Epigraph: “Be very careful not to understand the patient”: Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 2:87.
11 “I inscribe what I see”: Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 29.
11 “the true retina of the scientist”: Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 32.
22 “express the most vivid interest in”: Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Ballet-girl (London: Dance Books, 1996), 46.
23 “in a culture that views dancers as vaguely ‘sick’”: Felicia M. McCarren, Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 14.
23 “a predominant role”: Jean-Martin Charcot et al., Les Démoniaques dans l’art (Paris: Macula, 1984), 34.
24 “many of the nightmares”: McCarren, Dance Pathologies, 70.
25 “the definition of hysteria has never been given”: Laségue, quoted in Pierre Janet, L’État mental des hystériques (Marseille: Laffitte, 1983), 411.
25 “less linear than it is cyclical”: Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 19–29.
25 “Charles Le Pois argued”: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 21.
26 “British clinician”: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 22.
26 “Ovarian theory”: Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 23.
27 “Freud’s development of the practice of psychoanalysis”: Micale, Approaching Hysteria, 27.
31 “Owing to some physical weakness”: Alice James, ed. Leon Edel, The Diary of Alice James (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1964), 148–50.
32 “abandons part of her consciousness”: William James, “The Hidden Self,” Wikisource, n.d., en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Self.
37 “All the efforts of pathological anatomy”: Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 71; James, The Diary of Alice James (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 142.
38 “the hysteric always seems to be outside the rule”: Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011), 21.
38 One of them, Marie “Blanche” Wittman: Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 46.
40 “That depends on what you mean”: Quoted in Allan Ulrich, “Cullberg Ballet on the Cusp: A Change in Rep for the Swedish Company That’s Had Mats Ek Written All over It,” The Free Library, n.d., www.thefreelibrary.com/Cullberg+Ballet+on+the+cusp%3a+a+change+in+rep+for+the+Swedish+company...-a092135999.
42 Les Démoniaques dans l’art: Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 28.
43 “[Charcot] has set forth some nervous phenomena”: Guy de Maupassant, The Works of Guy de Maupassant: Short Stories (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2010), 516.
44 “that He was within me”: Teresa of Avila and J M Cohen, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 71.
44 “A pandemic similar to the one we see today”: Tiqqun, trans. Ariana Reines, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 123.
45 “culturally permissible expressions of distress”: Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1997), 15.
45 “Suffering is instructive”: Alphonse Daudet, trans. Julian Barnes, In the Land of Pain (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 3.
46 “Poor Daudet, who is haunted”: Julien Bogousslavsky, Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists (Basel; Freiburgbreisgau: Karger, 2005), 41.
48 “Hysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences”: Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, and Nicola Luckhurst, Studies in Hysteria (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 11.
50 “a mechanism which in the first instance”: Talcott Parsons, The Social System (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 477.
52 “To understand this one painting”: Allan H. Ropper and Brian Burrell, How the Brain Lost Its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness (New York: Avery/Penguin Random House, 2019), 11.
53 “Everything in her”: Désiré Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Progrès médical, 1878), 2:168, quoted in Hustvedt Medical Muses, 169.
60 “We must say that we regret”: British Medical Journal (London: British Medical Association, 1879), 857.
62 “pulled her hair, tickled, punched”: Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 169.
62 “Before the[ir] attacks”: Y. Keydar, “Mysteria: Unraveling Hysteria Theory Through Mid- to Late-Nineteenth-Century Fashion,” (History of Costume 2, term paper, MA Costume Studies Program, NYU Steinhardt, 2015)..
62 “Both in the admission reports”: Maayan Goldman, “Dressing like a Madwoman: On Amanda Bynes, Little Edie, and the Time I Quite Fashion,” Vestoj, n.d., vestoj.com/dressing-like-a-madwoman/.
66 “Here brought to Ballet is the atmosphere, or nothing”: Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1945), 313, quoted and translated in McCarren, Dance Pathologies, 117.
66 “hypnotism at that moment”: Loie Fuller, Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life: With Some Account of Her Distinguished Friends (London: H. Jenkins Limited, 1913), 25.
66 “I endeavoured to make myself as light”: Fuller, Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life, 31.
67 “Mallarmé’s dance texts on Loie Fuller”: McCarren, Dance Pathologies, 25.
67 “Mallarmé describes Fuller’s performing persona”: McCarren, Dance Pathologies, 157.
68 “functions as a critique of Charcotian psychology”: McCarren, Dance Pathologies, 25.
71 “A doctor in Northern Germany”: Twitter user @jtheseamstress, Twitter post, February 2019, 10:26 p.m., twitter.com/jtheseamstress/status/1093395579584086016.
72 “The sufferings most often deemed worthy”: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 40.
76 “examines the gender hierarchy”: Rachel Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 129.
77 “Dissatisfaction is the motor for desire”: Anouchka Grose, introduction to Hysteria Today (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018), xxx.
78 “literally cannot live or function”: Louise Bourgeois’s diary, quoted in Juliet Mitchell, “Louise Bourgeois and Sigmund Freud: Passage Dangereux—The Girl in Psychoanalysis and Art,” in Louise Bourgeois et al., Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2021), 137.
78 “Since the fears of the past”: Louise Bourgeois, cited in “Self-expression Is Sacred and Fatal,” in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Designing by Free Fall (Zürich: Ink Press, 2016), 228.
80 “In Bourgeois’s terms”: Philip Larratt-Smith, “The Case of LB,” in Bourgeois et al., Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter, 107.
81 “The empty house”: Louise Bourgeois’s diary, quoted in Mitchell, “Louise Bourgeois and Sigmund Freud: Passage Dangereux—The Girl in Psychoanalysis and Art,” 141.
81 “Bourgeois shows that”: Juliet Mitchell, “Louise Bourgeois and Sigmund Freud: Passage Dangereux—The Girl in Psychoanalysis and Art,” 139.
83 “rape, blood, more fires”: Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 137.
83 “when the men around her speak”: Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 137.
83 “vocalization, not communication”: Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 188.
83 “You see how hysterics scream”: Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 188–189.
84 “While it is not mentioned in the text”: Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 153.
85 “A man like you, a forty year old man”: Bourneville and Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 2:161, quoted in Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 192.
85 “so that our readers can clearly appreciate”: Bourneville and Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 2:167, quoted in Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 194.
87 “He used to look”: Freud, “Charcot” in The Freud Reader, 52, quoted in Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 21.
88 “In Agnes Varda’s 1962 film”: Cléo from 5 to 7, directed by Agnes Varda (Criterion Collection, 1962).
92 “For the sake of brevity”: Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, and Nicola Luckhurst, Studies in Hysteria (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 81.
93 “The problem with Charcot’s work”: Jacqueline Rose, “Femininity and Its Discontents,” Feminist Review 14 (1983): 5–21.
94 “Is Hysteria Real? Brain Images Say Yes”: Erika Kinetz, “Is Hysteria Real? Brain Images Say Yes,” New York Times, September 26, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/science/26hysteria.html.
94 “demonstrate that there are neuroanatomical correlates”: Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or, a History of My Nerves (New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2011), 34.
97 “Always the genital thing”: Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 21.
99 “The title assures me”: Joanne Zeis, You Are Not Alone: 15 People with Behçet’s, 1997.
99 “plenty of rest, maintain daily routine”: Sungnack Lee et al., Behçet’s Disease: A Guide to Its Clinical Understanding Textbook and Atlas (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2001), 73.
99 “Ever since I have been ill”: James, The Diary of Alice James (New York edition), 206.
102 “Diagnosis has diminished my ability”: Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer . . . and Care (New York: Picador, 2020), 35.
102 “A new language”: Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (1930; repr., Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2012), 7.
102 “lacked plot”: Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (1930; repr., Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2012), 6.
102 “we go alone”: Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (1930; repr., Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2012), 12.
103 “Suppose for a moment the claims”: Anne Boyer, The Undying, 213.
103 “Contrast this philosophical truism”: Anne Boyer, The Undying, 214.
104 “the pain [will] not be wasted”: Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (London: Penguin Publishing Group, 2020), 9.
104 “But I think the only thing that could paralyze one’s writing”: Hélène Cixous and Susan Sellers, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 28.
104 “pain is always new to the sufferer”: Daudet, In the Land of Pain, 19.
108 “told me he’d forgotten how completely the body loses”: Hervé Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2020), 36–37.
108 “the whole truth is still hidden from me”: Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, 17.
108 “already dead, beyond hope of salvation”: Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, 212.
108 “sleek and dazzling in its hideousness”: Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, 262.
108 “Between fits of coughing”: Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, 35.
109 “la belle indifference”: Jon Stone et al., “La Belle Indifférence in Conversion Symptoms and Hysteria: Systematic Review,” The British Journal of Psychiatry: The Journal of Mental Science 188 (2006): 204–9, https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.188.3.204.
110 “take all the morphia”: William James, The Letters of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1920), 311.
111 “My book is closing in on me”: Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, 251.
113 “Around her neck, she is wearing”: W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Penguin, 2010), 350–51.
114 “For Barthes, the punctum”: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill And Wang, 1996), 27.
120 “Researchers will be studying”: Dana Brandt and John Diedrich, “Nearly 800 People Have Died from Covid-19 in Wisconsin. Here’s What We Are Learning so Far,” Journal Sentinel, July 3, 2020, www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/07/03/800-deaths-wisconsin-what-we-know-so-far-covid-19-coronavirus/5355666002/.
120 “the idea that any of the death and despair”: Beatrice Adler-Bolton, “‘Deaths Pulled from the Future,’” Blind Archive, January 3, 2022, blindarchive.substack.com/p/deaths-pulled-from-the-future.
121 “Derrida argued”: Michael Naas, “‘One Nation . . . Indivisible’: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God,” Research in Phenomenology 36, no. 1 (2006), https://doi.org/10.1163/156916406779165818.
121 “But you’re not trying to want something else”: Susan Sontag, Alice in Bed: A Play (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 20.
121 “I always thought a man would crush me”: Sontag, Alice in Bed, 67.
122 “the religion of healthy-mindedness”: Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 111.
122 “When I asked her what attitude of the mind”: Alice James to William James, November 25, 1889, in The Death and Letters of Alice James, ed. Ruth Yeazell (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2004), 181–82.
122 “As I lay prostrate”: James, The Diary of Alice James (New York edition), 149.
123 “I shall at least have it all my own way”: James, The Diary of Alice James (New York edition), 25.
134 stories of “night doctors” had circulated: Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 165–68.
136 “It is no accident”: Benjamin quoted in Henry Bond, Lacan at the Scene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 23.
137 “by practicing a social segregation”: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 259.
139 “the grand asylum of human misery,” “the living museum of pathology”: Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 12.
144 “characterized by the subversion of the relationships”: Louis Aragon and André Breton, “Le Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie,” La Révolution surréaliste, March 15, 1928, 22, quoted in Mark S. Micale, The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 124.
144 “Beauty will be convulsive”: André Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 160.
144 “the greatest poetic discovery”: Micale, The Mind of Modernism, 124.
145 “It is also well to prepare”: Emily Post quoted in Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 59.
149 “Semmelweis dashed himself”: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Semmelweis (London: Atlas Press, 2008), 48.
150 “A reciprocity of charm was instituted”: Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, xi.
150 Huberman adds that he is “nearly compelled”: Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 4.
151 “a simple contradiction within reason,” “just as physical disease is not an abstract”: Georg W. zf. Hegel, “Part III: The Philosophy of Spirit, (1830),” sec. 388, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, www.marxists.org, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sp/susoul.htm.
151 “Gentlemen, we have yet to determine”: Charcot, quoted in Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 21.
152 “Do you think that it would have been easy”: Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 141.
153 “As definitive of a medical condition”: Jennifer Corns, “Puzzles with Pain Reports,” Post45, February 24, 2020, post45.org/2020/02/puzzles-with-pain-reports/.
154 the average patient spends three years: Marie Benz, MD, FAAD, “Survey Finds Autoimmune Diseases Are Misunderstood, Common and Underfunded,” October 3, 2018, https://medicalresearch.com/survey-finds-autoimmune-diseases-are-misunderstood-common-and-underfunded/
155 “in the course of the years she cost him a small fortune”: Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 12.
155 “when at last she died”: Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 12.
156 “Medical diagnoses reflect societal ideas”: Alice Hattrick, Ill Feelings (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2021), 205.
156 “focused on altering”: Alice Hattrick, Ill Feelings (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2021), 206.
157 “malady through representation”: Pierre Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals (New York and London: Putnam, 1901), 486-8.
158 “biological revolution”: Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), xiv.
159 “a generation of scapegoated parents”: Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019),181.
159 “a road to redemption”: Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019),177.
159 “overreached, overpromised”: Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), xiv. 159 “considering mental illness an individual”: Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zer0 Books, 2009), 37.
162 “a tool and a weapon shaped by particular belief systems”: Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 41.
165 “as a factory, an image of the body’s functioning”: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 96.
165 “a theory that this degenerescence”: Henry James, Selected Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 53.
167 “We can theorize all we want”: Liz Bowen, “The Job Market Is Killing Me,” Post45, February 24, 2020, https://post45.org/2020/02/the-job-market-is-killing-me/.
167 “Under the money model of disability”: Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2022), 15.
168 “cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright”: Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” The Criterion, 1926, thenewcriterion1926.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf.
168 “people with disabilities function as canaries”: Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract—A Warning from an Uppity Crip (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998), 98.
169 “Turn illness into a weapon”: Socialist Patients’ Collective, “Turn Illness into a Weapon: A Polemic Call for Action,” Heidelberg University, www.indybay.org/uploads/2013/11/14/turn_illness_into_a_weapon.pdf.
169 “Unlike other self-organized patient groups”: Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism, 129.
171 “Balanchine’s ballets can be read as icons”: Lincoln Kirstein, “Beliefs of a Master: Lincoln Kirstein,” New York Review, March 15, 1984, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/03/15/beliefs-of-a-master/.
172 “Ballet is woman”: Alastair Macaulay, “Of Women, Men and Ballet in the 21st Century,” The New York Times, January 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/arts/dance/of-women-men-and-ballet-in-the-21st-century.html.
172 “God made men”: “Harry Hurt III, “Paper Balanchine,” The New York Times, March 10, 2007, sec. Business, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/business/10pursuits.ready.html.
174 “If a dancer speaks, it must have value”: Toni Bentley, Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 33.
174 “cheated of a time of suffering”: Bentley, Winter Season, 91.
175 “Where there is a work of art, there is no madness”: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, quoted in McCarren, Dance Pathologies, 37.
175 “I think I’ve discovered my problem”: Bentley, Winter Season, 117.
175 “The eternal struggle”: Bentley, Winter Season, 120.
176 “ballet seemed infinitely preferable”: Gelsey Kirkland, Dancing on my Grave: An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1986), 41.
176 “I developed the habit of mentally undressing him”: Gelsey Kirkland, Dancing on my Grave: An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1986), 50.
179 “to find a way to look away and yet to feel”: David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 126.
180 “Despair shall set you free”: Sontag quoted in David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 140
180 “I lived on a high horse”: Sontag quoted in David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 141.