Hatred and Forgiveness

Beyond the various definitions and categories of hysteria, Freud already leaves us with a certain coherence of the psychoanalytical conception of this ailment: crossed identifications and the prevalence of repression, at play in the oedipal conflict and the oral and phallic registers. We know, moreover, that, starting mainly with “conversion hysteria” and “defense hysteria,” Freud not only works out his central conception of an unconscious, which he situates as an “other scene” at the heart of psychical life, but also notions such as “phantasm,” “symptom,” and “word-presentation/thing-presentation.” Following the work on hypnosis, the analyses of hysterics attest to another relationship of the subject to reality, thanks to the new Freudian conceptualization. And although the link between hysteria and memory had long been observed (I will return to some of Freud’s famous definitions regarding this), analytical thought today has still not sufficiently centered its exploration of hysteria on the fact that, if “reality” is modified in the hysteric, this modification goes hand in hand with a modified time.

Now, it has recently been noted that memory disorders are designated as the major manifestation of this affliction in psychopathological works on hysteria. I will not discuss the distinction between “hysterical personality” and “hysterical symptom” here, but I will mention two nosographic features, to start with, highlighted by the DSM-III-R: somatization and dissociative states.²

Although we are currently witnessing a veritable explosion of hysterical nosography (certain researchers distinguish no fewer than ten groups of symptoms, relying on at least twenty-five distinctive traits, and the DSM-III-R, mentions more than twelve complaints under the heading “somatization”), the temporal criterion seems to stand out for a number of observers as essential in characterizing hysteria.

Thus dissociative states are related to psychogenic amnesias,³ and I agree with the authors who do not establish a structural difference between these dissociative states and somatizations.

As for me, I would like to interpret these assertions in light of Freudian theory and my clinical experience. I will base my remarks on three studies I have devoted to the problems related to today’s subject: “Countertransference: A Revived Hysteria,” “The Scandal of the Timeless,” and “On the Extraneousness of the Phallus; or, the Feminine Between Illusion and Disillusion.”⁴

It would seem hysterical amnesia translates an intense drive-related conflict that affects the functioning of thought but is rooted in the mother-child primary coexcitation, which in the hysterical subject does not require an elaborative value of seduction but a traumatic value.

I would emphasize the fact that this traumatism of the “primary maternal” cannot be approached directly, but only through an analytical consideration of hysterical thought in its “dissociative,” “extraneous,” indeed, “hypnotic” aspects.

These reflections will lead me to four scenarios (among others) in which hysterical time is manifested—the amnesiac dissociative state, somatization, the “scene,” and passivation. I will conclude with a few questions about the notions of the unconscious and time.

Oriane came to see me one year after her brother died in a car accident. She seemed serene but phobic and planned to leave her job as a special education teacher in Belgium to start a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and start psychoanalysis in Paris. The analysis broached her difficult relationship with her father, as well as her mother, not to mention her grandparents, who sent her money to support her in Paris; we also dealt with the vagaries of academic competition and, above all, tensions in the relationship Oriane had formed with José, her former supervisor in Belgium. Oriane’s controlled narrative, which seemed to expect nothing from me, filled each session unfailingly and contrasted with the stifled tone of her voice, breathless and marked by silent gasping, which I perceived as a sob.

It took a long time to formulate the strange dichotomy that Oriane’s speech offered me: a sort of “dissociative disorder” and the copresence of two personalities. “I lack a single personality,” she would tell me later. One of them launched into a quest for knowledge in full rational control, the other wept for the brother who was killed. No allusion to this brother, or death, ever entered the discourse explicitly. When certain complaints due to José’s painful “absences” or “disappearances” seemed to reactivate the latent depressive state, I mentioned the loss of her brother in my interpretation; I went so far as to associate Oriane’s almost constant gasping for breath with “what happens when one grieves for a dead person.” Oriane reluctantly agreed but never spoke of the accident again, or the memories of twenty years spent with her brother, except to evoke scenes where she found herself alone, in conflict with both her parents: as if her brother had always been gone.

Today we have a tendency to describe hysteria as a state of psychical dissociation (“dissociative disorder”) distinct from psychotic Spaltung (or, splitting) and different from confused states. Some authors report cases of hysterical patients with a “double personality”—the rigorous student of the morning and the prostrate depressive of the afternoon, for example, struggling against deep sexual and narcissistic traumatism.⁵ Oriane presented this sort of dissociation, but synchronically, so to speak: on the couch she was two people at the same time—a highly capable intellectual and a depressed sister. This simultaneous dissociation, manifested by both registers of her speech (on the one hand, the meaning of the narrative, on the other, intonation, breath), was based on a selective memory disorder (“memory gap,” “lost memory”).⁶ Not that Oriane forgot about the death of her brother; she simply couldn’t remember it—but what did this simplicity consist of? The impossibility of remembering rather than recognition: apparently it was not a disorder in the encoding of information—though some of Oriane’s very emotional states might have suggested that. Nevertheless, the otherwise intact mental functioning suggested that Oriane was not suffering from a foreclosure of the reality of her brother’s death, but from a memory gap due to the “negative attention” focused on the brother’s accident. I could only speculate on the passionate causes for this psychogenic amnesia, because nothing would prompt Oriane to reveal the time of this death or, beyond that, the dead time that twenty years of her life with her brother had become since.

The value of this Freudian assertion on the timelessness of the unconscious, which continues to raise questions, is multiple, and I have tried to tackle this in a more theoretical way elsewhere. Here I would like to underscore that “the unconscious ignores time” is also an observation Freud owes to hysterics’ paradoxical relationship with time—hysterics being the favored objects of his observations at the beginning of the analytic discovery—as well as to the dissociative state covering a psychogenic amnesia (the case of Oriane) and the somatization (to which I will return) that still characterizes hysterical nosography.

I propose the hypothesis that hysterical amnesia is a major figure of the Zeitlos (the timeless), probably the first Freud discovered in hypnosis. Hysterical amnesia breaks through the linearity of conscious time (the linear time of thought), through the afflux of contrary drives and their presymbolic offshoots: the semiotic (infralanguage: rhythms, alliteration, breath, vocal gestures, cries, digestive and respiratory spasms, and so on) and sensations, thus tying the unconscious to the biological.⁹

When Charcot describes hysterical paralysis as an “ideal” paralysis, because, he says, the “idea of movement is already the movement,” the “idea of the absence of movement, if it is strong, is already motor paralysis realized”;¹⁰ when Janet explains morbid thought as a “narrowing of the field of consciousness,” we are dealing with the how of the symptom. By digging under the phenomenon before and elsewhere—in infantile memory and drive-related experience—Freud unveils the why: it is traumatic memory that generates the hysterical symptom; “the hysteric suffers from reminiscences.”

Perhaps it is now possible to associate these two currents of interpretation—the “why” of Freud and the “how” of Charcot/Janet—to account for this paradoxical temporality that characterizes hysterical states (beginning with “dissociative states,” “conversion,” and I would add the “scene” and “passivization”). To simplify, let’s say that, as a result of the drive-related conflict that traumatizes the psychical apparatus, the hysterical ego opts for one “idea” instead of another: the ego forgets one of the agents of the conflict, and so with the agent goes the act; the hysteric forgets their time. This defensive amnesia adheres to a fragment of the field of consciousness and the preconscious (Charcot’s “ideas”), considered inoffensive; but it leaves intact the drive-related motions mobilized in the traumatic conflict that take the regressive path of the primary process (in Oriane the infralinguistic expressions of mourning and suffering through sobbing). The time of the subject is thus found selectively amputated from the intense time of the trauma and therefore the analogous passionate states, more or less distanced from the major traumatism. The subject is literally in a passionate timelessness while still proving capable of conscious, social activities, intact and thus temporal, but that, deprived of this drive-related substratum, take on a somnolent or histrionic appearance.

I would add that this temporal dissociation is accentuated in the woman because of the specificity of her phallic phase and her oedipal phase, which I have written about elsewhere.¹¹ Though the female subject, like every subject, in order to be a subject, measures herself by phallic desire, the trial of castration, and the murder of the father, the little girl experiences this access to the phallic and/or the symbolic in a strange, foreign, illusory way. Due to her privileged link (negative or positive, but privileged nonetheless) with the “primary maternal” and the “mother-baby coexcitation” prior to the pleasure principle,¹² the phallic, oedipal, and symbolic parameters of subjectivity are connoted in her from a coefficient of “illusion” and “extraneousness.” From then on, the little girl and the woman will “play the game,” often better than men, but not without a disenchanted distance that can result in the women who fascinated Hegel (women as the “eternal irony of the community”) as well as cold technocrats, machinelike “managers” obsessed with power and devoid of reverie.

When the hysteric invests thought (access to which is ultimately consolidated by the phallic and the oedipal), this thought does not necessarily take on the split aspect of the “false self” or even the “as if” personality. However, due to lost passionate time, hysterical thought presents itself as a defense, whereas more exactly it is dissociation that is the very structure of hysteria. Suddenly, terms like inauthentic, false time, and ignored time come to the analyst when hearing this thought produced by the dissociative state, which Oriane exhibited in a paroxysmal way. Yet a certain analytical listening that would too quickly describe this hysterical (amnesiac) thought as a “defense” or “false self,” to immediately target the forgotten/dissociated drive-related conflict, risks a countertransference that is itself defensive and that underestimates the libidinal value of this amnesiac dissociation, which, understood this way, can reveal itself to be a fertile seam in the unfolding of analysis.

It is this amnesiac thought and its false time oblivious to lost passionate time that the analyst should, in my opinion, start from—and not from the trauma itself, which remains dissociated and unapproachable—to have a chance at accessing the personal drama, and, only later in the cure, move toward its working out. The hysteric who suffers from reminiscences and ignores time confronts us with thought that has lost the time of passion. And we should take this amnesiac thought, if not as true than at least as likely, pretending in order to mask the real, because it carries with it the offshoots of the passionate unconscious, still entrenched in the timelessness of passion itself. Dissociated offshoots, certainly, but it is up to us to hear them in their double adherence: to the apparent defensive ego and to the hidden forgotten ego. In other words, analytical listening (transference and countertransference) should be able to revive this mad forgotten/dissociated passion by respecting the protective speech of the trauma, which is very different from a hystericization-dramatization of the cure. The difference consists in the fact that listening and interpretation closely follow hysterical thought as it presents itself in its specificity—by which I mean its “falseness,” its “hallucinated truth”—and, by taking this dissociation seriously, threading through its labyrinths, will in the long run bring about the forgotten time of the traumatic passion. If the analyst does not play the game of dissociated/amnesiac thought, if he does not take it seriously, without holding to it exclusively but also without underestimating it, if he doesn’t start down its meanders patiently, neither true nor false but likely—it is to be feared that the hysteric, through an intellectual and/or cognitive tendency toward histrionics, will seduce the master/analyst over whom she aspires to reign, and analysis will become interminable and therefore unsuccessful.

Psychoanalysis is a clinic-and-theory of the sexuality/thought copresence. This does not only mean that we analyze the unconscious drive-related conditions of the advent of thought and its accidents; it means that we constantly work out the models for a stratified (heterogeneous) psychical apparatus whose thought is subtended, set in motion, or checked by plural logics, to the point of a “remainder” of an unrepresentable excitability, a “biological rock.”

Let’s not forget that Freud invented the specific temporality of the unconscious and that of the cure in counterpoint to the dissociated temporality of the hysteric. I encourage you to consider this proximity—analytical time/ hysterical time—for a moment in light of Bergson.¹³ He defined abstract time, in which the consciousness of the speaking being lives as “a succession of immobile sections,” opposing it to duration. Now, this “abstract time” cut up into immobile sections, which seems to be the ordinary time of everyone, finds its fixed and grimacing expression in hysterical temporality. In fact, it is in the amnesiac thought of hysteria and in its hypnotic temporality that time presents itself in immobile sections (think of our analysands’ various “scenes,” “conversions,” or “selective memories”), immobilized as they are by the passionate suffering whose sadomasochism goes back to the crazy link to the crazy mother,¹⁴ which maintains itself outside time.

The analytic interpretation, on the contrary, is placed on a “vector” (Bion) by its listening, so that it continues to hear the open totality of the various times the hysteric dissociates and immobilizes. From then on, analytic interpretation does not oppose abstract and/or hypnotic time but rather affixes to it a new temporality it introduced into modern culture: analytic time. Always open to the timeless, the time of analytic listening, in Bergsonian terms, would be the time of “movement as mobile sections.” But how do we go from a “succession of immobile sections” to “movement as mobile sections”? The analyst has no other means to open the “immobile sections” of dissociative states than to mobilize the series of unconscious or unrepresentable dissociated passions in transference as well as countertransference. This mobility, tuned in to a well-tempered countertransference, constitutes the “qualitative change” of the analytical process, which sometimes—rarely, but it shouldn’t be excluded!—allows the hysteric to emerge from dissociation/somatization and restores to him/her the mobility of duration. Do we need to emphasize the fact that this passage from the immobile to the mobile, from abstract time to duration, is to be handled with caution? If not, the hysteric quickly takes herself for the analyst, indeed, for analysis itself. And there she is, an established member of some society, continuing to control the hypnosis, and, above all, not allowing herself to be threatened by duration!

Oriane’s dead brother was named Christian, and though she only uttered his name once, at our first meeting, I for one did not forget that it was on my couch, Kristeva’s couch, that Oriane allowed her sobs to pour forth from a time other than the time of her speech—sobs accompanied by tears that literally flooded the pillow at each session, though the content of the patient’s speech was perfectly controlled and in no way dramatic. Moreover, during the rare exchanges we had standing up, to schedule changes or vacation time at the end of the session, Oriane abruptly effaced the mourner to become suddenly and perfectly serene, showing me her other, controlled, superegolike ego, free of sobs.

This young girl’s amnesiac thought, which unfolded in her narrative (again, dissociated from the sob), was not necessarily intellectualizing or flatly operational. Oriane rarely spoke of her studies, while suggesting the importance she accorded them; she did not speak of her accomplishments or competition with women, as I have heard from other female patients. With the mental and emotional control of a very mature little girl, she conducted the anamnesis of the oedipal triangle: a “drab, insignificant but authoritarian” mother, a father who was “a good guy, clearly a skirt chaser, but no one talked about it, those things aren’t discussed in Belgium,” her maternal grandparents, especially the grandmother who “spent her time reading” and whose distant tenderness and bourgeois distinction became a model for the little girl early on. Very quickly in analysis, the attention I call amnesiac in Oriane (because it was accompanied by the tearful nonattention brought to bear on her brother) became fixed on the anality of the father and the daughter.

The family’s last name lent itself to scatological connotations, and with repugnance Oriane mentioned her father’s anus, the “dirtiness” of a Don Juan doubled by the impression of “uncleanness” and “bad odors” that had “always disgusted” her. We might think of Melanie Klein’s thesis, according to which the girl’s superego is more forceful than the boy’s due to her greater tendencies to introject and keep the father’s penis within, even if it is bad, and this starting with the oral period, but more certainly still in the anal period, by confusing the vagina and the anus.¹⁵

A dream from this period: Oriane is in her bathtub, she is very small, perhaps even a baby, her mother is giving her a bath. It was “a state of grace,” but suddenly the dreamer notices that her father is sitting on the toilet and defecating; horrified, Oriane wakes up. After my interpretation, “a dirty guy,” she went on to her relationship with José, her ex-supervisor. I understood at the end of many sessions saturated with obsessional details concerning their meetings—the male and female friends they had in common, professional and affective complicities—that José was a married man, that he was black, and that he treated Oriane with brutality, but that she found him “less banal” (sic) than other men she had known, especially since José was very impressed by Oriane’s study of philosophy.

The sadomasochistic link of inferiority-superiority with the father/man was displaced onto me during this phase of analysis. Another dream of Oriane’s: walking in an unidentified city, which may have been Brussels, or a foreign, unfamiliar city that looked German, or perhaps even Eastern European. An old lady slips into a puddle of mud, which Oriane sees from behind, and she rushes to help her get up and wipe off “the filth she is completely covered in.” Then she sees the face of the old woman: “It was you,” she told me; “Pretty ragged-looking, I must say,” she added unkindly, an exceptional respite between two sobs. I said: “A dirty woman the way there are dirty men? Or else a tender grandmother?” She went on to discuss the fear she had of seeing her grandmother die soon, because for the past few months the old booklover had been afflicted with a serious illness, which was catastrophic, because, as I learned then, it was the grandmother who paid for Oriane’s analysis (Oriane had depleted all her funds and no longer gave lessons). Manipulated manipulator, the dissociated personality Oriane delegated to me on the couch included transference in the same logic of the anal manipulation that underlay the elegant presentation of her thought and allowed her to assert a certain control over … me, her mother, her grandmother, and a large part of her history. This, while nevertheless allowing herself access to certain aspects of her unconscious. Though dominated by the superego, this dissociated and amnesiac part of the hysterical personality is not reduced to it and acts as a complex entity with its own ego and its own id. I will come back to the superegolike dominant assuring her solidity.

We were completing the third year of analysis, when Oriane announced that she had received her master’s degree with honors and that her adviser had suggested she be published. “You will be an author, a name,” was my interpretation, which could be understood in transference-countertransference as well as in her phallic aspirations of symbolic control. Oriane went on: “My father was afraid that our name would die out with the death of Christian; that was more painful to him than the death itself. Now, thanks to me, the name will live on.” I heard her brother’s first name for the second time, a name so close to my own last name, followed—finally—by the account of the accident Oriane had repressed, or rather dissociated, all these years.

I will never forget this session: the change in tone, the gradual disappearance of the sob that would never return, and the detailed, though confused, account of events. I learned that Christian went to Spain with family friends in a car and was seated next to the driver. The exact circumstances of the collision with a truck would never be clarified; the driver was slightly injured, and Christian was the only fatality. Breathing normally, Oriane declared it “a suicide.” Since the description she had just given me did not seem to justify this conclusion, I repeated: “A suicide.” Then came the story, jumbled, angry, agitated—which took up several sessions—of the relations between the brother and sister.

At the time of the accident, Christian was twenty, and Oriane twenty-two. They were a twosome, like “twins,” she said. “People confused us, especially since I looked like a boy and he sort of looked like a girl, but not the way you think, just very delicate, very sensitive.” The idyll ended one year before the accident: Christian began to go out with a friend of Oriane’s. “I realized that I found my brother’s penis disgusting, his face had become obscene, something salacious.” I thought of the anal father, the “dirty guy.” She said: “I told him he disgusted me. I was disgusted with myself for not seeing what he really was until then. I was afraid of being like him, afraid that people would see me the way I saw him. I told him that, in his place, I would commit suicide.” I said: “He didn’t commit suicide, but, in his place, you would have committed suicide.” Oriane told me she didn’t know why she had spoken to me about Christian’s suicide. Logically, it was impossible, of course, and to be honest she had never thought of it, but she felt very bad after the accident and had “a sort of fugue,” fleeing to her grandmother’s house and not speaking to anyone for three months. A psychiatrist placed her on sick leave for six months. Oriane had not mentioned any of this to me until now, because she had emerged from it, id had erased itself, she never spoke of it to anyone, not to her mother, obviously, who was beside herself with grief, “and there was no way we could utter the name Christian in front of her; as for speaking about it to you, that did not present itself.” I thought perhaps “that did not present itself,” because Oriane was afraid and ashamed of her passionate ego, identified with the brother, at once beloved and disgusting, a desiring phallic ego, both desirable and menacing; because another part of her ego was still in “fugue” on the couch itself, by “forgetting” Christian; because she wanted to protect me—the way they protected mama at home—from the drama and the risk the girl who so identified with her brother ran in turn of being carried away by death, this time no longer accidental but suicidal.

Starting with this session, Oriane gave me the impression of emerging from hypnosis. For almost four years after her brother’s accident, she had subjected herself—as the hypnotized woman submits to the will of the hypnotizer—to an “ideal” or at least “second” image that was not suggested to her from the outside (as in a session of hypnosis) but from a dissociated part of her personality, which had taken the upper hand, attracting all the attention to a certain reality and ejecting the fraternal passion in the amnesia of the sob. Oriane was emerging from a self-hypnosis.

The Oriane of the first part of analysis, dominating the sob through her hypnotic thought based on anality, made me think of the patient under hypnosis discussed by Charcot: “The ideas imposed under these conditions (those of hypnosis), deprived of control over this aggregate of ideas that we call the ego, can, thanks to the one who has brought them into being, acquire an extreme intensity, an almost limitless power, as often takes place in our dreams.”¹⁶

Translation: The ideas imposed on Oriane by her dissociative state (equivalent to hypnosis) can, thanks not to the hypnotizer but to the anal personality of Oriane herself (controlled, realistic, following the introjection of the paternal penis), acquire an extreme intensity, an almost limitless power, as often takes place in our dreams.

Yet we emerged from the “power” of the first Oriane, amnesiac regarding Christian, evolving in a refashioned memory, like a dream or hypnosis, but assuming the appearance of normative and realistic behavior and thought; and we entered another “dream”—in the time of twin passion, evacuated until then. It was not long after crossing this passionate lost time that we could rejoin the archaic antecedents that predisposed Oriane to becoming a hysterical personality with “dissociative states.”

Thus I would say hypnosis is the hysteric’s natural state—though it might seem paradoxical, because we all know that late-nineteenth-century psychiatry induced hypnotic states in hysterical subjects with the goal of getting them to emerge from amnesia and access forgotten memory. I suppose even Freud was no stranger to this way of seeing things, when he renounced hypnosis as a means of therapy: indeed, he wrote that his patients were in “self-hypnosis”¹⁷—implying that it was not necessary to add “suggestion” through the intermediary of a hypnotizer. Psychoanalysis would be born precisely from this move away from hypnosis and self-hypnosis. By relying on hysterical self-hypnosis, from Studies on Hysteria to Dora’s homosexuality and the maternal link hidden there,¹⁸ and “analysis terminable and interminable,”¹⁹ Freud traces a path that traverses hypnosis and ends up in properly analyticalduration: that of the verbal act of free association caught in transference/countertransference, which, though insufficiently theorized and not without evoking the skepticism of Freud himself, ends up seeming to be the only thing likely to extract the hysterical subject from his/her dissociative states.

The “umbilical” aspect of Oriane’s second dream regarding the “dirty old woman”—which marked the third phase of analysis—was, as you might imagine, the symbiotic state of the baby Oriane with her mother, before the birth of Christian. This archaic temporality that Freud suggests through the metaphor of the “Minoan-Mycenaen” civilization—and that, while common to both sexes, is more intense in the girl—is not necessarily the peace of “being” Winnicott speaks of: the supposed serenity of the “is” of the breast/ego prior to the tension of all drives that “do” (i.e., the opposition between “being”/“doing”).²⁰ The biexcitation of Oriane and her mother, as the baby bit the breast of the woman who took refuge in her daughter to flee an unfaithful husband, made me think more of the “ruthless love” (Winnicott) that somehow, for the daughter and for the mother, is as absolute as it is merciless. This possession—source of an endogenous²¹ madness in every nonpsychotic person—is worked out during the phallic phase, through the oedipal, and. thanks to the superego, in sadomasochism, the desire of knowing and the development of thought that construct conscious time. I support that, in the hysteric, the merciless passion of the Minoan-Mycenaen maternal link threatens conscious and/or temporal reality in the form of these dissociative states in which traumatic psychosexual conflicts are fated to amnesia, inasmuch as they are tributaries of their prototype, the crazy link to the crazy mother.

Oriane’s mother had to have surgery, because her breast had gotten infected (that, at least, was the story), and Oriane had become a real “vomiter”: anything, certain foods, being jolted in the car, could prompt her to empty the contents of her stomach, preferably on her father’s jacket; he got in the habit of carrying another, a “spare,” just in case … This continued with the birth of the little brother, and it was only when Oriane was assured that she was the true leader of the pair, the “boy manqué” of the family who clearly dominated the truth, that the vomiting was absorbed in the rivalry with “dirty men.”

The mother, crazy about her daughter (or son—I will return to this with Charles, another analysand), is neither psychotic nor phallic, nor even seriously depressed. Certainly frustrated or somewhat depressive, she invests her child-penis with a possessive passion that makes up for her own castration, which the little girl (or boy) keeps engraved in an unconscious that is outside representation, outside time: the notion of the unconscious itself becomes problematic, though it is worked out in listening to hysteria, inciting thoughts of an extrapsychical somatic excitation that cannot be represented.

The superego and thought, as J.-L. Donnet recently described, are defenses against depression, issued from identifications as much as from the id.²² The superego punishes a fault to spare itself the distress of loss and, by “delimiting the site of self-destruction,” also allows the virtuality of an appeal to the object whose correlate, I would add, is the functioning of thought: culpability saves thought, though not without endangering it, sooner or later. The thought and superego of the hysteric are particular in that they must also “delimit the site of self-destruction” vis-à-vis mad love, the ruthless love of the crazy mother. Hysterical thought is constituted precisely by utilizing the play of primary processes (displacement, condensation) as well as secondary processes, provided they are based on dissociation: by rejecting ruthless love outside representation and outside time. In short, the hysteric’s superego delimits the site of self-destruction by means of self-hypnosis and/or amnesia.

The hysterical fixation on the penis and the paternal anal penis, source of disgust, fear, and fascination, is parallel to the investment of thought. This hysterical thought with strong superegolike connotations is then experienced as an internal extraneousness, because incorporated and indispensable to the subject so as to delimit the site of self-destruction carved out by the archaic link to the mother. One could argue that the paternal penis, like thought, is always already there and that, by biting the maternal breast and vomiting, it is already the paternal penis that Oriane desires and attacks to take its place with the mother. Though I accept this “always already there” of triangulation, I think that the (male or female) hysteric confronts us with a particular version of it. The hysterical subject conserves sensorial prelinguistic traces (thus, anterior to the “idea,” as Charcot would say, but also anterior to the representation of things or words), intense sensorial traces of the link with the mother. In relation to these traces, the penis, as the representative of the desirable object as well as thought, takes on the value of precocious counterinvestments, but counterinvestments just the same. A dissociation occurs, early on, between this aspect of desire, on the one hand, and sensoriality, on the other, with its substratum of drive-related representatives. The hysterical subject desires the penis and/or thought, and acquires them, but is swallowed up by the maternal receptacle that this penis gratifies or attacks. The phantasm of a phallic mother or a sadistic mother who “beats a child” is born of the subsequent guilt of having left behind this body-receptacle in order to desire the father. In other words, the phantasm of the phallic mother or sadistic mother is a montage of the superego that establishes a logical order (active/passive, master/slave, etc.), which is fanciful and imaginary but satisfies fear and desire. This phantasmatic order replaces the initial coexcitation of mother and baby, without representation of objects, even partial, and the wild disorder of which depended on the incompleteness of the baby (biological destiny) and love deprived of a third party, the ruthless love borne by this mother who is crazy about her offspring (“Minoan-Mycenaen” violence).

In adolescence Oriane replayed the Minoan-Mycenaen devouring in a bisexual rivalry with her brother; with the help of adolescent drives she also elaborated the breaking and entering undergone/inflicted with the primary maternal object that found itself transposed by the adolescent phantasm into this well-known dramatic scene where we find the phallic mother and androgynous identity. Alas, the death of her phallic double had brutally shattered the narcissistic and phallic totality in which Oriane had managed to translate—without sticking to it too closely—the primary coexcitation. Thought had survived this accident, but the primary passion reexperienced in the identification with Christian had imploded and ejected itself from the conscious realm. The hysteric forgets the real passions that nevertheless continue to consume her, and she is not only pretending to be somewhere else: she really is somewhere else—verisimilarly somewhere else. “Being somewhere else” is indispensable to her precisely in order to safeguard this psychical apparatus constituted as a result of phallicism, the oedipal, and superegolike investments, which certainly do not measure up to the Minoan-Mycenaen attraction, but that endure, because, regardless of Freud, who suspected women of an inaptitude to the superego; the more the superego is false the more perched it is on coexcitation and … sure!

Conversion is an event that divides time: by dividing the story of the hysteric, conversion cuts itself off and rejoins the timelessness of dissociative states by somatic means. I consider conversion amnesia incarnate, and so I will not adhere to the distinction the DSM-III makes between the “hysteria of somatization” and “hysteria of dissociative states.” For me, both obey the same “negative attention” that aims to push away a drive-related conflict linked to psychical bisexuality that is rooted in a traumatic relationship with the primary maternal.

Albertine complained of a complete lack of memory—she claimed to forget everything, which, she said, was problematic at work and, she added provocatively, risked making analysis impossible. Selective memory trouble, if there ever was, which I noticed after five years of analysis, when I took a trip to Israel that forced me to rearrange our schedule temporarily. Albertine’s mother lived in Israel, and my patient told me she was a survivor of Auschwitz—a little girl who had escaped a raid and been sent abroad by cousins—while Albertine’s grandparents must have died in Auschwitz. Albertine did not like stories: she had chosen images, because “it’s immediate, you either get it or you don’t, right away, there’s no padding,” and she hated psychoanalysts’ explanations, which she was familiar with because her sister was a “shrink”: “These people give you all the causes, but tell you nothing about the event: why does a teenager suddenly start shooting into a crowd or run away; that’s what counts—not the before or the after.”

Albertine’s “event” wavered for a long time between headaches, sore throats, and stomachaches but finally settled on abdominal pains, apparently uterine. Tensions, anxiety, a sense of abandonment, then of revenge, of anger turned inward: “A force goes through me, I’m on the verge of coming, but I never really come, either with a woman or a man”—Albertine said she was bisexual—“only with my vibrator; but when it comes over me, the pain, I mean, there’s no way I can think about the vibrator, I feel nauseous, then pain transfixes me like a knife pushing into my stomach.” This sort of painful erection sometimes lasted hours: Albertine’s time was literally punctuated by this anal phallic thrust that resisted the unconscious phantasm of being the boy of the family, the mother’s little page/lover; just as Albertine resisted envy over her pregnant sister’s stomach; phantasm and jealousy that analysis made conscious without however lifting the somatization. “Stomachaches like a pregnant woman” (Me). “You’re the one who says so; I don’t care about that” (Albertine, indifferent). “A tension in my entrails” (Albertine); I repeat her words: “A woman with a hard-on.” “I wouldn’t say no, but I prefer breasts to the penis, I’ve already told you a thousand times” (Albertine, annoyed).

Along with others,²³ I believe there is a not only masochistic impulse but a sadomasochistic one in the girl when she leaves the primary homosexual relationship in order to invest the father in the progression toward the oedipal. In fact, in the course of her passage from the mother to the father, the girl is at the apex of her sadistic-anal drives and sets up sadomasochistic scenarios with the mother: the aggressive desire to leave the mother, to disengage from the hold of the anal mother, generates guilt and sadistically mobilizes the anal penis of the girl as well as her phantasmatic phallus, which then becomes a uterus. The tension of the uterus, on lease from the colon (the “vagina on lease from the anus”),²⁴ participates in this drive-related montage that remains timeless (Zeitlos)—preceding the phallic/symbolic identification and the benefit of temporal thought that results from it. So much so that, as we have noted, the girl who becomes a boy phantasmatically protects the father from his own anxieties of castration (Albertine’s father lived in the family home with a childhood friend, “just a friend, a very timid man”), while avoiding the culpability of incest with the father and posing as the idealized homosexual object of this same father—and not only as the homosexual and heterosexual object of the mother.

The conversion-event must have lasted until the conflict with the little sister analyst was actualized in transference (in a dream Albertine planted a knife in this unfortunate girl’s throat), and Albertine mentalized her ambivalence toward me under the aspect of a threat of suicide: since I could do nothing for her (I didn’t love her), there was nothing left for Albertine to do but commit suicide. “You’re hesitating between penetrating me with your knife or punishing me by destroying yourself.” Albertine did not let me go so easily. Missed sessions, threats of suicide, confused e-mails: but the somatic symptom was on the way to disappearing.

A dream she related at the end of this depressive phase shows the psychical working out that introduces psychical time instead and in place of conversion. Shortly before her appointment, Albertine suddenly felt weak and had to lie down for a nap. While I was waiting for her, she had this dream: “There was a child, I don’t know what sex it was, it might’ve been a girl, but she was wearing the pants of an Italian page, it looked like from the Renaissance (sic). The child wanted to pee standing up, but the mother said such things weren’t done and prevented it. So the little boy/girl rushed forward, head first, and, like a bomb, blew up the woman’s stomach.” Albertine told me this dream when she came back to see me, after the session she “missed,” during which she had it. I told her that she fell asleep because she needed to know that I was waiting for her; that I was all alone with no baby in my stomach and no one on the couch, and that she could come at her convenience, capricious as a young page, to ram into me and finally let all her anger against her pregnant mother explode. This anger, which until then she only allowed herself to manifest by making her own stomach explode. She laughed, defending herself: “I didn’t tell you the end of the dream. The woman was transformed; instead of exploding, she calmly came back to life. I saw that it was the cousin who had gotten my mother out of Germany, and she was carrying the child I didn’t recognize in the beginning of the dream in her arms, the one I thought was me but that was my mother, a little girl being saved.”

One cannot resent a mother who is an escapee. One cannot even make love to her. One suspends the contrary drives and knots them in one’s own stomach—a love-hate with no object except for the inside. A psychical and prepsychical inside, a pain outside consciousness and outside time. The hysteric decidedly suffers from a dissociation between excitability and its cognitive congruence: to the by-products of this dissociation, Freud gave the name the unconscious.

Odette remembered being a baby who could not hold her head up—she was told this, but thought she remembered it as well, so that at the age of two or three she recalled being “wilted, like a piece of fabric, spineless,” sitting next to her big sister on a train, during one of the family’s “many moves.” I would attribute certain motor difficulties, and notably axial dystonia as well as the backache the hysteric suffers from, to an archaic perception of maternal hypotonia, a corollary to her depressiveness: if the skin marks the borders of the ego, muscle tone and the verticality of the spinal column immediately precondition the autonomy of the subject vis-à-vis the other, and record the failures. “With my mother, it was always like we were communicating vessels: I feel exactly what she feels, though I’m not sure of the opposite. Communicating vessels that only go one way must not exist.” Of her military father, who was blown up in his tank in Indochina when Odette was sixteen, she reports a scene; she held out her hand to make a promise: “I promise to do my homework after our walk.” The military man twisted her fingers as well as her ankle, a gesture that forced the young girl to fall to her knees, and the paternal voice ordered: “You will do what you must!”

Her first analysis ended with a paranoid outburst—Odette described it as “very emphatic, with a silent analyst,” where she interpreted things on her own, “perhaps too much, I understood everything.” “Mr. X (the analyst) had taken my husband’s side, they both treated me like I was crazy, the neighbors whispered behind my back that I was incapable of taking care of my husband, my children; the housekeeper had taken control at home; I was relegated to a corner; I’d been rejected everywhere. X ended up telling me, if that’s the way it was, I could leave his couch as well and stop analysis.” Odette came to see me a few years later, and we began our sessions face to face over the course of two years. The persecutions returned, less frequent than before, as well as scenes like this one, which she told me “afterward”: “I arrived at the country house by car, harried, tired. My husband, who had been there for two weeks, was not waiting for me, had not prepared anything, and had left to visit his sister in a neighboring village. The walls seemed transparent to me, I had no bones, I saw myself sink, I became a puddle of water. That’s when Jean arrived. ‘Still tired, poor dear,’ he said in his condescending way. To him I’m worthless, a nobody. Then I felt the puddle rise up, a hurricane, a tornado, and a voice that tore through my throat; I don’t know what I said to him. I must’ve slammed the door and went to bed. In the morning he said, ‘You’re as crazy as ever.’ That may be so, but now I understood: my scenes are my health, without them I would just be a puddle.”

The overinterpretation favored by the silent cure had demolished the defenses of an ego, its “skin” (Anzieu) uncertain and even its skeleton unable to stand erect. The absence of “transitionality” in transference/ countertransference exposed the patient to her original phantasmatic scenarios, notably the most archaic, persecution. In the aggravating circumstances of such an “emphatic” analysis, hysteria, confronted with uncontained excitation, had yielded to its paranoid foundation: the patient saw herself persecuted by all and sundry and had no other shield against excitation except for the scenes acted and undergone in pairs: with the husband, the analyst, the mother—who ended up merging into the same persecuting paranoid object. Archaic scenes experienced but not made secondary through the copresence of verbal transitionality.

The scene is not an action: whereas an action unfolds in time, the scene involves a sensoriality outside time that is pathos filled—semiotic, in my terminology²⁵—and that mobilizes motility, the voice, gestures, and “thoughts” in quotation marks, extracted from their status as thoughts. Then these “thoughts” are organized by the primary processes and thrown out like bad objects to the persecutors thus persecuted in turn, the patient having the impression of finding security through the elimination of the bad inside as well as outside.

Not without empathy, but through it, we went on to reconstruct a transitionality—explication, mentalization, indeed, theorization—to reconstruct the contours of the ego, beyond the crumbling of the original repression in empathy. The perverse innocence of the destructive empathy the patient experienced in her earlier analysis (“I was precipitated from empathy into an innocent destruction where I talked about everything all by myself”) gradually began to yield to what cannot be called innocence but the pernicious harm of a conflicting formulation.

The transitionality of language in psychoanalysis is different from that of the baby and mother in that, in addition to playing and innocence, there is the added struggle to the death (the work of the negative) between two cognitive strategies that are revealed to be two contradictory desires: that of the analyst and that of the analysand. There is a chance not of avoiding but of voiding the struggle, this drive-related death that is the product of the hallucination that destroys thought. The verbalized interpretation implies a choice between the various meta-psychologies at the analyst’s disposal, a choice that severs and thereby liberates unconscious thought from the traumatic scene where it was stuck.

Charles presented a “photo-obsessional” symptomatology without a characterized obsession. Doubt and inhibition, rather than compulsive rituals, hindered his personal and professional life. He stayed in his relationship for the sake of his child. Charles made a few attempts, without conviction, at relationships with young female colleagues; dabbled in politics; took a writing workshop. Repressed homosexuality and an identification with his mother—“like a deer in the headlights, unprotected,” he said, at the first session—supported this well-defended structure, using analysis “not to touch it.” What? The phallic identification with the father seemed a prosthesis, a “false self” that Charles maintained to keep up appearances, while admitting to me—via his dreams or sometimes by telling me in our sessions about the short stories he was writing in his workshop—his disgust regarding his own castration, which had come to be identified with the disgust once inspired in him by the cloth sanitary napkins spotted with blood that his mother let soak in a basin. A drastic image of his castration, this Charles-as-Bloody-Rag confided a much more profound traumatism than one we might imagine for a little boy abandoned by the mother-deer. “A bloody rag for others to see,” I suggested. Charles continued with a memory: “I’m sick in bed, maybe three or four years old, my mother takes my temperature, I have my legs raised and a thermometer in my butt, she has a neighbor come in and leaves me in this horrible position. I die of shame under this man’s gaze, I don’t dare say a thing.”

Memory-screen or phantasm, the desire and/or horror of being sodomized by this man was attributed to the mother—not so doelike after all, not so castrated as all that, a mother with a phallic thermometer inflicting “bloody” anal castration on a son who suffered doubly: of being identified with feminine castration (the weakness of the doe, the dirtiness of the napkins) and being tormented by the phallic fantasized feminine excitation—both insufferable.

Charles missed several sessions after this memory. When he came back, he spoke to me of “a passive, I would say morbid, state,” during the two weeks he missed his appointments, punctuated by his fear of being attacked by … homosexuals on the train. “The first homosexual who attacked you was your mother,” I said to him. “And you are afraid I will expose you the way she did.” This sentence of the analysis led to important modifications in Charles’s relationships with women. His heterosexuality seemed to become less of a cross to bear.

Both the anal retention and inhibition of the obsessional straddle hysteria. The passion of being the mother’s passive object may be the aberrant madness the obsessional’s inhibition and ritualistic doubt are trying to contain. The subject suffers from the castration of the mother, with whom he confuses himself, but, even more, he suffers from maintaining the belief in the omnipotence of the sadistic phallic mother: a sadomasochistic suffering that is his secret jouissance and that he hopes to preserve against analysis, if need be, by serving as his own analyst (I was fantasized as a phallic woman who could torment him, expose him—especially in my publications). Charles had been through five years of analysis before consulting me, and the dream of the mother with the thermometer only appeared in the fourth year of analysis with me. He needed all that time to be less afraid of telling me that I could be a mother “like that”: he could then include that mother—his own or myself—in the transference narrative, instead of keeping the trauma enclosed in the passivity of his circumspect person, doomed, he believed, to failure. I agree, therefore, with H. Troisier who believes that in the phantasm of “a child is being beaten” the beater is female, and the fear/desire of being penetrated by the mother goes back to the primary coexcitation, later attributed to the anal penis or the penis, quite simply, so to speak, of the mother.

I am less certain that this phantasm in women marks an evolution toward the oedipal, an obligatory passage toward oedipal maturation: many girls, including Albertine, remain fixed in the position of the female homosexual “punished, loved, penetrated by the mother.”²⁶ On the other hand, this fixation on the masochistic position of being beaten/penetrated by the anal penis of the mother commands the failure of the castration complex and induces a hysterical position of passivation of the male subject toward men as well as women: we find it underlying many male obsessional neuroses, and I have tried, in my reading of The Rat Man, to point out the hysterical oral link to the mother, the violence of which is suggested only in Freud’s Journal—but not in the text of the case histories.²⁷

These lead me to a few general remarks, the boldness of which I know I am not the first to express, as many researchers of the SPP (Société psychanalytique de Paris) have already started down this path:

1. The unconscious was invented to relieve the hysteric of the noncongruence between excitability and cognition. By way of this “other scene,” the nontime of the drive is metabolized into representations and primary processes, still outside time but able to be formulated in temporal conscious representations. This always incomplete translatability invites us to understand Freud’s sentence, “Hysteria is linked to the place,”²⁸ not only as a dependence on home, landscape, and setting, but on the maternal place, which is a place of passion. Now consider how Freud’s sentence resonates with this one by Joyce: “Father times, mother spacies.” Here, the space of passion (of the primary maternal) turns into the memory of the species, ontogenesis into phylogenesis. In short, hysteric temporality encourages us to reformulate the unconscious—beyond the timeless drive and its semiotic and sensorial offshoots—by including the prepsychical.

In other words, by listening to hysterical time and other contemporary clinics, a contemporary version of the unconscious appears to be emerging that includes the prepsychical and even Being.²⁹ Far from being the hysteric’s trick of recovery in transference with the master-analyst, this unconscious augments the hysteric, just as the monster characters at the end of Proust’s Time Regained are augmented: the outsize temporalities that are in play create monstrous intimacies. Moreover, and symmetrically, if the analyst’s listening were to be placed in the vortex of this hysterical temporality, the analyst would run the risk of dissociative states. And access to this mad passion that is absorbed, with the serenity due to philosophy, by calling it Being.

2. I have naturally wondered if my personal interest in the crazy link to the crazy mother did not come from the fact that I was spared this configuration, “in favor,” dare I say, of another, destabilizing in other ways: a mother neutralized by her latent phobia and, in addition, split in two, indeed, three, by a lineage of matrons (grandmothers, great-aunts, and so on) in the image of Santa Maria Metterza in the painting by Leonardo analyzed by Freud. To have been satisfied and frustrated by not one, but two or three possible mothers, I am probably impressed by the frightening impact of unique “ruthless love.” As a result, I am among those who consider the emphasis on “the primary maternal” an excessive return of the deus ex machina—when not the goddess-mother—in psychoanalysis. If I have resorted to it, however, it has been to point out that this archaic maternity is not the absolute cause in the ultimate anthropomorphic representability adjoining the other side: the prepsychical/biological. By coming up against the real mother and the phantasm of the phallic or anal mother, hysterical time leads us to the coexcitation of the two primary protagonists. Moreover, beyond their passion, hysterical time leads us to the strictly inhuman components of this excitation. I understand this “passionate primary maternal” in the pure sense Freud attributed to the concept of “metapsychology”: it is the ultimate irrepresentability. Didn’t Freud write to Fliess that he was looking for “a biological—or rather metapsychological—” solution (emphasis mine), the synonyms biological and metapsychological contrasting with the “psychological” solution brought about by “the theory of wish fulfillment”?³⁰

Though forged in transference by the speech of free association, a temporal action, hysteria defies it and checkmates the end of analysis, perhaps even “analyzability,” in a different way than psychosis.Knowing this, the analyst does not disavow metapsychology or the clinic for all that. To those who worry about the end of History, we can say that, since his pact with hysteria, Freud opened another temporality: that of the spacing of Being in the event, which, for the analyst, is nothing other than passionate madness. “Dissociative states” like conversion, scenes, passivations, and other components of the hysteric syndrome testify to the fact that, while threatening desire, thought, and time, it is indeed this madness, not to be confused with psychosis, that constitutes the secret motor of the human condition. Having led Freud to invent the unconscious, hysteria reminds us that the madness of this unconscious can never be explored enough.