Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder

Abstract

HYSTERICAL writes Cecily Devereux in this issue's opening essay, back (41). Indeed, past five years alone have provided us with peculiarly frequent cultural manifestations of great disorder (1): a pathology famously invented in late nineteenth century Paris by Jean-Martin Charcot at Salpetriere Hospital (Didi-Huberman), amorphous illness that became, through Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer's Studies in Hysteria (1895), the embryonic moment of psychoanalysis (Bowlby xvi). Recently, hysteria has surfaced onscreen in films including Alice Winocour's Augustine (2012), David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (2011), and Tanya Wexler's Hysteria (2011); onstage in Sarah Ruhl's 2009 Pulitzer-nominated In Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and a 2013 London revival of Terry Johnson's Hysteria, first produced in 1993 (Spencer); in widespread media coverage of a late 2012 outbreak of mass disorder among female high school students in Le Roy, New York (Dominus); and in an Amazon-produced television series inspired by Le Roy case--Hysteria (2014)--which premiered, auspiciously, as editors were compiling this issue. (2) appears to be a sudden cultural reinvestment in hysteria coupled with a puzzling instance of corporeal materializations invites broad, provocative question, as posed by Devereux in her essay: What does mean when hysteria erupts into cultural space (21)? Recognizing that we cannot wholly pin down a concept that circulates in defiant resistance to definition, this issue understands hysteria as a diagnostic trope assigned to a series of symptoms--performed, manifested, and/or expressed at level of body--and functioning in every case as an index of cultural norms that hysteria always exceeds and sometimes resists. Today, hysteria commonly circulates with reference to collective and individual social performances of excessive behaviour, and although has been by and large disarticulated from gender and medical discourse hysteria remains haunted by its history and etymology. (3) In fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013), hysteria is housed as Conversion Disorder (Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder), which encompasses symptoms including weakness or paralysis, abnormal movement, swallowing symptoms, speech symptoms, attacks or seizures, anesthesia or sensory loss, special sensory symptoms, and mixed symptoms. The DSM estimates that persistent symptoms occur in two to five people per one hundred thousand per year and that disorder is two to three times more common amongst women. Interestingly, hysteria has had a tenacious if not consistently named presence in DSM's history; four of five DSM editions use language of conversion to depict hysteria (DSM I in 1952, DSM III in 1980, DSM IV in 1994, DSM IV-TR in 2000, DSM V in 2013) with exception to this pattern being DSM II (1968) which uses language of hysterical neurosis It is as though we have never quite done with hysteria, Rachel Bowlby points out in her introduction to 2004 edition of Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria; it is always, repeatedly, necessary to return to it, to see what lacked or promised, to try to understand what is going on in its own apparently unprompted return in present time (xviii). In 2012, inspired by our shared experience two years prior in Cecily Devereux's graduate seminar, Hysteria: Cultural Texts at University of Alberta, we--the editors--found ourselves intrigued and perplexed by what seemed to be a renewed fascination with hysteria on behalf of our popular imaginary. We sought to perform task Bowlby describes: to probe, through lens of hysteria's contemporary materializations, cultural desires and anxieties that great disorder's returns and resurfacings seem to index. In our call for papers, we declared that issue aims to read hysteria's present--its current representations, manifestations, embodiments, deployments, and iterations--while drawing on its diverse genealogies and violent, tangled past; we aspired to challenge hysteria's grand histories and unearth its minor ones, defy myths of hysteria's origins, teleology, progress, and its ties to medico-scientific objectivity, while emphasizing its present-day potency (Hysteria Manifest). …