Despite its disappearance from the diagnostic manuals and the consulting room, hysteria has had a recent cultural resurgence, as films, books and papers update its meaning for our society, marked by dissent, struggle and uncertainty.
Its migration into new, more medically manageable conditions (including dissociation, conversion or post-traumatic stress disorder) highlights the common elements to all forms of hysteria: a struggle with gender, a manifestation of symptoms in the body, and the asking of a question – ‘Che vuoi’, or What do you want from me? We put forward the idea that hysteria is a process, a state of mind, rather than a condition, and that its relationship to femininity and the body – following Juliet Mitchell’s argument – is the reason it has disappeared from the medical vocabulary. Yet, this state captures something inherently human, ambivalent and conflicted. It names, defines and understands something elusive.
Our paper will question hysteria as madness in relation to an epistemology, which, according to Christopher Bollas is depraved. Even though it seems to be a state impairing the mind’s judgment as the body takes over, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed the production knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses. The hysteric knows what the master, the university and the analyst do not. We will argue that hysteria as madness relates to the visionary aspect of the state, to the fact that hysterics articulate and know, in the body, what does not want to be known. In order to safeguard a symbolic universe, hysterics are labeled mad, possessed, delusional or, simply, as acting out their symptom. The outcome of this struggle is visual and performative, so we will draw on visual examples – from our production, and that of others. These implicate the body and the gaze, and therefore, a witness, creating a space for discourse.
