– –––
S2 < ––//–– S1
There is a fifth discourse, the Discourse of the Capitalist, which Lacan did not
elaborate, although he did refer to it in Other Side.
46
Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London:
Routledge, 1996), 45-47.
47
Bruce Fink, ‘The Four Discourses’, in The Lacanian Subject. Between Language
and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 129-137.
48
Lacan, Other Side, 129.
49
Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn, Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid. Elements
for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (London: Routledge, 2005), 129.
50
This argument has been developed by, among others, by Sharon Kivland and
Marc du Ry, ed., In the Place of an Object, Journal of the Centre for Freudian
Analysis and Research 12 (Special Issue 2000); Psychoanalysis and The
Creative/Performing Arts Seminars, part of the Institute of Germanic and Romance
Studies Psychoanalysis Network (London: Institute for Germanic and Romance
Studies, January to November 2007); Vicissitudes, Histories and Destinies of
Psychoanalysis conference (London: Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies,
January 17-19, 2008).
 
 
__________________________________________________________________
 
51
As Katia Mitova explains in her chapter, Pessoa connected his symptom to an
expression of genius: ‘Pessoa described his condition as “a relentless, organic
tendency toward depersonalisation and simulation.” He believed this condition was
caused by “a deep-seated form of hysteria,” or “hysterical neurasthenia” that
entailed “pretended communication with diverse spirits” as well as “insanity made
sane by dilution in the abstract, like a poison converted into a medicine by
mixture.” The latter also happened to be Pessoa’s definition of genius.’ So the
hysteric’s symptom and her production of knowledge in relation to artistic practice
is linked, according to Pessoa and Mitova, to exceptional intellectual and creative
abilities, and insight, going beyond simple mastery.
52
Our insistence on the body is backed up by Christopher Bollas: [It] 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.
Bollas, Hysteria, 19.
53
Louis Aragon and André Breton, ‘Le Cinquantenaire de l’Hysterie (1878-1928)’,
La Révolution Surréaliste (IV.11, March 1928): 20-22, reprinted in Zoe Beloff,
ed., The Somnambulists (New York: Christine Burgin, 2008), 76-83, trans. Aimery
Dunlap-Smith. The quote is from page 83. In addition, Aragon and Bréton offer a
definition of hysteria that ties in with our proposition that it is outside the frame of
madness, a state of being and, in terms of discourse and dialogue, tending towards
the intersubjective: ‘Hysteria is a more or less irreducible mental state,
characterising itself by the subversion of the links established between the subject
and the moral world, of which he believes he is indeed a part, outside of any
system of madness. This mental state is founded on the need for a reciprocal
seduction, which explains the hastily accepted miracles of medical suggestion (or
contra-suggestion)’. Beloff, Somnambulists, 82-83.
54
55
Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 13.
56
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, New
York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 144-145. But, of course, the speculum is
also a symbolic device, as Irigaray points out, one referred to as signaling the
exclusion of women and their sexuality from discourse, especially discourses of
philosophy and psychoanalysis.
57
Possession [DVD], directed by Andrzej Zulawski (Second Sight Films, 1981).
58
Sigmund Freud, ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’ (Der Witz und
Seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten), The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 8, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London:
Vintage, 2001 [1905]).
 
 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
 
59
Jean-Martin Charcot, Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Delivered
at La Salpêtrìere, ed. and trans. George Sigerson (London: The New Sydenham
Society, 1881).
60
Yet this knowledge is not a secret, as in the case of cryptophores, but knowledge
of a prohibition, as clarified by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok: ‘The repressed
is always only a representation or a desire. These return in the symptom as so
many “materialisations” of words, of the very words that repressed them. In fact,
the hysteric does not get so far as to intend a reality—and thus possesses no
secrets—at least in the metapsychological sense. Could we claim that what the
hysteric represses had a name, a prior existence as speech at the moment of
repression and that, as a consequence, the function of repression would be to hide a
secret? In actual fact, the hysteric's desire and attendant representations are merely
the offshoots of words voicing not desire or pleasure but their prohibition. Calling
desire by the very name of its prohibition is the law of hysteria's transparent
opacity. And that is fundamentally what we all do.’
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘The Topography of Reality: Sketching a
Metapsychology of Secrets’, Oxford Literary Review 12.1 (July 1990): 63-68.
61
Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria.
62
63
Lacan, ‘Subversion of the Subject’.
64
The Big Other, in the Lacanian canon, is the internalized voice of authority.
65
Charcot, Lectures on the Diseases.
66
Rachel Maines, Technology of Orgasm, 3, 68.
67
For a discussion of the hysteric in relation to gender roles see, particularly,
Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas, and Micale, Hysterical Men.
68
Nitza Yarom, Matrix of Hysteria. Psychoanalysis of the Struggle Between the
Sexes as Enacted in the Body (London: Routledge, 2005), 3.
69
Taylor-Wood, Hysteria.
70
In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Žižek writes: ‘Or—with respect to truth: the
Real qua trauma is not the ultimate ‘unspeakable’ truth which the subject can
approach only asymptotically, but that which makes every articulated symbolic
truth forever “not-all”, failed, a bone stuck in the throat of the speaking being
which makes it impossible to “tell everything”’. The Plague of Fantasies (London:
Verso, 2008 [1997]), 277. Žižek further elaborates this in ‘Grimaces of the Real, or
When the Phallus Appears’, October 58, Rendering the Real (Autumn, 1991): 44-
68. He analyses the screams in art with particular reference to Sergei Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and The Man Who Knew Too
Much, and Edward Munch’s painting The Scream. He writes: ‘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’ (49).
He classifies the scream in these works and relates the scream vocalised with
deferral (evident in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III)—to self-
reflexivity, for this scream is only heard when perceived in silence (50).
71
72
Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, xi–xii.
73
Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, xi.
74
Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, xii.
75
Figure 45 in Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 113.
76
Ecstasy is Figure 64 in Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 147; The Call is
Figure 60 in Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 143.
77
Exploring this turning point is the main argument of Didi-Huberman’s work,
Invention of Hysteria, xii.
78
79
Julia Borossa, Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Hysteria (Cambridge: Icon books,
2001), 26.
80
Borossa, Hysteria, 51-53. She explains how ‘hysteria manifested itself as both a
pathological effect of patriarchy and its subversion’.
81
Christopher Bollas, Hysteria, 19.
82
Gérard Wajcman, ‘The Hysteric’s Discourse’, The Symptom 4 (Spring 2003),
viewed June 7, 2012 http://www.lacan.com/hystericdiscf.htm.
83
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Hogarth Press, 1931).
84
Woolf repeatedly speaks of The Waves in imagistic terms, as for example cited
by Francesco Mulas in his essay ‘Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: a Novel of
“Silence”’: ‘The Waves is a verbalisation of a mystical vision …’ (see
http://www.uniss.it/lingue/annali_file/vol_2/04_Mulas.pdf, 1, viewed February 21,
2013).
85
Wajcman, ‘Hysteric’s Discourse’.
86
Woolf, The Waves.
87
Figure 46 in Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 118-119.
88
89
90
91
92
American Beauty [DVD], directed by Sam Mendes (Dreamworks Live Action,
1999).
93
The Hours [DVD], directed by Stephen Daldry (Optimum Home Entertainment,
2002).
94
Freud, ‘Principles of Mental Functioning’.
 
 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
 
95
AAA-AAA is a recorded performance by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, created in
1977. Abramovic explains its score at the beginning of the video: ‘We are facing
each other, both producing a continuous vocal sound. We slowly build up the
tension, our faces coming closer together until we are screaming into each other’s
open mouths’.
96
Dylan Evans writes: ‘The phrase is introduced by Lacan in 1961 in order to
designate the illusion of a self-consciousness (Ger. Selbstbewußtsein) which is
transparent to itself in its act of knowing. […] This definition emphasises that it is
the analysand’s supposition of a subject who knows that initiates the analytic
process, rather than the knowledge actually possessed by the analyst. The term
‘subject supposed to know’ does not designate the analyst himself, but a function
which the analyst may come to embody in the treatment. […]The end of analysis
comes when the analysand de-supposes the analyst of knowledge, so that the
analyst falls from the position of the subject supposed to know. The term ‘subject
supposed to know’ also emphasises the fact that it is a particular relationship to
knowledge that constitutes the unique position of the analyst; the analyst is aware
that there is a split between him and the knowledge attributed to him. In other
words, the analyst must realise that he only occupies the position of one who is
presumed (by the analysand) to know, without fooling himself that he really does
possess the knowledge attributed to him. The analyst must realise that, of the
knowledge attributed to him by the analysand, he knows nothing. […] Lacan also
remarks that, for the analyst, the analysand is a subject supposed to know.’ Evans,
Introductory Dictionary, 199-200.
97
Among Surrealist techniques … was a kind of collective collage of words or
images they called ‘the exquisite corpse’. Based on an old parlour game, it was
played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase or draw a body part
on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next
player for his contribution. The poetic fragments that emerged from this process
(referred to by Max Ernst as ‘mental contagion’) were felt to reveal the
‘unconscious reality in the personality of the group’. Adapted from William S.
Rubin, Dada & Surrealist Art (New York: Abrams, 1985).
98
Victoria Glendinning, A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter,
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 106.
99
Glendinning, Suppressed Cry.
100
Glendinning, Suppressed Cry, 6.
101
102
103
104
105
 
 
__________________________________________________________________
 
106
Glendinning, Suppressed Cry.
107
108
See Appendix ‘Acting Madness’, in Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of
the Unlived Life (London: Penguin, 2012), 169-200.
109
110
Phillips, Missing Out, 104.
111
‘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”’. Letter from Juliet
Seebohm (sister) to Meta Tuke (Winnie’s close friend), Glendinning, Supressed
Cry, 105.
112
See for example Glendinning, Suppressed Cry, 78. Having written an up-beat
descriptive letter to her sister during the day, in a private memo book Winnie
writes in the early hours of October 26, 1895 (2:30am): ‘My idea of heaven—a
place where one need not breathe’, and the following morning (3:30am): ‘To those
who are well and strong God reveals Himself in the joy and beauty of nature … in
the springing life of their own limbs and veins—but to those that suffer He reveals
Himself more especially and more intimately in pain and weariness’. 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’. Glendinning, Suppressed Cry, 107.
113
114
115
Dianne Hunter describes hysteria as a ‘shared unconscious structure’ between
patient and observer (see Hunter, especially the section ‘The Hysteria Project:
Research through Performance’, in Charcot’s Hysteria Shows, 6.
116
‘The medical model on which Charcot based his theory was ‘one of an inside
lesion that produced outside symptoms’. Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 308.
117
Possession, directed by Zulawski; Taylor-Wood, Hysteria.
118
Paul Richer, Études Cliniques sur l'Hystéro-Épilepsie ou Grande Hystérie
(Paris: Delahaye and Lecrosnier, 1881).
119
A faculty group of students at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (1987),
informed by Paul Richer’s drawings, researched the symptoms of la grande
hysterie through performance. This was part of a larger project funded by the Ford
Foundation to promote women’s studies in colleges previously dedicated to the
education of men. See Hunter, Charcot’s Hysteria Shows.
120
Hunter, Charcot’s Hysteria Shows, 3-4.
121
Borossa, Hysteria, 51-53.
122
Freud, ‘Principles of Mental Functioning’.
 
 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
 
123
Hunter, Charcot’s Hysteria Shows, 9.
124
Abraham and Torok, ‘Topography of Reality’, 63-68.
125
126
127
128
Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 6
129
Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 6.
130
Hustvedt, Medical Muses.
131
Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 141.
132
Martha Noel Evans, Introduction, Hunter, Charcot’s Hysteria Shows, xiv.
133
Abraham and Torok, ‘Topography of Reality’, 63.
134
The notion of a ‘rotating body’ (apart from being a somewhat unnerving image)
evokes a sense of endless repetition, and this sense is echoed in Gérard Wajcman’s
comment that hysteria, historically always presenting the same question, remains a
mystery, so that ‘accounting for hysteria resembles the work of Sisyphus’ (see
Wajcman, ‘Hysteric’s Discourse’, 1).
135
136
137
Hunter describes the influence on her research performers of Helene Cixous’
suggestion that the great hysterics of the Salpêtrière inspired and fascinated late
twentieth-century feminists as ‘threshold figures’, (see Hunter, Charcot’s Hysteria
Shows, 3).
138
139
See the section on The Discourse of the Hysteric in this chapter.
140
141
Extract from writings of Florence Nightingale, cited in Glendinning,
Suppressed Cry, 7.
142
143
144
145
Ali Smith in conversation with Mark Lawson, ‘Front Row: Ali Smith, Dave
Brubeck, Crime Fiction’, Front Row (London: BBC Radio 4, December 6, 2012).
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Between Laughter and Crying

Eleanor Bowen and Laura González

Key Words: Hysteria, Augustine, madness, psychoanalysis, performance,

2. Charcot’s Hysteric as Mad

… something was constructed at the Salpêtrière, something

• Aura, or the Beginning of the Attack:

This can consist of a seething pain in the right ovary, and is

• Epileptoid phase (tonic rigidity):

• Clownisme: ‘circus-like acrobatics.’36

enacts seduction, supplication, erotic pleasure, ecstasy and

3. The Discourse of the Hysteric

Fig. 1: Positions of the Four Discourses and Discourse of the Hysteric

agent –––––––> other S –––––––> S1

they have an operative function, not an interpretative one. They

Discourses, as ways of understanding each other, have a dimension of enjoyment;

4. The Voice of the Hysteric: Augustine and Sam Taylor-Wood

Hysteria, with its fluctuating symptoms, is par excellence the

boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s

they called ‘pelvic massages’ to induce a ‘hysterical paroxysm’ as a

In Taylor-Wood’s 8-minute film Hysteria, a woman laughs until

From laughter to crying, from ecstasy to wailing, all in the space of

symptoms are, but also heard. As Gérard Wajcman wrote, ‘while

… analytic experience is based on the fact that … we

And now a series of staccato images, like a little filmstrip, comes

Writing, talking about hysteria is our symptom. What does this

6. Unfolding the Exquisite Corpse

They had no vocabulary for it.

Early in the evening the struggle for breath began again...it

Winnie Seebohm, a student at Cambridge, died of asthma on 18 December

An attack of asthma has the significance of a suppressed cry. It

but the unlived life was held in the throat

If you ask me how I am—h’m, I'm as cross as a Kentucky cat …

…the people we call mad are, of necessity … people who are

In addition, can we say that Winnie’s asthmatic condition was hysterical? If

Recent works depicting hysteria such as those we have discussed, the

Hysteria misses a beat.

We saw … a tension between spirituality and sexuality expressed

In Andre Brouillet’s 1887 painting A Clinical Lecture at the Salpêtrière, Dr

…capturing and in capturing us in the profound discomfiture that

knowledge, the American research team ‘used physical replication to generate

I sometimes think there is no use bothering myself so about

Passion, intellect, moral activity—these three have never been

One of the things I very much wanted to discover by going to

Winnie was left stranded on the shores of the nineteenth century.

Woolf stood up in Girton and Newnham in Cambridge in the late

Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. ‘The Topography of Reality: Sketching a

A Dangerous Method [Film]. Directed by David Cronenberg. 2011.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical

Beard, Georges. A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion. New York: William

Bernheimer, Charles and Claire Kahane. In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria,

Bollas, Christopher. Hysteria. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Borossa, Julia. Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Hysteria. Cambridge: Icon books, 2001.

Charcot, Jean-Martin. Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Delivered

Cixous, Hélène. ‘Portrait of Dora’. Translated by Sarah Burd. Diacritics 13.1

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London:

French, Sarah. ‘Re-imagining the Female Hysteric: Hélène Cixous’ “Portrait of

Freud, Sigmund. ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (Bruchstück

———. ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (Bemerkungen über einen