Psychoanalysis/Hysteria

In 1977, Lacan mourned the loss of traditional hysterics: "Where have they gone, the hysterics of the past, these marvelous women–the Anna O’s, the Doras ..." (qtd. in Nas97 1). Juan-David Nasio, opening his book on Lacan and hysteria, Hysteria: the Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis, with this quotation from Lacan above, adds to it: "... all those women who provided the womb from which psychoanalysis was born" (1). Is psychoanalysis the splendid child of hysteria? Or is it a monstrous offspring of a diseased womb? Did psychoanalysis explain and cure hysteria? Did it master hysteria? Supposedly psychoanalysis is the child of a diseased womb that it cures through its conception and birth. According to the orthodox origin myth, psychoanalysis itself is born through the cure psychoanalysis provides for hysteria. But how can it be both provider of the cure and born of the cure? Is this a form of self-posting? Freud’s cure filled the gaps he supposedly discovered in the personal narratives of the patients he diagnosed as hysterics. At first this filler was theorized as the repressed memory of the (father’s) phallus, and then later as the repressed fantasy of possessing that phallus: castration, penis-envy, and refusing to give up masculine sexuality. Freud thus positions psychoanalysis and himself as the phallic father of the cure, what restores health to the diseased womb: a "penis-child" (Freud) as "anchoring point" (Lacan) for the wandering womb similar to the one described by Plato in the Timaeus. Just as Freud identified with both his grandson and as grandfather in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, psychoanalysis is both father and child of this process: woman as hysteric disappears as "she" becomes a conduit for this androcentric economy. With Freud’s grandson, "fort" was associated with the absent or bad mother (hysteric), and "da" was associated with the present or good mother (cured hysteric). The origin myth of psychoanalysis can therefore be read as a similar fort/da game where the hysteric (fort) is cured (da) and baby and theorist (psychoanalysis and Freud) is master. Psychoanalysis arrives at its destination–but it arrives, it returns, at the origin.

The logocentric repression of self-posting reveals the uncanny remains of a ghostly inheritance due to the necessity of dispatching the self to the self in this postal relay, and the necessary impropriety of this relay’s proper, and its (non)origin. These are the destabilizing, anti-identitarian (anti-self) remains of the original repetition, essential division, and the logic of dissemination of what Derrida calls iterability, a concept to which I will return in the concluding chapter. This particular self-posting of the fort/da game with hysteria and the origin myth of psychoanalysis is one of masculine positioning that both uses the mother-woman-hysteric as simple other and denies her significance in the game by establishing a father-son identity: an (op)positionality of mastery and disavowal. Since self-posting "acts out" the impropriety of the proper–mise en abyme where, according to Derrida, the "proper is not the proper, and if it appropriates itself it is that it disappropriates itself--properly, improperly" (Der87 357)–it is unstable and requires repetitive "acts of establishment" (Barratt), an interminable play.

The self or identity establishing itself simultaneously (in a mode of disavowal) against the (op)positions of "woman" in abject form (absent mother, hysteric, fort!) and then in proper form (present mother, cured hysteric, da!) can be seen as two of three acts in the "triple (self-)deception" of the "actual phallic function." The "actual phallic function" is another way of theorizing Derrida’s conception of phallogocentrism and Freud’s unconscious inasmuch as it is phallogocentric: presence is established by reducing the Other to absence, binary difference is effaced by erecting one term (the phallus) to identify difference, the binary becomes a hierarchy, woman is abjected and disavowed, the One or phallic presence is established and secured by transforming what is radically other to the One into a "specific" absence, this specific absence is put at the center of this Negative Concord (Kermode), and these processes are naturalized via the repression of all repressions and of all that remains.

With respect to psychoanalysis proper, man/woman is in the form of male/female sexuality and masculinity/femininity, and the magical term of difference-into-identity is castration. Castration had not been established as the oikos when Freud was transitioning from his more memory-based theories focused on hysteria to his more fantasy-based psychoanalysis proper. The trajectory of Freudian theory from this transition to his final work should be seen as a movement away from the unstable self-posting of psychoanalysis/hysteria to the more stable ground of "castration-truth" and its general theories of subjectivity–masterplots of being, metapsychologies–rather than etiologies of neurosis. One enigma of "hysteria studies" is the supposed disappearance of hysteria during the beginning of the twentieth century. Regardless if this disappearance should be theorized in terms of changing diagnostics and nosology, or if it should be theorized in terms of a change in the patriarchal orders’ relations to women and madness, hysteria was no longer in the limelight after The Interpretation of Dreams. Judging from his own writings, even Freud’s interest in the topic waned after 1897: Freud saw the Dora case more as an extension of his "dream book" than as a proof of a new, psychoanalytic etiology of hysteria. Freud’s two psychoanalytic case studies of hysteria, Dora (1905) and "Psychogenesis" (1920), were both fragments of case studies. Between the two cases Freud wrote only sporadically about hysteria (see especially his works form 1905, 1908, 1915, 1927, and 1933).

Freud’s and the psychiatric community’s waning interest in hysteria–that is, the theorization and diagnosis of this supposed psychological illness–would mean that the cure of hysteria could not provide a stable foundation for the claims of psychoanalysis to being a revolutionary science. But this waning is not the only reason hysteria was an unstable foundation for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis/hysteria is also unstable because it lacks a magical term of difference-into-identity and simply because it was based on curing the so-called hysterics’ symptoms. Much of what is groundbreaking about psychoanalysis relates to the absence of this difference-into-identity term. During the early years of psychoanalysis proper the primary process, the pleasure principle, and the navel of the dream had yet to be reduced to a logic of the Same via phylogenetics and castration. Though Freud showed leanings towards a Symbolic based on castration during this time, he was also able to leave–he even insisted on leaving–something fundamental as ambiguous, such as the navel of the dream.

Cure was always an unreliable proof for the efficacy of psychoanalysis and therefore an unstable foundation. For example, the Wolf Man haunted Freud: for all of Freud’s life and well into the 1970s, the Wolf Man’s symptoms continued and at times got worse, and, for years after Freud published his case study, the Wolf Man was easily found in Vienna: a ghostly remains during the ascendancy of psychoanalysis to international stature. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," with its pessimism regarding the efficacy of the psychoanalytic cure, can be read as Freud privileging the truth of his metapsychology over his technique and separating this truth from cure. For Freud to make such an argument, such a rhetorical move, Freud would have to once again flip-flop from what I argue in chapter four is his flip-flopped position in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety regarding the ego’s relative strength in relation to the id: in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," cure cannot be counted on since the id is recalcitrant, and its strength in relation to the ego is, once again, theorized as being great.

The scientific status of psychoanalysis also depends on the efficacy of a particular analysis: Freud’s own self-analysis. Freud and psychoanalysis seem to have a relationship to cure based on the logic of disavowal and fetishism: cure is both crucial (origin myth) and insignificant (as argued in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable"). Given that metaphorically cure is often theorized in terms of filling gaps with phallocentric etiologies and/or fantasies–in terms of the phallus both being and not being in its proper place–I see psychoanalysis as, if not fetishistic, since the concept of fetish is phallocentric, then very much dependent on the defense of disavowal. The phallus is not in its place (hysteria, fort!), and yet it is (cure, da!). What is significant for us here is that, according to psychoanalytic orthodox myth of origin, Freud cures himself of his own hysteria. Charles Bernheimer writes in his introduction to In Dora’s Case: Freud–Hysteria–Feminism:

Though Freud would consistently call his female patients with hysterical symptoms "hysterics," he would not reduce himself to that category: he merely had hysterical symptoms, but would never consider himself an hysteric. Did Freud cure his own hysteria? What might this have been? What symptoms? According to Derrida, Freud’s self-analysis was "unterminated" (Der87 305). But we do not need to appeal to Derrida’s authority in order to problematize Bernheimer’s orthodox assumption. What might a cure or a terminated analysis be? What would it have been in the last years of the nineteenth century, when Freud was conducting his self-analysis? What might a self-analysis be? How could it possibly work? Would there be transference and counter-transference? More importantly, what might hysteria be for a male? If it does not necessarily have to do with a diseased womb, why call it "hysteria"? Was Freud’s diagnosis of his neurosis as hysteria correct? According to which theory? Which etiology? Given that Freud’s final theory of hysteria in "Femininity" (1933) is female-specific–the female’s improper repression of her original masculinity and its clitoridal sexuality–how might we with hindsight theorize Freud’s diagnosis of whatever symptoms there were and his supposedly cured hysteria? Does Freud see his so-called hysteria as one of the two "themes" that "give the analyst an unusual amount of trouble," as he writes in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable"? He defines this theme as the male’s "struggle against his passive or feminine attitude toward another male" (XXIII 50), and again conflates, if not hysteria, than neurosis and homosexuality. The other theme from this passage, of course, is "envy for the penis" in the female. Given Freud’s therapeutic pessimism in this late essay and given that a self-analysis would certainly be less reliable than a dyadic analysis, it seems that again the foundation of psychoanalysis is unstable inasmuch as it is based on the efficacy of Freud’s self-analysis and his cure of his so-called hysteria.

A fuller version of the quotation of Derrida referred to above is worth mentioning here: "… how can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a worldwide institution its birth?" (ibid.). Freud’s "auto-bio-graphy" (Der87 passim) seems to be the womb of psychoanalysis for Derrida. As with any self-posting, auto-bio-graphy is abyssal, but the womb of psychoanalysis is "doubly so" (if infinity could be doubled) since it is also constituted by an impossible self-analysis. Among other problems with Bernheimer’s passage above, he seems to beg the question he raises about hysteria’s supposed exteriority to psychoanalysis when he assumes that Freud cured himself through self-analysis: Freud as primal father whose genius (access to Truth) sets him beyond transference and therefore beyond the effects of his unconscious. Freud as the discoverer of the unconscious is assumed to be the exception to the very basis of his supposed discovery, the supposed breakthrough–the relative weakness of the conscious ego in relation to the unconscious–due to the assumed power of his ego and its genius. Here "hysteria" becomes almost synonymous with "the unconscious" and/or "sexuality," and Freud has basically cured himself of them: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. The "it" is associated with the unreason of the body, as is the traditional hysteric. Below, especially in the section on Freud’s "The ‘Uncanny,’" I try to connect this "it" with the figure of woman: what must be mastered by psychoanalysis. Indeed, with Wo Es war, Soll Ich werden we can replace the Ich/Es binary with any of the binaries of hysteria: mind/body, reason/unreason, sanity/madness, and, especially, male/female:

For the orthodox keepers of the flame, Freud’s "cure"–"cure" being opposed to hysteria, "cure" as "I" unencumbered by "it"–is a crucial aspect of the traditional origin myth to protect from criticism: the objective rationality of the founder and, therefore, the scientific status of psychoanalysis depend on the success of Freud’s self-analysis and cure of his hysterical symptoms. These symptoms are therefore an object, an "it," within Freud’s subjectivity, and his genius, therefore, constitutes some subjectivity untainted by hysteria, which allows for the subject-object split necessary to keep this self-analysis out of the abyss–to allow the subject, the "I," to become transcendent. The father of psychoanalysis, once cured–of his body, his irrationality, and, mostly, his femininity–is therefore the pure analyst-scientist cleansed of the irrationality associated with hysteria and able to give birth to his science. He is like the primal horde father: a father without a father, the analyst without an analyst. Freud positions himself as both primal father and first-generation son, a positioning Derrida plays with in "To Speculate–on ‘Freud.’" This primal father, beyond genealogy and an unconscious, is beyond a mother or woman in general. "Psychic health, Freud discovered," Jonathan Lear argues in Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis, "depends on abandoning the fantasy that one can be one’s own child. This is as true within the realm of thought as it is within the family" (3). But it does not seem to be true for the founder.

Freud’s mastery over hysteria, his own and others, is the basis for the separation of psychoanalysis from hysteria: psychoanalysis (the subject of reason and truth) is anterior to, separate from, the diseased, irrational, feminine, and unscientific object of hysteria (the object of irrationality and deception). From this separation and dominance, this abjection, psychoanalysis secures for itself a position as a new and privileged way of knowing and understanding within the fold of reason, able to reach beyond reason and the mind and master madness, the body, and the feminine. With this origin myth the dualism of psychoanalysis/hysteria is established, and many related traditional dualisms are maintained: hysteria the disease, hysteria as feminine, bodily madness of the "it"; psychoanalysis the science, a curative discourse of masculine reason and the "I." Hysteria acts as the primary other to psychoanalysis, an extension and condensation of philosophy’s other of woman, theology’s other of the flesh, and psychiatry’s other of madness. Neither psychoanalysis nor hysteria comes first: they both arrive at the same time as psychoanalysis/hysteria. Psychoanalysis established itself as (impossible) father-child of hysteria; it constructs hysteria as the (impossible) feminine other that is simultaneously the mastered woman-mother-hysteric that gives birth and security, but also does not matter or even exist: fort/da. We should read the colon of Nasio’s title, Hysteria: the Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis, as both an "and" and an "as." With respect to origins, psychoanalysis/hysteria is undecidable.

I interpret the loss Lacan is mourning above as the loss of the splendid or magical present-absent other against which psychoanalysis began to establish itself, the (op)positional other it first employed to reduce the effects of an encounter with the Other to more of the Same. In other words, hysteria as woman-body-irrationality is what psychoanalysis must create as an absence, a gap to be filled by its specific, phallic presence: man-mind-reason. According to this line of argument, Bernheimer does not acknowledge that, if hysteria is implicated in psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis would also have to be implicated in hysteria in order for both to be "constituted simultaneously." Psychoanalysis constitutes its own hysteria as it constitutes itself. The proper must make the improper that is necessary to it into a circular detour that leads back to itself: fort/da.

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