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CHAPTER 2 Problematizing "Hysteria" and the Origin of Psychoanalysis Section 4 Hom(m)osexual Pornographics and the Performing Hysteric The hysteric as an individual seems to disappear, not only with Foucault’s hysterization, but also with the reduction of hysteria to a reappropriative discursive strategy of patriarchy. The potential drawback of this disappearance is that certain feminists portray the hysteric as a potential revolutionary figure, or as a proto-feminist and resister to the misogynistic violence of patriarchy. Though I argue that the feminist-hysteric is oxymoronic given the way I define hysteria, the hysteric as an individual does not necessarily fall away: there were individuals, mostly women, who performed a masquerade of hysteria à la the supposedly anti-essentialist line of theory that grew out of feminist readings of Joan Riviere’s 1929 essay, "Womanliness as a Masquerade." I write "supposedly" because this line of theory has become essentially an extension of Lacanian theory, which, as I have argued, following Derrida, is ultimately essentialist with its phallogocentrism. Can the performance of the so-called "hysteric" legitimate the use of "hysteric" within an anti-essentialist argument that attempts to problematize traditional uses of "hysteria"? To address this question I turn to Catherine Clément’s and Hélène Cixous’ The Newly Born Woman. It follows from my conceptualization of "hysteria" as being a patriarchal tool that I would feel more kinship with Clément’s position than with Hélène Cixous’ in the part of their "Exchange" dealing with conceptualizing "the hysteric" as an individual: H: … Dora seemed to me the one who resists the system.… And this girl–like all hysterics, deprived of the possibility of saying directly what she perceived … still had the strength to make it known. It is the nuclear example of women’s power to protest. It happened in 1899; it happens today wherever women have not been able to speak differently from Dora, but have spoken so effectively that it bursts the family into pieces…. The hysteric is, to my eyes, the typical woman in all her force….Clément seems to struggle in her exchange with Cixous because she accepts that the hysteric as an individual, and hysteria as a reified disease entity, rather than focus her attention on how the name-game of the diagnosis hysteria, the discursive construction of hysteria, is what reinforces what she calls "the Symbolic"–"the Symbolic" as what this name game might call itself, under the spell of an "Imaginary" and structuralist delusion, since language cannot be "anchored" in order to justify the capital "S." Cixous seems to privilege the disruptive alterity of what "hysteria" tries to name and master, but then errs, like Clément, by reifying "hysteria." This reification follows, as with Lacan, from the assumption of a "Symbolic" and the "certain linguistics" that is connected to this assumption. Cixous also disregards those individuals deemed hysterics who performed in a way that colluded with the patriarchy in question, and whose performance was therefore antithetical to any disruptive force that might be construed as feminist. This patriarchy-friendly version of the hysteric, who I call the performing hysteric, seems to be the version of the hysteric Clément privileges in her theorizations. The performing hysteric would hardly be considered a protofeminist. With respect to Clément’s position, I am hesitant to criticize her essentialist and unproblematized use of "hysteric" since her privileged version of the hysteric, it might be argued, exists as much as any body who performs an identity exists. The performing hysteric would be an hysteric whose positionality is in collaboration with the patriarchy in question, and with its appropriative categories or roles for women. Calling this positionality an "hysteric" does not betray some disruptive force as I have argued the figure of the hysteric as proto-feminist potentially would do. Clément’s use of the word "hysteric" risks essentialism–and, again, this essentialism seems to be the crux of her struggle in the exchange–but her argument is still powerful since she relates the hysteric to those deviants who are "the deepest reinforcements of the superstructure." The potential essentialism of her argument is undermined by her focus on the hysteric as performing a patriarchal function, since essentialism and performance are potentially at odds. Showalter’s description of a fifteen-year-old patient in Charcot’s Salpêtrière named Augustine provides an almost archetypal illustration of the performing hysteric: Intelligent, coquettish, and eager to please, Augustine was an apt pupil of the atelier. All of her poses suggest the exaggerated gestures of the French classical style, or stills from silent movies. Some photographs of Augustine with flowing locks and white hospital gown also seem to imitate poses in nineteenth-century paintings.… Among her gifts was her ability to time and divide her hysterical performances into scenes, acts, tableaux, and intermissions, to perform on cue and on schedule with the click of the camera. (153-54)Actually, the cameras of that time didn’t click: the lenses were held open and the subjects would have to hold their poses for fifteen seconds or so, which would have been exceedingly demanding during what would have been the expected stages of the hysterical attack. Showalter explains that in "Charcot’s own lifetime, one of his assistants admitted that some of the women had been coached in order to produce attacks that would please the maître," which confirmed suspicions that the hysterics’ performances were "the result of suggestion, imitation, or even fraud" (150). I would add that these performances were also the result of a strong unconscious desire of the performing hysteric to be something, some-body recognized by the patriarchy after "the cult of true womanhood" became in some way untenable. That Augustine reported being raped by her mother’s lover suggests that Augustine was probably seeking a safe role she could play that would be recognized and appreciated by the patriarchy. Her masquerade would then be similar to the masquerade in Riviere’s essay, where the woman puts on a mask to avert the violence of the patriarchy. What was masked here, however, was not the essentialist masculinity of Riviere’s essay, and what was feared here was not the "reprisals" of the patriarchy that discovered a female possessing this masculinity. What was masked was a radical alterity no longer able to transform and channel its otherwise energetics into the structures of "the cult of true womanhood" since this cult had become too dangerous and therefore untenable. What was feared was the abyss of not having a mode of channeling and transforming this otherwise energetics that would have been recognizable to others, and therefore unable to support an object relating ego. To the identitarian ego, constantly re-establishing itself in the "face to face" with this abyss, the radical alterity of falling into the abyss, of being "uniterable"–that is, of not "being"–would be the ultimate horror. Therefore the pleasure of the performing hysteric would be the eschewal of the pain of this abyss: a certain unpleasure principle. The structures of the hysteric might have provided Augustine a temporary asylum, so to speak, from this horrific abyss. The maître’s pleasure would assure her recognition as an hysteric. The female body in this scenario is mastered by the patriarch in question and by performing for his pleasure; the patriarch is displaying his scientific (mental) mastery by solving a riddle of female sexuality gone awry, as Freud would do later. The hierarchies of hysteria–mind/body, reason/madness, and male/female–are re-established by her performance, whence the pleasure of the male, and of the performing hysteric, who now has an identity and a body where otherwise energetics are channeled by/into that identity. Within the Salpêtrière, the male maître displays that mastery among a forum of voyeuristic "subjects," most of them identified as male, and within a hom(m)osexual economy of scientific-sexual pleasures–what Barratt would associate with the patriarchal "phenomenology of fucking," a violent and phallic way of knowing what is deemed feminine nature via the penetration of feminine mysteries (Bar93 150). I also see here a parallel between the hysteric’s position among the male physicians of the Salpêtrière and the position of the female porn star with respect to the men involved with pornography–consumers and producers. According to Stephen Heath, … pornography is a relation between men, nothing to do with a relation to women except by a process of phallic conversion that sets them as terms of male exchange. (Hea87 2)The hysteric mastered would have been the colonized "dark continent" of science, the discovery of the caput Nili. Though formerly a "sexual threat" to the male’s sense of mastery and the limits of the domain of that mastery, the hysteric would be domesticated via "the phenomenology of fucking," often violently brought back into what Derrida calls the oikos. The Salpêtrière and its performing hysterics, who were coached to please the voyeuristic crowds, suggest a possible parallel between the prostitute and the hysteric: both provide ever-ready supports for a pornographic economy for the channeling of otherwise energetics into the "patrix" of a hom(m)osexually-reproductive patriarchy. The hom(m)osexual pornographics of hysteria was not limited to the Salpêtrière, as evidenced by Chrobak’s recommendation to Freud for the patient he sent him–"penis normalis dosim repetatur" (Gay 92)–which can be read in a new light along the lines of the themes introduced above: the patients passed between the physicians can be interpreted as the products of a "phallic conversion that sets them as terms of male exchange." Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, author of Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, was a pioneer of hysteria studies in that she treated the doctor-hysteric relationship as sexual. She points out how the physician legitimized the hysteric, and how he was often the replacement of the husband as the woman in question went from the typical domestic relationship structures of the home to those of the doctor(s)-hysteric of the clinic, hospital, or doctor’s office (209). Though many had theorized the hysteric’s role in this relationship as sexual, Smith-Rosenberg also recognizes the potential sexuality of the doctor’s role: In a number of cases, the physician could have played the role of Oedipal father figure to the patient’s child-woman role, and in such instances his complicity [with the hysteric’s disruption of the family] was not only moral and intellectual but sexual as well. These doctors had become part of a domestic triangle–a husband’s rival, the fatherly attendant of a daughter. (209)Smith-Rosenberg is also suggestive regarding the sexuality of the supposed cure: "Her cure demonstrated that he had mastered her will and body" (211). Smith-Rosenberg’s analysis, however, suffers from understatement. What is missing from it is the sexuality or even the pornographics of this mastery–how the cure was often the climax of a scientific "phenomenology of fucking." In 1888, Freud most likely wrote the following in a contribution to Villaret’s encyclopaedia entitled "Hysteria" (the contribution was unsigned but mentioned in Freud’s letters): "In the face of no other illness can the physician perform such miracles or remain so impotent" (I 53). Switching Freud’s causation where the potency provided the miracle cure, I would argue that the cure provided the miracles of potency. There is one potential disruption to my perhaps too-neat demarcation between performing hysterics and the disorderly bodies that resist the diagnosis of hysteria, and therefore the reappropriative name-game of patriarchy: the protean symptomatology of hysteria that would frustrate physicians. This frustration was one source of the violence of physicians mentioned above, and would be contrary to the physicians’ pleasure, which equaled recognition. I interpret protean symptomatology as a potential aspect of the sexualized and unstable relationship between the performing hysteric and the physician, and as a way of the performing hysteric to have some control over that relationship. I see at least three possibilities for reasons why this relationship is unstable. First, the doctor could not tolerate his own sexuality coming to consciousness in a recognizable, non-scientific form. This might have been the case with Brueur’s treatment of Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), though this can only be speculation (see Api92 83). It certainly was the case often with Freud. Second, in overly simplistic terms, the position of hysteric was probably inadequate for the task of channeling what I am calling under erasure "otherwise energetics." Third, and I believe most significantly, the physician would lose interest in the mastered hysteric once mastered, like the Don Juan who loses interest in a conquest after he is sexually satisfied. Protean symptomatology would be a vehicle for allowing the physician a miracle or two, while not allowing him to reach the final satisfaction that would threaten the performing hysteric with his departure. Freud’s comment in an 1895 letter to Wilhelm Fliess reveals his awareness of the sexualization of the doctor-patient relationship: "There are two kinds of women patients: one kind who are loyal to their doctors as to their husbands, the other kind who change their doctors as often as their lovers" (FF 110). He would, however, consistently deny his own investment in this sexualized structure. An illustration of my argument with respect to the protean symptoms of a performing hysteric and the role this type of symptomatology plays in the sexualized doctor-patient relationship would be Freud’s first extensive case study of Fanny Moser as presented in Studies on Hysteria as the case of Emmy von N. According to Appignanesi and Forrester, authors of Freud’s Women, Fanny Moser was the latter type of patient: changing her doctors and lovers with regularity. Freud seemed to share this opinion of her when in 1895 he looked back at the case that spanned about three years starting in 1889. During the case, however, Appignanesi and Forrester show that Freud sees her as the former, loyal kind of patient. Freud would secure his husband-like position with her by establishing that he had what Appignanesi and Forrester call "exclusive hypnotic rights over her" (97). Freud writes at the close of his description of the case: … in the summer of 1893, I had a short note from [Fanny Moser] asking my permission for her to be hypnotized by another doctor, since she was ill again and could not come to Vienna. At first I did not understand why my permission was necessary, till I remembered that in 1890 I had, at her own request, protected her against being hypnotized by anyone else, so that there should be no danger of her being distressed by coming under the control of a doctor who was antipathetic to her, as had happened at -berg (-tal, -wald). I accordingly renounced my exclusive prerogative in writing. (II 85)Appignanesi and Forrester also show that Freud is aware of "how much the power of suggestion [in hypnosis] places him in the role of an ex-lover" (97): It may be remarked, by the way, that, outside hypnosis and in real life, credulity such as the subject has in relation to his hypnotist is shown only by a child towards his beloved parents, and that an attitude of similar subjection on the part of one person towards another has only one parallel, though a complete one–namely in certain love-relationships where there is extreme devotion. A combination of exclusive attachment and credulous obedience is in general among the characteristics of love. (VII 296)Freud would play the authoritative master to Frau Moser’s subservient slave, who would give him exclusive reign in the netherworlds of her psychological interior. He even isolated her from her daughters, who seemed to him to pose a threat to the doctor-patient bond. Freud, in relation to other doctors-suitors, jealously guards his exclusive rights to his patient and attempts to secure her loyalty. His hypnotic mastery and competitiveness with other doctors would combine, according to Appignanesi and Forrester, as Freud would use his power as hypnotist to perform tricks on Frau Moser "to demonstrate the stupidity, cruder hypnotic skills and less amicable effectiveness of the other doctors who had tended to Fanny" (96)–at Frau Moser’s expense. According to Appignanesi and Forrester, Frau Moser cooperated with Freud with respect to attaining exclusive rights over her and with respect to isolating her from her family, a plan which she agreed to, according to Freud, "without raising the slightest objection" (II 50): Fanny’s body collaborated in Freud’s plan of isolating her so that only he had influence over her, in particular by erupting in a flurry of symptoms whenever the resident house-physician entered her room. (Api92 94)Freud’s initial treatment met with some successes, but Frau Moser’s symptoms returned after she left his care and returned to her home in Switzerland. During the second phase of treatment Freud had to deal with a new and initially recalcitrant symptom: anorexia. His treatment was based on Frau Moser’s valuing their relationship more than this relatively dangerous symptom, and, like much of this case, had little to do with Freud’s future methodologies: Freud put their future relationship on the line: he threatened to leave if she did not accept within twenty-four hours that it was her fear, rather than her constitution, which made it impossible for her to eat and drink normally. Give up your symptom, or give up your masterly doctor! (95)When Frau Moser wanted Freud to visit her, rather than her usual visit to Vienna, she produced another new symptom: a phobia of trains (a case of mimicking her doctor). Frau Moser would use her polysymptomatology to keep Freud near her in three ways: first, by intensifying her symptoms when other doctors would attempt to treat her while she was initially isolated from her family; second, by giving him small "miracles," enough to keep him interested and feeling like a man; and third, by coming up with new symptoms when she either wanted him near or wanted to renew the treatment–and even when she wanted to check his cock-assuredness or to stage a protest. Freud would not only deny his sexual investment in the relationship, but hers too. He saw the source of her neurosis as abstinence even though, as Appignanesi and Forrester, put it: "People in the neighborhood remembered her particularly for her erotic extravagance" (98). The eroticism, sexuality, and pornographics of "hysteria" bring together two themes I explore throughout this chapter, and particularly in the fifth chapter on "The ‘Uncanny’": the relationship of questions of "sexuality" to questions of positionality, or, as is almost invariably the case with Freud, (op)positionality. Returning to Matlock and the relation of the positions of the hysteric and the prostitute to the position of proper womanhood, Matlock argues that The hysteric and the prostitute provided opposite models against which an orderly body could be measured–the one tormented by desires welling up from the inside, the other transformed into a holding tank for desires that might contaminate society from the outside. (4)Yet neither the hysteric nor the prostitute would constitute a disorderly body in the terms I am trying to establish here: both are integral parts of the phallocratic deployment of power in relation to what has been deemed feminine. They would have provided the boundaries of the "cult of true womanhood": an (op)positionality within "womanhood." The difference between the prostitute and the performing hysteric might be theorized as follows: the prostitute is not associated with any Other that might threaten the stability of the same, whereas the performing hysteric would be associated with those "bodies" resistant to any of these established forms of womanhood. The performing hysteric, the site of scientific "miracles" in a context of hom(m)osexual pornographics, would thus be associated with a potentially castrating form of "sexuality" or "bodiliness," the site of "impotence." But both forms of womanhood are used as boundaries of proper womanhood in terms of sexual positioning, and both forms are subject to the violence associated with the potential disruptions of "sexuality," and particularly of the "sexuality" of "woman." Moreover, both forms of womanhood can be theorized as integral parts of a hom(m)osexual pornographic economy. Hysteria and the hysteric, like Foucault’s "hysterization," should be associated with the appropriation or totalization processes fueled by the identitarian energetics of phallocracies–what Derrida calls "the drive of the proper," which I discuss below–rather than with the Other and its otherwise energetics, which would be "in but not of" identitarian energetics. Unlike Foucault’s "hysterization," however, hysteria and the hysteric should be understood with respect to processes of repression and resistance, where these and other identities are established via repression of/resistance to that which is otherwise. next —> |
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Copyright 2000 by Eric W. Anders |