Hysterical Body Research Articles

The Transient Nature of Hysteria: How Patriarchal Victorian Values Fostered its Existence

Hysteria is an everchanging illness that has historically been regarded as both a medical and mental disorder. Characterized by a plethora of symptoms such as anxiety, irritability, and grand movements, the disease was particularly diagnosed in females at its peak in the 19th century. Key figures of the 19th century’s medical and psychological spheres, such as Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud, contributed to the perception of hysteria as a predominantly female disease. Charcot’s presentations of the female hysterical body, coupled with the patriarchal values of the Victorian Era, created the perfect environment for hysteria to be viewed in this way. Although once quite prominent, the diagnosis of hysteria ultimately disappeared with its removal from the DSM-III in 1980. Its disappearance and transient nature raise questions about how societal and cultural factors impact the narrative of illnesses. These questions can be approached using Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking’s framework for transient mental illnesses. This framework asserts that mental illnesses are transient because they require a specific environment to flourish, often referred to as an “ecological niche”. Furthermore, Hacking suggests there are four possible vectors that contribute to the development of these illnesses: 1) the illness and its symptoms must be deemed abnormal, 2) the deviant behaviour of the illness must align with other illnesses, 3) the illness must lie between a cultural polarity, and 4) the illness must provide release. Thus, using the concept of Ian Hacking’s framework, hysteria can be viewed as a transient mental illness fostered by the patriarchal values of the Victorian Era and can be examined through each of the four vectors.

Between the Psychical and the Material: Body Language in Freud's Dora

ABSTRACT Feminist theories of embodiment, particularly those that have emerged from corporeal feminism, have been influenced by the psychoanalytic distinction between the hysterical body and the anatomical body [Wilson, Elizabeth. 2015. Gut Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press]. Following Freud and his concepts of the body ego and somatic compliance, psychoanalytic assertions that the way the body is lived is psychically informed have proven productive to feminist aims. Freud proposes the notion of somatic compliance as the explanatory rationale for hysterical symptomatology’s strange ability to express itself in a manner incommensurable with medical explanation. This article opens and extends those questions raised by the anatomical body that originally perplexed Freud in the case of Dora. In particular, it queries the notion of somatic compliance by asking: what is the character of anatomy such that it can defy and revise its own apparent limits? How can the hysterical body achieve feats that the non-hysterical body cannot? And lastly, what does it mean to comply somatically? In this way, the article responds to the anti-biologism that continues to feature in much feminist scholarship on corporeality.

«Великий невроз» Жака Луазеля и Альфреда Кубина

On the example of the work «The Great Neurosis» by the French sculptor Jacques Loysel and «Europe» by the Austrian graphic artist Alfred Kubin, it is described and analyzed how artists gave characteristics of changes in their eras, using the same visual image associated with a mental illness. It is proved that while Loysel’s artwork was associated with the latest discoveries in medicine, then Kubin’s artwork was reinterpreted in a new way, reflecting the problems and experiences of the «lost generation». From this it follows that the example of the works «The Great Neurosis» and «Europe» by Loysel and Kubin can be traced not only to evolution, but also to the introduction of the pathological image of the “hysterical body” both in the art of the XXth century and in contemporary art practices. Such a study demonstrates the relevance and signifi cance of studying the links between, as well as the analysis of the impact of mechanisms of institutions of disciplinary power on the visual arts of various eras.

Cuerpo-cámara-ojo: presencia e intersubjetividad en el trabajo de la artista Pola Weiss

Dos trabajos de la artista mexicana Pola Weiss (1947-1990) nos conducen a modos alternativos de conceptualizar lo estético desde el cuerpo femenino/feminizado y desde la subversión de las relaciones sujeto/objeto. El cuerpo-cámara-ojo de Weiss se expande más allá de la visualidad e interrumpe la hegemonía escópica para intentar que aparezca aquello que no se ve. Las propuestas estéticas de Weiss se entrelazan con otros casos de estudio que, desde lugares muy dispares, han situado el cuerpo, su materialidad y sus afectos como elementos centrales de la experiencia epistémica y estética. El potencial del cuerpo histérico, la teoría estética de Lee y Anstruther-Thompson, o el problema de traducción cultural del término náhuatl ixiptlah, muestran otros modos de entender las imágenes, otras lógicas capaces de reinventar las formas en que miramos y somos miradas.
 Palabras clave: Performance; Empatía; Cuerpo; Teoría Feminista; Estética; Intersubjetividad

Of Beasts Blond and Damned

This essay engages in a critique of soteriological desire, alongside its corporeal and affective correlates, mobilized in different ways in German fascism of the thirties and Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel, Nightwood. In contrasting the “fascist body” with the “hysterical body,” I seek to account for the psychic logic co-implicating narcissism and fascist eschatology in order to dissociate it from the expressive enactment of hysteria in Nightwood’s Doctor O’Connor and, in so doing, to offer a revisionary account of the novel’s political unconscious. Both narcissism and hysteria bind the subject to the figure of the sovereign in a soteriological relation. However, where the narcissist disavows the lack internal to his constitution in the identification with his idol, the hysteric, though placed in the field of the sovereign’s desire, ultimately foregrounds the failure of the redemptive promise encoded in this relation.

Hister Ergo Sum

Starting at the end of the Nineteenth century, the hysterical body invaded the European medical and artistic scene, giving birth to different kinds of ambivalent performances. The sexed body was the dominant reference in the definition of hysteria, which, for a long time, was considered by medicine as a form of neurosis typical of women/females. The hysterical body, with its troubling sexuality, was considered as the pathological body par excellence and, as a consequence, had to be regulated. At the Salpêtrière, the Parisian clinic run by Jean-Martin Charcot, the staging of the hysterical body seemingly offered a «great representation of desire» produced by the masculine gaze lingering over a female body: a grotesque body-marionette that moved, miming strong erotic scenes repeated at will under the impulse of a doctor-director. At the same time, the hysterical body began to be investigated also by the performing arts, finding its perfect stage in the performances of Eleonora Duse and, especially, Sarah Bernhardt. Even if in different ways, the two actresses were equally inspired by the hysterical pantomime, which gave them the chance to promote not only an artistic renewal, but also a new image of woman.

Seeing Hysteria: A Case, A Study

Seeing Hysteria:A Case, A Study Ela Przybylo, with photographs by Ela Przybylo and Michael Holly I come to hysteria lost, confused, detached. Hysteria’s “disappearance,” its current fragmentation, desensationalizes the hysterical body (Micale, 1993). And all those women depicted-invented by the “great optical machine” of the Salpêtrière hospital in late nineteenth-century Paris, by the Salpêtrière’s veritable “image factory,” become fixed (Didi-Huberman 9, 30). Who were they? What did they say? Where did they go? Much of this information is either lost, as most personal histories are, or occluded by the auteur of hysteria, Doctor Charcot himself, founder of the Salpêtrière’s neurology clinic, for he did not like listening, only seeing (Marneffe 75, 77). Described by Sigmund Freud, who was one of his pupils and admirers, as a “visuel”—a man who knows through seeing—Jean-Martin Charcot, along with one of his right-wing men, photographer Paul Régnard, ate lives up, processing them through the twin medico-photographic project of the Salpêtrière hospital (Freud, “Charcot” 12). Augustine was one such life. As one famous hysteric who went through the optical machine of the Salpêtrière, Augustine, like many hysterics, was put under hypnosis and under ether and chloroform. The photographs taken of her were calotypes, executed with a large format camera. These photographs were both posed and “photoshopped” using painting [End Page 177] techniques: the hysterics themselves, the backgrounds, and the final photograph were each in turn regulated by means of paint. In other words, all these elements collaborated to create the hysteria that we can, today, see on paper. These photographs became the very proof of hysteria. As historian Sander Gilman comments writing on hysteria, “[d]isease is only real if it is universal. And it is universal only if it can be seen and the act of seeing reproduced” (379). But while there was the hypnosis, the ether and chloroform, the photographic staging, flash, and subsequent retouching work, Augustine was there as well and she was not mute, and she was not passive (Didi-Huber-man 215, Baer, Marneffe 84). It took skill, reflex, and probably cunning to be “the star model for a whole concept of hysteria” (Didi-Huberman 117). And Augustine used her histrionic skills, finally, after the masterful execution of many poses, after at least seventeen snaps of the shutter, to “put an end to her existence as a ‘case,’ ” to dress up as a man and walk out of Charcot’s “living pathological museum” (Marneffe 79, Didi-Huberman 276, Charcot 3). So, hysteria, and most especially Augustine’s hysteria, was staged, in a very complex way, by the medico-photographic institution of the Salpêtrière: by the lights, the camera, the props, the flash, the photographer, the physician, and Augustine—the hysteric—herself. It was a collusion of all these forces, and probably many more, that led to the invention of Augustine’s hysteria and perhaps hysteria more broadly. The process of opening the shutter on myself (by way of someone else) is an exercise in patience. I am not Augustine, I do not wish to be, and I do not wish to pretend to be. But Augustine, whom so many see, needed to be placed, visually, in a more intricate web. She never acted in a vacuum; her performance had an entirely different dynamic of agency. The patient and physician spiraled off into hysterical plateaus together. They needed one another; they fueled one another’s performance. Elisabeth Bronfen speaks of the “murky enmeshment of mutual consent, mutual deceit, and mutual desire” (174). But that was not all, it was not just physician and patient; the scene was further complicated by the technologies of photography—the lights, the flash, the backdrop, the camera—which were there as well. And then there was the photographer (here—Régnard), Charcot’s middleman, and who knows what other characters appeared on set. There is no “Augustine, the hysteric” without the others. Speaking of individual agency and individual performance, in the photographic landscapes of hysteria, is insufficient. My mirror mimics Augustine’s gaze, it reminds us of the mess of physician...

“Deep deep into the river of her mind”: “Meneseteung” and the Archival Hysteric

WHILE THE DIAGNOSIS MAY BE OFFICIALLY DEFUNCT, the language of is still rampant in popular, cultural, literary, and scientific discourses. A search on the term hysteria in PubMed returns over five hundred hits from the year 2000 to date. As of the slipperiest illnesses of the mind, continues to invoke fear, curiosity, and the desire for interpretive mastery. (1) Studied by a range of scholars including historians, feminists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and ethnologists, has been defined primarily by its protean and varied symptoms such as headaches, dysmenorrhea, alterations in mood, pain, non-organic paralysis, and general weakness that resemble symptoms of other, more fully understood diseases. According to Canadian historian Wendy Mitchinson, nineteenth-century hysterics suffered from the nebulous symptoms of violent emotions and attention-seeking behaviour (285). All of these symptoms could be explained by hysteria's defining characteristic: a lack of control over the emotions, which most doctors perceived as a predominantly female problem (Mitchinson 280). Seeing as a dysfunction of the mind and body, many nineteenth-century hysterical sufferers and their families turned to the medical profession for help (Mitchinson 281). While hysteria's cultural significations changed over the centuries, the figure of the hysteric was largely feminized in the nineteenth century. (2) What can we learn from the nineteenth century's hysterical legacy? In particular, how does the body--the self-regulating, respirating, digesting, thinking, eliminating human body--figure into this feminized and protean illness of the mind? In many ways, contemporary literature has been able to go further than medical science in exploring the causes and healing of hysteria. While the medical field eschews the speculative, anecdotal, and liminal, fiction embraces multiple ways of knowing. Bestselling fictions including Jane Urquhart's Away (1993) and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) turn to the archives of nineteenth-century Ontario to explore how and why the hysterical mindbody acts as an archive of past emotional traumas and how this might suggest a model of recovery. In particular, I would like to explore how Alice Munro's Meneseteung (1990) uses the archive as a literal and figurative structure to tell the story of a hysterical nineteenth-century Ontario poetess. In both the story and nineteenth-century medical discourses, the hysterical body interacts with its environment in complex and unexpected ways. Meneseteung was written at a critical point in the history of mental illness. While the psychopharmacological revolution started in the 1950s, the emergence of in 1987 changed the contemporary psychiatric landscape, with family doctors in addition to psychiatrists prescribing the pills. (3) Elizabeth Wilson notes a change in the 1990s with a transition from feminist politics under the influence of anti-psychiatry to feminist politics after Prozac (Organic Empathy 376). In the medicalized context of the 1990s, a sufferer may see herself as a victim of a medical condition: The medications make it easier for someone who is afflicted by such a mental illness to think of it as something 'other,' a thing, almost an agent that acts upon one (Hacking 113). In the nineteenth century, however, was seen less as an agent in itself but rather as a potential--and even natural--part of female subjectivity. As was treated by wide-ranging therapies including surgery, blistering, botanical remedies, marriage, talk therapy, cold douches, firm pressure applied to the ovaries, clitoridectomy, and rest (Mitchinson 286-88), the nineteenth-century conception of the condition rooted it in the social, biological, and cultural life of the sufferer. In Meneseteung, Munro depicts her hysterical heroine as both a sufferer and a resistant subject; is impacted by social and familial trauma, and it springs from the complexities of the mind-body connection. …

Hysterical Body, Resisting Gestures in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

Hysterical Body, Resisting Gestures in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

"I Longed for a New World": Colonial Hysteria, The American, and Henry James's Paris

The focus of this essay is James's "Americano-European" legend, located as an object of nostalgia and as a primal scene of conquest and contrast, reiterated in James's global/ "international" spaces. More precisely, this reading centers on the insistently colonial script in The American, correlated with a psychoanalytical approach to the "hysterical body" (Ender), extrapolated here to include the foreign land. Using this joint approach, my paper proposes the notion of "colonial hysteria" as a major mode of constructing and relating to the space of otherness which, ultimately, is revealed as already buried under a narration of exile simulating, and rehearsing, return.

Masking the horror of trauma: the hysterical body of Lon Chaney

Masking the horror of trauma: the hysterical body of Lon Chaney

Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The World Is a Scandal 1. Reconfiguring the Body: Anagrams of Anatomy 2. The Hermaphrodite in Me 3. The Hysterical Body 4. Return to the Enchanted Garden of Childhood Chronology Appendix: Selected Writings by Hans Bellmer Notes Bibliography Index

Towards an interpersonal understanding of bodily experience

This paper attempts to understand the interpersonal nature of bodily experience. It explores the way the body symptoms we meet in the consulting room, and in everyday life, express and communicate disturbances in our relationships with others. The article seeks to understand how others that are close to us can really get under our skins. The work of the philosopher of the body, MerleauPonty, findings from contemporary developmental psychology, recent psycho-biological studies and psychoanalytic insights are all drawn upon as a way of offering an introduction to contemporary developments in thinking and research on the body. The article explores the interdependence of body and environment. In particular, the body is always in an interpersonal context with others. Bodies are interdependent; communication is first and foremost bodily. Bodily behaviour and biological functions develop in the context of a relationship. The relationship with the other influences the formation of bodily processes and actions. Clinical examples are drawn upon to illustrate how interpersonal disturbances in development are expressed in bodily symptoms. The difference between a hysterical and psychosomatic body symptom is also briefly addressed.

Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body

Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body

Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, and: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (review)

Reviewed by: Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, and: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations Felicia McCarren (bio) Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. xiii + 295 pp. $49.95, $19.75 paper. Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xii + 327 pp. $29.95. Ventriloquized Bodies is two books in one: a welcome feminist rereading of nineteenth-century French novels (including the less-read work of women writers Louise Colet and Rachilde) in relation to the contemporary history of gynecology, and a more problematic presentation of medical texts that influenced and absorbed them. Beizer notes in her introduction that this book both is and is not about hysteria: although she understands the medical and cultural slipperiness of the term, she focuses exclusively on the “uterine theory,” which connects hysteria to the womb from Hippocrates through the nineteenth century. Using anatomy as the model for all nineteenth-century medical science (Foucault oblige!), Beizer critiques the essentialism and misogyny of the medical establishment—caricaturing Charcot, for example (in a misreading of a late remark), for his attribution of hysteria to “la chose génitale.” The qualifying “dans des cas pareils” (“in such cases”)—Charcot was referring to a particular case of frigidity in marriage—escapes Beizer’s usually sharp eye. The misreading is telling. Beizer is at her best when tracing the metaphoric and metonymic links, in fiction, between hysteria, the female sex, reproduction, fluids, fetish, voice, and irony. Hysteria is thought to be provoked by, and expressed as, a pathological femininity. It is a “ventriloquized” discourse in which the hysteric’s body is separated from her voice, and dubbed by a male narrator. Focusing on the aestheticization of hysteria in the novels of the age, which she calls “hystericization,” Beizer finds that distinctions between fiction and medical texts disappear. She [End Page 125] argues that narrative developments in French writing of the period, in particular the impersonal “free indirection” of Flaubert, find support in the ventriloquism embodied by the hysteric. Narrative and medical texts resemble one another as both express a pervasive ideology located in an invisible but all-controlling narrator. The book’s focus on the connection between body and discourse in the writing of hysteria is both its most original and its most limiting factor. Beizer’s intriguing move from anatomy to discourse could be fleshed out: her argument about the overlapping of female genitalia and the larynx in the cultural imagination relies heavily on the visual resemblance between them in one anatomical drawing published in 1865. No contemporary medical illustration of the genitalia is offered for comparison, and there is no discussion of the problem of visual resemblance in medical representations of the period. Many of the medical illustrations from this period that I have seen—for example, in the pages of Le progrès médical, the journal of the Paris École de Médecine—looked like something else. The connections Beizer is making between medicine, culture, and image need to be explored further. Rather than attributing meaning to the hysteric’s silent semiosis of gesture and symptom (as did “surrealists and doctors”), Beizer believes the nineteenth-century hysterical body is the mute mouthpiece of male-dominated culture and medicine. But if the “hyperbolically loquacious” hysterics are silenced in Beizer’s text, it is partly because she has chosen neither to include interviews and testimony of Salpêtrière patients, nor to valorize as a language their somatic code, and the way in which medicine, itself a science of interpretation, attempted its decoding. The crucial question here—who validates hysterical expression and why—is unfortunately relegated to a footnote: whose hand turns the faucet through which hysterical discourse pours? “This is admittedly not an easy hand to find. Does it represent language? Culture? Power? Are all three the same thing?” (p. 54). This is at the very heart of Beizer’s investigation, and yet her book ultimately says little about the confluence of language, culture, and power in medicine; nor about the practices, instruments, and institutions that make it, in Bruno Latour’s term, a...

Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body The ‘pathos formula’ as an aesthetic staging of psychiatric discourse — a blind spot in the reception of Warburg

Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body The ‘pathos formula’ as an aesthetic staging of psychiatric discourse — a blind spot in the reception of Warburg