Why do I retain attachment to such a famously problematic word, hysteria, when it invites metaphor and messy historical analogy? Rachel Mesch writes that the contemporary feminist answer to the question of hysteria can be summarized through two broad directions:
[The first] examines the gender hierarchy of the medical profession and its victimization of women through history and literature; in this light, the hysteria diagnosis is revealed to have unfairly silenced women who threatened the social order. The other trend takes a more psychoanalytic perspective, seeing hysteria, in Carol Smith-Rosenberg’s terms, as a desperate “flight into illness.” From this perspective radical French feminists like Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, and Luce Irigaray recognize hysteria as a form of female resistance. Irigaray, for example, recognizes the revolutionary potential of the hysteric as a “culturally induced symptom.” Irigaray’s hysteric herself deliberately assumes the feminine role, carrying on a charade of feminized suffering to, in her words “convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus begin to thwart it.”
In everyday use, hysteria still means “uncontrolled or dramatic emotional display,” but in the Lacanian psychoanalysis clinic, the hysteric holds revolutionary potential. It was Lacan who, in his four discourses, set up the hysteric’s discourse as that which can overturn fixity and uncover new lines of inquiry. In a Lacanian clinic, a hysteric diagnosis is far from an affront: as the psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose puts it, “Dissatisfaction is the motor for desire, and desire drives existence. Hysterics specialise at using dissatisfaction to keep desire spinning, acting against atrophy and ossification. Far from trying to get them to stop fussing and get back in line, one might encourage them to take their questioning further, to use it in their lives and work, and to even attempt to enjoy it.” If, as Lacan said, the only distinction between humans and animals is that we are afraid of our shit, the hysteric, unafraid of paradox or truth or shit, can be seen as a seeker, someone who uses her discomforts and dissatisfactions as means to interrogate the Other. The hysteric’s dissatisfaction keeps desire spinning—a preferable interpretation to the body-as-contradiction being problematized.
One need not endorse Freud’s theory of hysteria as unconscious ideas or desire that manifests itself in symptoms in order to use it toward an idea’s shape. After reading Freud enthusiastically, the artist Louise Bourgeois entered analysis in 1952, at the age of forty. She was experiencing a cluster of symptoms (insomnia, depression, fits of anger, agoraphobia, dizziness, sore throats, nausea) and dichotomous digestive issues, many consistent with those previously attributed to hysteria. The emotional turmoil she experienced after the death of her father (“literally cannot live or function / without the protection of a father,” reads a diary entry from 1952) encouraged her to seek treatment. Bourgeois’s work invites psychoanalytic narrative as an entry point, returning again and again to a common family drama: her father was unfaithful to her invalid mother by sleeping with Louise’s governess, and her mother tacitly used Louise to keep an eye on the affair. The story could have been adapted from any number of the case studies in Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria. Bourgeois wrote, “Since the fears of the past were connected with the functions of the body, they reappear through the body. For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.” Much of her work seems to replicate Freud’s structure of symptom formation, though The Arch of Hysteria maintains the most explicit dialogue: a hanging figure of a male body cast in bronze is bent backward in a maneuver reminiscent of the arc-de-cercle, a famed pose of the hysteria patients at the Salpêtrière in which the body is arched upward, locked in spasm, with weight only on the head and feet. In neither the case of the patients nor in Bourgeois’s symbolic body is it clear if the body is in pain or pleasure, if it is expressing illness or jouissance—or, if illness, if it is caused by or reflects the mind. In both cases, the body is frozen, exposed, defenseless, suspended in time.
A male Salpêtrière patient photographed by Albert Londe sometime between 1859 and 1910