Problematizing "Hysteria"

In this chapter I show how Freud’s system-making begins very much in terms of gap filling, a process at least related to what I have described, following Barratt, as the "phenomenology of fucking." The Other to Freud’s system-making is consistently transformed from Other into other, from the unconscious or the unknown (the open spaces, the remains of the system) into femininity, woman, or, as I will discuss here, hysteria (gaps, specific absences). Because the traditional myth of psychoanalytic origins is that psychoanalysis was discovered during Freud’s work with hysterics, hysteria becomes a privileged category for any project interested in disturbing these origins and the myths based on them. I posit here what I think has been a repressed binary, psychoanalysis/hysteria, where, analogous to the male/female of psychoanalysis, this binary reduces the Other to a simple other, "hysteria," in order to establish itself, "psychoanalysis," in a mode of self-posting "auto-bio-graphy" (Derrida). My goal in this chapter is to deconstruct this binary and therefore problematize psychoanalysis at what the orthodoxy considers to be its origin: its analysis and cure of hysteria. By focusing on Freud’s own "hysteria" and his impossible "self-analysis," I hope to further problematize these myths by (dis)placing them en abyme, and, in general, to show that Freud’s own "phobosophie" is consistently mixed with misogyny. This latter theme is treated in chapter five below.

What is hysteria? Or should I ask, what was it? In Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan’s Lacanian entry for hysteria is typical in its acceptance of certain myths of hysteria:

Ragland-Sullivan’s acceptance of this so-called "illness" as one is a typical psychoanalytic assumption, one on which the myth of the birth of psychoanalysis depends. Moreover, she seems unquestioning that this "illness" indeed had something to do with a reality related to actual diseased wombs. The womb (hystera) has been consistently established as the essence of women throughout Western history, and from this determination came the various discourses of medicine, biology, sexuality, religion, etc., which gave birth to many forms of sexism stemming from the notion that "anatomy is destiny."

Of course, we are investing ourselves in a "certain linguistics" when we speak of "maladies" with ancient histories and their realities. And this linguistics and its essentialism and reality, as I will argue, create this "illness" and the misogyny associated with it in order to sustain itself. This linguistics and its phallogocentrism need this "illness." Yet, even within the context of such a linguistics, the symptomatology of what was called "hysteria" has a long, unwieldy, and inconsistent history, though not nearly as long as presumed by Ragland-Sullivan, nor as is usually presumed. The orthodox mythology of the birth of psychoanalysis depends on the objective existence of hysteria as a disease entity that psychoanalysis cures. What I argue here is that even within a logocentric episteme, hysteria can make no claim to being a proper disease. Freud constructs his "hysteria" and its cure to father psychoanalysis and "Freud," and Lacan and Lacanians, such as Ragland-Sullivan, will assume its existence within a "certain linguistics" of phallo-phono-logocentrism. I will argue that psychoanalytic hysteria constitutes a magical detour-destination, which allows the letter to be properly purloined so that it will always properly arrive back at its proper destination. Psychoanalysis and "hysteria" are one: psychoanalysis/hysteria. All detours must be construed as circles leading back to the proper destination, and the sending of the self-post must be appropriated as the proper detour, instead of indicating something radically other that might account for the compulsion to repeat the sending.

In Womanizing Nietzsche, Kelly Oliver argues that "woman and the feminine"(5) are the excluded other in the discourse of Western philosophy, but that this excluded other is also an other within. Oliver urges philosophy to "engage in a dialogue with the other within it, the other out of which it was born" (4). Certainly this approach could be applied to Freudian theory and psychoanalysis in general: hysteria was indeed repressed as a psychoanalytic concern after the Dora case, and the cure of hysteria has been considered the womb out of which psychoanalysis was born. Yet the way Oliver sets up her problem reinscribes the (op)positionality of the binary philosophy/woman in order to create a dialogue, and, as with any (op)positionality, the binary dissimulates difference and division behind opposed identities or ideal categories. I do not ascribe to a project where psychoanalysis would "engage in a dialogue with the [hysterical] other within it, the other out of which it was born" since to do so would be to risk reinscribing the binary I reveal/construct here in order to destabilize: psychoanalysis/hysteria. My hope in this chapter is to show how this binary acts as a mode of defense against the radical alterity Freud encounters in this initial phase of his theorizing. I do this after showing how the history and the histories of this supposed disease support the repression of what is totally other via this supposition. Because of the tradition of how this word "hysteria" was used to support a variety of patriarchies, it seems to me that any attempt at any "reappropriation" (a making proper to a discourse interested in subversion of the proper)–for example, hystericizing hysteria or hystericizing psychoanalysis–even if successful, would run the risk of reproducing the reification of "hysteria" and all of the misogynistic baggage this reification carries with it, and it would do so without any clear gain with respect to problematizing how "hysteria" was used to create this baggage or how psychoanalysis/hysteria was used by Freud and his followers as the basis of an origin myth.

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