Chapter 2: Problematizing “Hysteria” and the Origins of Psychoanalysis

              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:

Psychoanalysis was born with Freud’s treatment of the illness then named “hysteria” (from the Greek hysteros ‘womb’), a uterus thought to be “wandering,” a malady as old as Hippocrates and the subject of the oldest known medical text. (163)

Ragland-Sullivan’s acceptance of this so-called “illness” as one is a typical psychoanalytic assumption,[i] 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.[ii]  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.[iii]  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.[iv]  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.

Historia

              Sweeping histories of this supposed disease, this supposed singularity—such as Ilza Veith’s classic, Hysteria: The History of a Disease—are flawed in that they create what Mark Micale, author of Approaching Hysteria, calls “a remote and venerable historical heritage” (Mic95 46) rooted in the Hippocratic texts.  In “Once upon a Text: Hysteria and Hippocrates,” Helen King undercuts traditional histories of hysteria in three crucial ways: (1) by problematizing the similarity between popular conceptions of hysteria in its modern forms and the hysterike pnix, or “suffocation by the womb” (Gil93 28-9), which Hippocrates described; (2) by arguing that anything recognizable as a modern form of hysteria was not recorded until the 16th century; and (3) by pointing out that the diagnosis “hysteria” was not coined until 1801 (Gil93 73).  According to Micale, the common type of mythical historical heritage of a disease entity for something “as elusive and mysterious as hysteria ... implies the universality of the disorder, establishes the validity of the diagnostic category, and bolsters the scientific status of psychiatric medicine itself” (Mic95 46).  Even during the latter part of the nineteenth century, which Fulgence Raymond called “la période héroïque de l’hystérie” (qtd. in Mic95 3), hysteria’s symptomatology could not sustain what most nosologists, then or now, would consider proper disease status.  Jean-Martin Charcot’s conceptions of hysteria in his writings of the 1870s and 1880s reveal a dizzying polysymptomatology despite his efforts to make the diagnosis functional through a delimiting classification system.  Basically any behavioral abnormality in a woman was suspect of being a sign of hysteria during “la période héroïque de l’hystérie.” 

              Contemporary symptomatologies for hysteria—a diagnosis unfortunately still in use—are also extremely vague and general.  The very recently outdated Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition—Revised) or DSM-III-R lists “paralysis, aphonia, seizures, coordination disturbance, akinesia, dyskinesia, blindness, tunnel vision, anosmia, anesthesia, and paresthesia … [disturbances of the] autonomic and endocrine systems … [and v]omiting” (257) as symptoms of the more specific category of “Hysterical Neurosis, Conversion Type.”  The DSM-III-R also lists the dissociative type of hysterical neurosis, hysterical personality (histrionic personality disorder), and various kinds of hysterical psychoses.  The updated and current DSM-IV does not list hysteria at all, I hope in recognition of the nosological chaos of the history of this diagnosis and, more importantly, the often violent misogyny of the history of “hysteria’s” theorizations and treatments.  Since the term remains a common element of psychoanalytic discourse, it seems that the psychoanalytic community is far from acknowledging this history of misogyny and nosological chaos.  To do so would be to undercut the origin myth and therefore the very foundation of the supposed scientific status of psychoanalysis—not to mention the complicity of psychoanalysis in the latter part of this misogynistic history.

              As with many psychoanalytic feminists who write about hysteria, many Freudian faithful attempt to limit hysteria to symptoms of “conversion,” the somatic expression of psychical conflict, as Freud, early in his career, claimed should be done (see I 41-52 passim).  Reducing the vast polysymptomatology of hysteria to its merely broad psychosomatic component appeals to psychoanalytic feminists because the metaphorics of the silenced women who can only express their dis-ease with(in) the patriarchy through their culturally hypercathected bodies is indeed powerful.  This reduction appeals to the Freudian faithful because the mythologies surrounding Freud’s supposed cure of hysterics, and hysteria as the womb of psychoanalysis, comprise the origin myths of psychoanalysis (Freud cures/anchors the womb that gives birth to psychoanalysis as anchor).[v]  Freud’s own symptomatologies and theorizations with respect to hysteria, however, were varied, inconsistent, contradictory, and usually conflated with female homosexuality after the initial writing of the Dora case—a far cry from the “gross, florid motor and sensory somatizations” (Mic95 4) we associate with Freud’s earlier work on hysteria with Breuer.  At the same time that Freud would try to limit the symptomatology of hysteria in order to make it manageable, he would also bring in many other symptoms from the dizzying polysymptomatology when they would suit his particular purposes at that time.

              If hysteria could be said to have been one thing, something that might constitute a categorization, it was simply a diagnosis, one that was historically made by males in positions of authority—primarily nineteenth-century physicians—about women who were somehow beyond the boundaries of what was contemporaneously considered proper womanhood.  The diagnosis of hysteria itself may be a symptom of a patriarchal “dis-ease”—that is, the patriarchy’s dis-ease with those bodies classified as female that did not conform to, were in excess of, its dictates of proper womanhood.  Many of the feminists who make this argument or similar ones, however, treat hysteria as if it were something beyond a diagnosis.  If they don’t explicitly do this, and even if they at times argue against such a position, their common unproblematized use of “hysteria” suggests just such an assumption (see Showalter, Kahane, Matlock, Smith-Rosenberg, among others).  In other words, many feminist theorists often use “hysteria” as an unproblematized denotation of an actual disease even though these feminists suggest that the word “hysteria” itself cannot be anything but the discursive manifestations of a variety of related patriarchal defensive strategies, especially with its unavoidable anatomical etymology of a diseased womb.  There seems to be an understandable, if unfortunate, need to figure out the causes of hysteria-the-disease at the same time that some feminists argue for hysteria as a part of a reappropriative discourse of nineteenth century physicians made insecure by the changes happening with respect to women and their roles in society, in the family, and in their personal and sexual relations.

              Histories such as Veith’s—not a “hys-story” as much as a case of “historia”—if not histories of a disease entity, may be useful as histories[vi] of what Elaine Showalter calls “the pervasive association of women and madness” (Sch85 4), if their use of “hysteria” is retroactively problematized.  For two reasons I hesitate to say that such histories might be considered histories of female madness.  First of all, Showalter would see this as a redundancy since she argues “madness is a female malady” (Sch85 3).  Second, Derrida might argue that this would be an “infeasible” (Der78 33) categorization for the same reasons that Foucault’s intention of writing his History of Madness from the position, as Foucault said, “of madness itself … before being captured by knowledge” (qtd. in Der78 34), is for Derrida infeasible, or even “the maddest aspect of his project” (ibid.).  Any history is on the side of reason, thus making a history of madness a reduction of the Other of “madness” to reason’s more of the Same.  Indeed, madness can be read as the (op)position that allows for reason.[vii]

              What these “hys-stories” mask as aspects of this general reduction of the Other to the Same with respect to reason/madness, are the undecidables of certain boundaries that make up the dualisms or (op)positionalities that have played major roles in the West’s representational histories.  This masking is a process of naturalization of dualisms such as male/female and reason/madness, a deciding of undecidables along traditional lines.  A third dualism, mind/body, is also a major player in the general representational histories of the West.  On one level, what is at stake with these hys-stories, and the many questions of hysteria in general, is the reproduction of what Showalter calls “the fundamental alliance between ‘woman’ and ‘madness’” (Sch85 3) and “how women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind” (Sch85 3-4).  These dualisms have been hierarchies in practice, and they mask the undecidables—the radical alterity of what is Other, the instability of the same—and the futility of the various patriarchies’ attempts to reduce what is Other to its dualistic codes and hierarchies once and for all. 

              Showalter’s feminism itself seems to be based on the self-evidence or naturalness of such a dualism, male/female, and therefore it risks reproducing the phallogocentric reduction of what is Other to more of the Same—that is, inasmuch as such an assumption necessarily leads to such a reproduction, and inasmuch as feminism necessarily makes such an assumption.  In, “Deconstruction in America,” Derrida suggests that feminisms are necessarily phallogocentric:

So I would say that deconstruction is a deconstruction of feminism, from the start, in so far as feminism is a form—no doubt a necessary form at a certain moment—but a form of phallogocentrism among many others. (Der85 30)

Psychoanalysis, of course, would also be one of these phallogocentric forms.  The appeal of psychoanalysis for some feminisms seems to be what these forms of feminism read as its anti-essentialism, which gets away from “anatomy is destiny.”  And yet, since Derrida argues both psychoanalysis and feminism are forms of phallogocentrism, the source of this attraction may also be that they share phallogocentric assumptions.  In so far as phallogocentrism prescribes a destiny, a destinational linguistics, ultimately “anchored” to the letter of anatomy, the two “lures” of psychoanalysis for certain feminisms—anti-essentialism and sharing phallogocentric assumptions—become mutually exclusive.  Without getting embroiled in the intricacies of the relationship between deconstruction and feminism at this point, I am interested in suggesting here that the conflicted strategies of treating hysteria as a discursive formation and attempting to theorize the origins and essence of hysteria—that is, treating it as a “real” illness—can be understood in relation to the certain feminisms’ conflicted relationship to phallogocentrism and the mainstyles of psychoanalysis and deconstruction.  I return to these issues in the concluding chapter.

              The primary function of hysteria is to bolster and reproduce the aforementioned hierarchical dualisms—mind over body, reason over madness, and male over female.  Even when the diagnosis of hysteria was used for men, as in the late nineteenth century by Charcot and Freud—and though the diagnosis was severed here from its history of connecting the pathology to a diseased womb—the diagnosis was used figuratively to suggest that the male had succumbed to a feminine type of madness, a “female malady.”  Freud returns to this type of metaphorics—the type where Freud must cure himself of his hysterical symptoms, his femininity—in the late essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” where he stresses the difficulty of curing his male patients of their residual femininity (though he never theorizes this source of femininity beyond simply stating the universality of bisexuality).[viii] 

              The discursive formation “hysteria,” the diagnosis, was used to justify oppressive practices in the service of the stability of various patriarchies.  Prior to the inception of “hysteria” as a diagnosis in 1801, the theories, speculations, and “treatments” of aberrant forms of femininity were also used oppressively, often violently.  I will refer to all aberrant forms of femininity I deal with here that various Western patriarchies felt the need to classify or diagnose to defend against their disruptive potential, borrowing from Showalter, “the female malady”—though I use this phrase, not as a synonym for madness in general, but as a way of denoting the paradoxical imbrications of femininity and madness[ix] from the perspective of a hom(m)osexual patriarchy—that is, the malady of being female, and, furthermore, the malady of not being female enough.  Psychoanalysis continues this treatment of the themes of femininity in terms of a malady for both men (see “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”) and women (the “peculiar” sex, penis envy), and this contradictory treatment of the feminine malady as not being female enough (either hysteria or female homosexuality with respect to Freud’s “three lines of development”).  With respect to terminology, my hope here is to differentiate the broader term, “the female malady,” from its subset “hysteria,” and therefore to historicize “hysteria” as a diagnosis made after 1800.  This allows me to maintain the broad strokes of related histories of female oppression associated with female madness without reifying hysteria and making the error of assuming that nineteenth-century hysteria has a “remote and venerable historical heritage” (Mic95 46) rooted in the Hippocratic texts.  In fact, I would say that a “remote and (un)venerable historical heritage” of the imbrication of femininity and madness would be less vulnerable to “historia” than a comparable hys-story.[x]

              The theories and treatments for the female malady were aspects of varied though similar forms of patriarchal reappropriation, where the aberrancy of things feminine—that is, associated with femininity yet in excess of its proper form—is reappropriated by establishing that which is aberrant as the abject form of the proper in a name-game of mastery that re-establishes the One and the same in the face of the Other.  As usual, the aberrancy—the transgression, perversion—was used as limit and negative in order to establish and center the proper, the norm, the law.  In the Timaeus, Plato wrote:

the womb is an animal which longs to generate children.  When it remains barren too long after puberty, it is distressed and sorely disturbed, and straying about in the body and cutting off the passages of the breath, it impedes respiration and brings the sufferer into the extremist anguish and provokes all manner of diseases besides. (qtd. in Mic95 19)

With proper femininity in Plato’s Greece, the womb is irrigated and inseminated; the happy womb does not wander as it is anchored by the penis.  A proper sexuality, a proper relation of womb to penis, therefore, is the cure and antithesis of the diseased womb, the symptom of aberrant femininity.  The themes of proper sexuality and the curative penis/phallus would recur throughout the history of the female malady.  For example, Rudolph Chrobak sent along the following course of treatment with a patient he had diagnosed as hysterical and had sent to Freud: “penis normalis dosim repetatur” (Gay 92).

              Another recurring theme in histories of the female malady is violent misogyny.  Despite what seems like what should have been the sound security of Western patriarchies throughout history due to their rootedness and overwhelming power, violent misogyny regarding the treatment and theorization of the female malady has been common and often virulent, which suggests that these patriarchies were not as stable as they were powerful, and that the threat of what is Other associated with the phantasmatic feminine was consistently great.  After St. Augustine, who attributed all illness to “a manifestation of innate evil” (Mic95 20), the female malady became synonymous with witchcraft and possession by the devil:

During the late medieval and Renaissance periods, the scene of diagnosis of the hysteric [sic] shifted from the hospital to the church and the courtroom, which now became the loci of spectacular interrogations.  Official manuals for the detection of witches, often virulently misogynistic, supplied instructions for the detection, torture, and at times execution of the witch/hysteric.  The number of such inquisitions remains unknown but is believed to be high. (Mic95 20-1)

The violence of the nineteenth-century patriarchal reactions to what was named “hysteria” is consistent with the violence of previous eras’ patriarchal reactions to the demonic female malady, such as the uncountable murders of women deemed to be witches.  Nineteenth century forms of violence were often medicalized and sexualized in keeping with its less religious Enlightenment ethos.  The seventeenth century would see the beginning of a neurological model used to theorize the female malady, one that would evolve until the present time.  A revival of uterine theories would occur in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, hence the womb-oriented diagnosis of “hysteria” for what were considered materialist maladies circa 1801.  As examples of this combination of medicalization and sexualization, treatments that stemmed from a combinatory, neuro-uterine model of “hysteria” included “intrauterine injections, the cervical and vulvar application of leeches, and clitoral cauterizations,” and recalcitrant “cases were occasionally subjected to amputative and extirpative gynecological surgery, including bilateral ovariotomies” (Mic95 24).  Though a pioneer in getting away from physically violent forms of treatment, Freud in 1896 volunteered one of his “hysterical”  patients, Emma Eckstein, for a procedure developed by his friend Wilhelm Fliess, who posited that the cauterization of the turbinate bone of the nasal cavity could supposedly cure sexually related neurotic and physiological ailments such as hysteria.  By Freud’s own account, the operation had disastrous effects: the patient nearly bled to death because of bone chips and a meter of gauze left in her nose after the operation.  As late as 1920, Freud would consider an overidectomy as a potential therapy for one of his patient’s homosexuality and the hysteria Freud associated with it (XVIII 172).  Whether neurological or uterine/sexual, there are clear connections between “hysteria, ” the female malady, aberrant forms of femininity, proper forms of femininity, feminine sexuality, patriarchal insecurity, and the violence to which this insecurity led.

Hysteria and Hysterization

              Differentiating my conception of hysteria from Foucault’s “hysterization of women’s bodies” (Fou78 104)—one of his “four great strategic unities which, beginning in the eighteenth century, formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex” (Fou78 103)—will help to expand my own treatment of the questions of hysteria I have raised here.  According to Joan Matlock, author of Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France, hysteria “is far less the diagnostic name for a set symptoms than a category for perceptions”:

While doctors with radically different views reported similar phenomena—paralyses, fainting, coughing fits, convulsions, impressionability, and hypersensitivity to physical and emotional stimulation—the range of symptoms for this disorder [sic] was so great that some doctors refused to categorize it at all except as an exacerbation of whatever made women different from men. (3)

Except for Matlock’s unproblematized assumption that hysteria is a “disorder,” so far so good.  Matlock continues by incorporating her reading of Foucault:

What Foucault called the hysterization of women’s bodies was achieved in the nineteenth century by differentiating orderly bodies from those perceived as disorderly.  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)

What Foucault called the hysterization of those bodies called female, however, was not achieved through any differentiation among these bodies.  On the contrary, his anti-essentialist take on hysteria and sexuality posits the hysterization of those bodies called female as a “strategy” of “the deployment of sexuality,” and, according to Foucault, it would not have excluded any “women” from the category of the potentially threatening to the hegemonic patriarchal order: all “women” were deemed “thoroughly saturated with sexuality” (Fou78 104), therefore they were all disorderly, and this disorderliness was used as an alibi for policing by being “integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to” sexuality (ibid.).  In other words, hysterization allowed for the policing of all women, but Foucault does not address the differentiation between proper women and hysterics in the first volume of the History of Sexuality.  Lacan’s conception of hysteria can be seen as an example of Foucault’s hysterization since Lacan’s “hysteric” cannot be differentiated from his “woman.”

              Besides the anti-essentialism of Foucault’s take on the hysterization of women, another strength of his formulation is the imbrication of women and madness with respect to sexuality, which seems to have been the source of Elaine Showalter’s notion of “the female malady” in her book by that name, despite the critique of Foucault we find there:

Although anyone who writes about the history of madness must owe an intellectual debt to Michel Foucault, his critique of institutional power in Madness and Civilization (1961) does not take account of sexual difference. (6)

Foucault’s notion of the hysterization of women’s bodies, published seven years before The Female Malady, does take into consideration something akin to what Showalter calls “the pervasive cultural association of women and madness” (4)—that is, how being designated female equals suspicion of being laden with a malady, since the female is defined as being saturated with supposedly pathogenic sexuality.  Where Showalter truly differs from Foucault—and what seems to be the source of her misunderstanding of Foucault’s anti-essentialism—is her acceptance of hysteria as a disease, and her other essentialist notions concerning “the feminine”:

While he exposed the repressive ideologies that lay behind the reform of the asylum, Foucault did not explore the possibility that the irrationality and difference the asylum silenced and confined is also the feminine. (6)

In other words, Showalter does not acknowledge that such an essentialist exploration in relation to an a priori feminine is contrary to the anti-essentialist thrust of Foucault’s work, and, accordingly, she does not problematize her essentialist notion of hysteria.

              Where I differ with Foucault begins with his tendency toward a monolithic conception of power.  According to Lois McNay, author of Feminism and Foucault,

What Foucault’s account of power does not explain is how, even within the intensified process of the hysterization of female bodies, women did not slip easily and passively into socially prescribed feminine roles. (41)

Accordingly, Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality argues against the psychoanalytic idea of repression.  Repression and resistance, which Freud and Derrida argue are two sides of the same coin, fall away when power is monolithic: without something otherwise to the discursive constructs that make up the ego and other institutions of power, what is there to repress or resist?  Where or how do the discursive constructs and what is otherwise to them meet without the aporetic “logic” of what Barratt calls the “in but not of” (Bar93 133) relation of the “otherwise other” to the “I-now-is” (Bar93 passim)?  When Foucault does posit an Other, it is either completely passive—as with the silence of madness in Madness and Civilization—or it betrays his anti-essentialist creed, as with the notions of “plebs,” “subjugated knowledges,” and “disqualified knowledges” in his later work.  Whereas all authors who write about some form of what is totally other, or “the Other,” struggle to avoid the reduction of this “subject” to the more of the Same—as Derrida argues in his analysis of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics”—Foucault is a special case since he is one theorist who seems to understand such struggles and their significance—for example, when he writes that madness is “the absence of the work” (qtd. in Der78 43) in reference to Madness and Civilization.  Unfortunately, he sometimes passes over these difficulties as he posits the Other as the simple opposite of the Same (Madness and Reason in Madness and Civilization), or ontologizes and essentializes the Other (plebs, Madness), or makes it an a priori in the form of the Same (disqualified and subjugated knowledges).

              The passivity that characterizes some of the conceptions of a non-reductive encounter with what is Other—for example, the silence of Madness—accounts for neither the instability of the Same, nor the necessary exclusion of what is Other (repression and resistance) that allows for the establishment of the Same and its logic.  In other words, Foucault does not account for the role the Other plays in the “acts of establishment” (Bar93 12) that constitute the Same, and how the Other is “in but not of” the Same.  The energetics of Foucault’s discursive power, what he calls “biopower” in his later theorizing, is all on the side of the Same: the power of the Same determines the modes of the “bio,” as with the hysterization of women’s bodies.  Foucault seems to have been unable to conceptualize a type of power, what might be called an otherwise energetics (that is, an otherwise “energetics” under erasure), which is “of” the Other yet constitutive of, or “in,” the Same (that is, “in but not of” the same).  According to Foucault,

Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover.  It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. (Fou78 105-6)

With this monolithic “deployment of sexuality,” repression of the Other that allows for an “act of establishment” of the Same would not be needed since it is a totality of the Same.  Derrida refers to Foucault’s use of “The Decision” for Foucault’s separating of “sexuality” and the energetics of discursive power (Der78 38).  Is this evidence of a certain avoidance by Foucualt of the problem of the relationship between language and what makes it unstable, what it represses and resists?  Derrida asks how Foucault could write about madness as an Other within a history of reason.  I would add: whence the madness with respect to such a monolithic power of reason?  Foucault gestures toward letting madness speak for itself, which is a gesture towards writing ethically in the Levinasian sense.  Ethics, in this sense, seems to preclude “The Decision,” a distinct delimitation between the Other and the Same, which would be different than Barratt’s “in but not of” and Derrida’s “dissension” where “the exterior (is) the interior, is the fission that produces and divides it along the lines of the Hegelian Entzweiung” (Der78 38-39).

Feminism and the Hysteric

              Foucault’s concept of hysterization theorizes a pathologizing of all women’s bodies, employed to justify all policing, but it does not account for the use of the diagnosis as a means of appropriation or reappropriation of the disorderly bodies labeled as hysterics.  The difference between the normal female body and the hysterical one, in a pseudo-Foucauldian sense, might be construed as the difference between the always potentially disruptive body (in need of policing) and the actually disruptive body (in need of a type of incarceration, a diagnosis as incarceration).  It would be “pseudo” because Foucault did not theorize anything beyond the body as a discursive formation: nothing to repress, and nothing otherwise to the power that might create a dissension within discursvity.  Furthermore, Foucault’s hysterization does not account for the difference between the normal and hysterical positions of “woman” within patriarchies that used the diagnosis of hysteria, and it does not account for the deployment of “hysteria” as a reappropriative measure.  As with Lacan’s hysteric, Foucauldian “hysterized body” is synonymous with “female body.”  Whatever created the dissension within the strictures of proper womanhood, or within the hysterized body, would have been radically other to the identitarian logics of these discursive formations, and therefore would have been threatening to the stability of these logics and the powers of the patriarchies in question.  To call this source of dissension “hysteria,” however, would reduce what is radically otherwise to that logic, to make it recognizable and therefore masterable within that logic and its possible bodily positions.  “Hysteria” marks what is otherwise to a particular phallic order, while providing one of many feminine positions within that order, and a mode of defense against what is radically other to that order.  In all cases “hysteria” is a reappropriative tool of these orders.

              The hysteric as proto-feminist would be oxymoronic if hysteria is understood only as a patriarchal tool of appropriation, and if feminism is understood as being about problematizing, if not disrupting or destroying, traditional positions which would be in the service of patriarchy.  Dianne Hunter’s assertion that “feminism is transformed hysteria, or more precisely, that hysteria is feminism lacking a social network in the outer world” (Hun83 68) would thus seem to be contrary to my position, as Hunter’s position seems to associate hysteria with what is otherwise to the patriarchy, rather than with patriarchy’s appropriation or totalization processes, its identitarian or (op)positional logics of the Same.  Some feminisms might aspire for feminism to be the transformation of the disruption of whatever it is that creates Derrida’s “dissension,” and by definition this (non)source or source would lack a social network.  Again, to call this disruption “hysteria” is to risk legitimizing the patriarchal tool that associates any deviation from proper womanhood with an essentialist notion of a diseased womb—even if “hysteria” is used in a way that attempts to destabilize what is proper by “reappropriating” “hysteria.”     

              Derrida might argue that both “hysteria” and feminism are both part of a phallogocentric social network.  We might ask, how much is the phallogocentrism of “hysteria” linked to the phallogocentrism of feminism?  The larger question becomes how much is feminism invested in the “social network of the outer world,” its logic of the Same, its essentialism, and its use of “hysteria.”  Limiting the scope of my inquiry, I want to focus on the problematic relation of certain feminisms to essentialist conceptions of hysteria.  These conceptions might be seen as the lure of phallogocentrism for these feminisms.  As I stated above, Derrida reduces feminism to a phallogocentric discourse, and feminisms’ inability to give up essentialist conceptions of hysteria seem to be evidence supporting Derrida’s reduction.  Yet Derrida’s reduction of feminism to phallogocentrism is just that, a reduction.  It assumes that, like logocentrism, phallocentrism is inescapable, thus all logocetrism would be phallogocentrism.  In Spurs, Derrida writes probably his most infamous lines for feminists:

And in truth, they too are men, those women feminists so derided by Nietzsche.  Feminism is nothing but the operation of a woman who aspires to be like a man.  And in order to resemble the masculine dogmatic philosopher this woman lays claim—just as much claim as he—to truth, science and objectivity in all their castrated delusions of virility.  Feminism too seeks to castrate.  It wants a castrated woman.  Gone the style. (Der79 62-65)

Derrida assumes that all feminists assume only two positions available to bodies: male or female.  Most feminists do just this, particularly psychoanalytic feminists, who seem to be the most invested in this fundamental aspect of phallogocentrism.  In Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme, however, Diane Elam writes,

If feminism is merely a form of phallogocentrism, then Derrida, however much he gestures at historical necessity, would be equating all of feminism with a teleological search for the essence of woman.  Thus, he would be reducing all feminisms to one and the same feminism.  Lost the style, for Derrida as well. (16-17)

Derrida also reduces all male/female binaries to its phallogocentric form: presence/absence of the penis-phallus by assuming that all searches for truth or logocentrism are necessarily phallogocentrism.  Since Derrida wrote Spurs in 1978, many feminists have attempted to theorize bodies, genders, and sexualities beyond the limitations of phallogocentrism and its male/female.  For me the question remains open whether logocentrism, which seems to be inescapable for theory, is necessarily phallocentric.  Logocentrism seems inescapable for any theory of bodily or sexual positioning.  But why would phallocentrism be inescapable?  What seems to be at stake here is the relationship between the traditional binary of sexual difference, male/female, and the traditional binaries of presence/absence.  Which is primary?  Is logocentrism, the metaphysics of presence, always phallogocentrism?  Can we have logocentrism without phallocentrism?  I return to this question in the concluding chapter.

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….

C: … but when you say “that bursts the family into pieces,” no.  It mimics, it metaphorizes destruction, but the family reconstitutes itself around it….  The analysis I make of hysteria comes through my reflection on the place of deviants who are not hysterics but clowns, charlatans, crazies, all sorts of odd people.  They all occupy challenging positions foreseen by the social bodies, challenging functions within the scope of all cultures.  That doesn’t change the structures, however.  On the contrary, it makes them more comfortable….  In that position, they are part of one of the deepest reinforcements of the superstructure, of the Symbolic.  (154-55).

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.   

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:

Freud invented psychoanalysis between 1895 and 1900 on the basis of his clinical experience with hysterical patients, nearly all of them women, and of the self-analysis he performed to cure his own hysterical symptoms.  Hysteria thus is implicated in psychoanalysis in the sense that the science enfolds the disease within it and is constituted simultaneously with this pathological interiority.  Yet psychoanalysis contests this originary implication, insisting on its scientific authority and asserting mastery over hysteria as the illness of the other, typically of the feminine other.  (1)

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,[1] 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:

Where body was, there shall mind be.

Where unreason was, there shall reason be.

Where female was, there shall male be.

              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.

The Lacanian Hysteric’s Essential Question of Lack

              Freud supposedly cures his own hysteria, what he and Lacan might later call his “struggle against his passive or feminine attitude toward another male”—but the later Freud also theorizes female hysteria as not accepting a “passive or feminine attitude toward another male,” not accepting one’s lack of a penis and instead envying the possession of one.  Most Lacanians read Lacan’s return to Freud as a corrective or clarification here: hysteria is connected to bisexuality, or, as Ragland-Sullivan puts it:

Lacan translates Freud’s find, the hysteric’s sexual oscillation between women and men, into the quintessential question about gender, divided artificially by the effects of identification and language that constitute a sense of being in the form of totalized gender concepts of male and female [see Lac 68].  The hysteric’s gender question—“Am I a woman or a man?—links sexuality to identity: her discourse reveals the fundamental impossibility of reducing identity to gender in the first place.  For Lacan, there is no signifier, symbol or archetype adequate to re-present the difference between the sexes (Lacan, 1975, p. 74 [Lac98 80]). (Wri92 163)

But there is the lack of symbol adequate to transcendentally center the structure of language and the unconscious, which therefore makes the hysteric’s question one of the essential lack.  In Lacanian psychoanalysis, according to Derrida, “[s]omething is missing from its place, but the lack is never missing from it” (Der81 441): “manque à sa place,” which Bass translates as “lack in its place, missing from its place” (Der87 425).  “Manque à sa place” is also a homophone of “manque a sa place”: “lack has its place.”  Contrary to leading to any undecidability, indeterminacy, or division between sex and identity, “lack in its place, missing from its place” is the very foundation of “castration-truth” and a “destinational linguistics.”  According to Derrida, “lack does not have its place in dissemination” (Der87 441).

              Lacan’s status as theorist—whether his work is poststructuralist or postmodern (e.g., Cop94) or the products of a potentially reactionary ontotheologist (e.g., Nan92)—is difficult to determine.  According to Derrida,

In France, the “literary criticism” marked by psychoanalysis had not asked the question of the text….  It is entirely otherwise in the “Seminar on The Purloined Letter.”  Or so it appears.  Although Lacan has never directly and systematically been interested in the so-called “literary” text, and although the problematic of Das Unheimliche does not intervene in his discourse to my knowledge, the general question of the text is at work unceasingly in his writings, where the logic of the signifier disrupts naive semanticism.  And Lacan’s “style” was constructed so as to check almost permanently any access to an isolatable content, to an unequivocal, determinable meaning beyond writing.  (Der87 420)

Yet, following Derrida’s reading of Lacan that follows this quotation, I will argue that the Lacanian text is psychoanalytic and not literary— that is, it attempts to ground itself in its own “castration-truth.”  Its “logic of the signifier” is a logic of lack: a textuality of a “certain linguistics” (Der78 199).  This logic may disrupt “naive semanticism,” but it does so by securing a transcendental phallic center where the “failure” of language secures the center: the disruption is itself construed as that lack which has its place.  The absence of this “naive semanticism,” therefore, should not be read as an example of a postmodern celebration of the indeterminacy of meaning and the decentering of Western discursive structures.  The question for me becomes: should Lacan’s style be read as an obfuscatory defense against any kind of critical assessment?  Along these lines, Barratt argues that

assessment of any “thesis” of Lacan’s … is notoriously difficult.  For, eschewing systematization, Lacan deftly, even roguishly, defies systematic critique.  Moreover, as is well known, his style almost wholly obliterates considerations of the content of his thought.  For Lacan, style is everything, and the content of whatever thesis he might happen to be presenting becomes quite unnecessarily adumbrated. (Bar84 214)

Despite all the turnabouts and twists and contradictions, the orthodox feel of Lacanian “psychoanalysis” comes from the way it consistently conceptualizes the relation of the “subject” (in its most servile sense) to the Other, the ultimate totality and patrocentrism of that Other, and the immutability and oppositionality of the possible sexual identities determined by the Other.  Moreover, a cosmology based on Oedipal destiny (Der87 495) is created when the “letter,” the “odd” material substrate of the Other and its logic of the signifier, “always arrives at its destination” (Lac88 53), and this destination is the reproduction of the oedipal structure of sexual positionality and the actual phallic function.  Though Lacan claims to have subverted the notion of “anatomy is destiny,” he has erected a determinism immune even to what might be called the vicissitudes of any “biology” or adestinational postal system and created a sexual transcendentalism where the “male” is “whole” and the “female” is “not-whole,” as determined by the phallic function.

              Despite what seems to be the consistent and radical determinism of Lacanian “psychoanalysis,” Joan Copjec, in her book Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists—in particularly the section, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason”—writes that deconstruction could learn about undecidability from psychoanalysis (which she erroneously assumes is simply represented by its Lacanian form).  This claim stems from her analysis of Lacan’s opening to Television that “saying it all is literally impossible: words fail” (213), and of the relationship of this “failure” to sexual difference, and therefore to hysteria’s essential question.  The rest of this opening to his mass seminar is as follows:

I always speak the truth.  Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all.  Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail.  Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.  (3)

It may seem that Lacan, with his conception that “words fail,” has backed away from his previous belief in how “a letter always arrives at its destination,” and therefore embraced a less deterministic theory of language, but this is not necessarily the case.  “Words fail” to speak “the whole truth,” but the letter of each word, mysteriously connected to a part of truth, seems to still be determined to “arrive” at the proper destination.  We can read “failure” here as “lack”: words must fail, properly.  They must take a detour in order to return; in order for the “Real” to be held onto, mastered.

              Truth for Lacan usually refers to the truth about desire; thus when he claims to “always speak the truth,” he seems to be saying that he has left his imaginary behind, which purifies speech of the demands of the imaginary: Lacan called this “full speech” (Lac77a 46), which might be equated to Freud’s cure.  To “always speak the truth,” it seems, would be to become one with the assumption of one’s desire, but not necessarily all of one’s desire, especially when “desire” occasionally overlaps with jouissance.  Yet even Lacanians understand, as Dylan Evans argues, that “it is impossible to give a univocal definition of the way Lacan uses [truth] since it functions in multiple contexts simultaneously, in opposition to a wide variety of terms” (Eva96 215-16)—and, I would add, at times in radical contradiction to other uses.  For example, Lacan also associates truth with deception, lies, mistakes, and errors.  His line could thus be read as “I am deceiving you, therefore I am telling the truth.”  Moreover, truth is supposed to refer to the truth about desire, and desire is supposedly a product of the Symbolic, but Lacan associates it with the Real above, an order that is supposedly a radical alterity to the Symbolic.  It seems that “words fail” only because they cannot say the whole truth about desire-jouissance, not because of any inherent failure within words themselves, such as a necessarily arbitrary relation between signifier and signifieds—which would only be a “failure” if “success” meant some magical correspondence between signifier and signified.  Lacan seems to be saying that words fail to represent the whole truth, thus he falls back into, if he ever got beyond, a correspondence theory of language, which is antithetical to a differential or Saussurian theory of language.  Moreover, this “failure” suggests a failure of words to correspond to the specific absence of lack: words must “fail” in order for “castration-truth” to be at the center of the structure of language and the Lacanian unconscious.

              Before I get ahead of myself, I should put Copjec’s use of the quote above into the context of her argument.  Copjec argues that Lacan, in Seminar XX: Encore,

reiterates the position of psychoanalysis with regard to sexual difference: our sexed being, he maintains, is not a biological phenomenon, it does not pass through the body, but “results from the logical demands of speech” [Lac98 15].  These logical demands lead us to an encounter with a fundamental bedrock or impasse when we inevitably stumble on the fact that “saying it all is literally impossible: words fail.”  Moreover, we are now in a position to add, they fail in two different ways, or, as Lacan puts it in Encore, “There are two ways for the affair, the sexual relation, to misfire….  There is the male way … [and] the female way.” (213)

Beyond the unfounded assumption of the identity of words failing and the sexual relationship misfiring, Copjec’s citation of the latter quote by Lacan is disingenuous.  Bruce Fink’s translation of the extended selection of Encore Copjec quotes reads as follows:

The universe—you might realize it by now, all the same, given the way in which I have accentuated the use of certain words, the “whole” and the “not-whole,” and their differential application to the two sexes—the universe is the place where, due to the fact of speaking, everything succeeds (de dire, tout réussit).

              Am I going to do a little William James here?  Succeeds in what?  I can tell you the answer, now that I have, I hope, finally managed to bring you to this point: succeeds in making the sexual relationship fail (faire rater) in the male manner.

              Normally I would expect to hear some snickering now—alas, I don’t hear any.  Snickering would mean “So, you’ve admitted it, there are two ways to make the sexual relationship fail.”  That is how the music of the epithalamion is modulated.  The epithalamion, the duet (duo)—one must distinguish the two of them—the alternation, the love letter, they’re not the sexual relationship.  They revolve around the fact that there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship.

              There is thus the male way of revolving around it, and then the other one, that I will not designate otherwise because it’s what I’m in the process of elaborating this year—how that is elaborated in the female way.  It is elaborated on the basis of the not-whole.  But as, up until now, the not-whole has not been amply explored, it’s obviously giving me a hard time.  (Lac98 53)

Contrary to Copjec’s misquote, Lacan never argues here that words or the sexual relationship fail in the female way.  He only argues that there is another way besides the “male way” of revolving around the fact that there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship, whatever this might mean.  Moreover, his statement “there are two ways to make the sexual relationship fail” seems to be what he imagines his detractors ignorantly accusing him off admitting.  Copjec’s quotation is thus misleading in two ways: 1) she quotes “there are two ways to make the sexual relationship fail” as if it were directly and unambiguously argued by Lacan, and 2) she equates the “male manner,” which is highly ambiguous with respect to whether it modifies the universe’s success or the sexual relation’s failure, with “the male way of revolving around” the “fact that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship,” and opposes it to “the female way” of “elaborating” what Lacan “will not designate otherwise” to the “the male way of revolving around” the “fact that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.”  Thus in Copjec’s quotation of Lacan there is a conflation of various actions and the potentially very different objects of these various actions: a way of elaborating, a way of revolving, and a manner of failing-succeeding.

              Even if we granted Copjec the equation of the failure of the sexual relationship and the failure of words, and that Lacan argued that they could fail in a “female way,” it would be hard to imagine these “failings” that fall into two a priori categories as “undecidability”—but Copjec doesn’t stop there.  Following Lacan’s “A Love Letter” in Encore, she defines these two categories or positions as follows:

[On the males side:]

There is at least one x that is not submitted to the phallic function

All x’s are (every x is) submitted to the phallic function

[On the female side:]

There is not one x that is not submitted to the phallic function

Not all (not every) x is submitted to the phallic function  (214)

Copjec justifies “Lacan’s abandonment of some of the terms, and even some of the premises, of classical logic” because of the ubiquity of the phallic function.  Yet isn’t this in some ways intended as proof of the phallic function?  Why this ubiquity would justify such abandonment, furthermore, is unclear.  Perhaps similar to the phallus, which is the magical signifier that determines its signified—and, in the process, all other signs—the phallic function’s magic allows for Lacan’s tables to pass as logic.  Furthermore, in a rather obtuse Kantian argument for how this a priori compartmentalization of sexual positions constitutes undecidability, Copjec contradicts Lacan’s (and her) notion that “Woman doesn’t exist” (Television 38) and argues “a judgement of her existence is impossible” (226).  She also contradicts the idea that the category of woman is determined by the phallic function (castration) and, following Lacan, reduces “woman” to the “not-all” equation “because she lacks a limit, by which [Lacan] means she is not susceptible to the threat of castration; the ‘no’ embodied by this threat does not function for her” (226)—which is ultimately a repetition of the traditional notion of the underdeveloped super-ego of women, the result of the actual phallic function and their marginalization with respect to the phallic Other.  Copjec concludes her discussion of the left side of the table as follows:

For it is precisely because she [it?] is totally, that is, limitlessly inscribed within the symbolic that she is in some sense wholly outside it, which is to say the question of her existence is absolutely undecidable within it….  We are thus led to the conclusion that the woman is a product of a “symbolic without an Other.”  For this newly conceived entity, Lacan, in his last writings, coined the term lalangue.  Woman is the product of lalangue.  (227)

This seems to me to be a rationalization of the presence-absence of woman required by “castration-truth”: totally inscribed, and yet “not-whole.”  If woman is the product of an-Other symbolic, the supposedly undecidable of her existence with respect to the symbolic of the Other seems to have been decided, this time in harmony with Lacan’s position that “Woman doesn’t exist.”  Lacan concludes here a totality of “castration-truth,” a transcendental structure centered on a specific absence.  One wonders what happened to the idea that “there is no Other to the Other” (Television 40).  Moreover, a “symbolic without an Other” (how could this be?!) sounds a lot like castration as God, negative theology (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe).

              Any “failure” that reinforces the negation of woman and re-establishes man’s privileged relation to the Other would be a success in terms of reinforcing and re-establishing what is obviously a version of the actual phallic function.  And any “failure” of words or “the” sexual relationship—as if there were only one, a heterosexist assumption—that maintains two transcendental categories does not embrace undecidability.  The so-called failing of language in Lacan always seems to end up reestablishing the oppositionality of the possible sexual identities, a type of “complementarity” that Rose argues is the foundation of the “ultimate fantasy”: “It is when the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ are seen to represent an absolute and complementary division that they fall prey to a mystification in which the difficulty of sexuality instantly disappears?” (Mit83 33)—and the “difficulty” of language when it is the basis of an oedipal destiny and the letter’s inevitable return reestablishes this “proper.”  That these categories are each populated by two contradictory “arguments” is more a product of Lacan’s need for “odd” conceptualizations to sustain whatever might be considered his theoretical system than the basis for some kind of undecidability.  I will argue later that these “odd” conceptualizations, Lacan’s material-ideal letter/phallus/penis, are the proper legatees of what I call Freud’s “trauma”-structure trope of castration, his difference-into-identity trope.  Another example of one of Lacan’s “odd” conceptualization would be the “at least one x” of the right side that designates the mythical primal father.  Isn’t this supposed to be a materialist theory?  Also, no explanation is given for why there would not be symmetry between the use of verbs in the second “argument” of each side.  Why isn’t it “All x is” or “Not all x’s are”? 

Early in her essay, Copjec argues:

So you see, there’s no use trying to teach psychoanalysis about undecidability, about the way sexual signifiers refuse to sort themselves out into two separate classes.  It’s no use preaching deconstruction to psychoanalysis because it already knows all about it.  (Cop94 216)

In Lacanian “psychoanalysis,” any signifier, not just “sexual” ones—whatever these might be in a system where signifiers are not attached a priori to signifieds—are submitted to a linguistic version of the phallic function.  This is the “odd” function where the “parlêtre’s” alienation is conceived of in terms of castration, and, at the same time, castration provides the emptied space—the S1 of Lacan’s Urverdrängung—for the S2 of the phallus, which anchors what would otherwise be the sliding of signifiers to the signifieds in accordance with the proper, the proper destination where the letter always arrives at what Derrida calls the oikos, Das heimlich, the familiar and the familial—which, of course, is Oedipus, the Law-of-the-Father, that which determines the economy of the phallic Other. 

              What remains consistent through the equivocations, obfuscations, and “odd” concepts of Lacanian “psychoanalysis”—which can be confused as “undecidability”—is the repetition of the actual phallic function: repressed, mostly hidden from direct assessment, but constantly returning and hardly an undecidable.  Just as there seems to be only successful language in Lacan’s universe, success being determined by the reproduction of oedipal sexual identities, a “specific” failure, any failing of “the” sexual relationship in Lacanian theory has less to do with some mythical obstructions of a Third, the Other, and more to do with Lacan’s drive to maintain the “singulière” hom(m)osexual basis of his theory, his logic of the same, where one side of his oppositionality falls out after it serves its purpose of acting as oppositional other.  Any oppositionality would be devoid of sexuality if this sexuality is conceived of as an otherwise other to the binarisms of identitarian logic (see Bar93).  Lacan and Lacanians often conflate sexuality and oedipal sexual identities, just as they do language with a rigid and stiltified Other of the Law-of-the-Father.  Lacan’s hysteric, therefore, is not the figure of sexual indeterminacy, the so-called “Real,” or undecidability, but the foundation, the “anchoring point” of a “specific” failure, a “specific” absence, whose loss would be mourned.  Lacan’s hysteric is like Freud’s, but more in the terms of the so-called “linguistic turn” of mid-century structuralism.  Lacan mourned lack not having its place, the lack of lack, when he mourned the loss of the traditional hysteric.  Psychoanalysis/hysteria.

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[1]   I wonder why Freud’s work before 1895 would not be considered part of the invention of psychoanalysis, especially when much of his work with Breuer on hysterics was done then.  The year 1900 fits popular and orthodox conceptions of the end of Freud’s invention phase, but the Oedipus and castration complex were unformulated at that time, and the Dora case (among other cases that were even later) still shows signs of the “seduction” theory, which the orthodox like to believe had been “abandoned” to make way for psychoanalysis proper.  Thus, “psychoanalysis,” if your definition would be centered on the relationship of repression and sexuality, was forming before 1895 (repression, defense) and was still largely unformed until 1908 (Oedipus and castration complex).  What seems to be at stake here is (1) the notion that psychoanalysis has an essence, and (2) an orthodox reading of the origin of psychoanalysis centered on 1897 and Freud’s supposed abandonment of the “seduction” theory.

[i]  Seems more significant that she treats it as an ahistorical identity.

[ii]  see i above.

[iii]  This seems secondary to the notion that phallocentric metaphysics of presence “needs this disease.”

[iv]  Or, will support the assumption of their linguistics with this construction.

[v] also appeals to a certain wo es war soll ich werden ethos.

[vi] demonstrations

[vii] and history.  Isn’t there something else wrong with a “history of female madness”

[viii]  see chap 5.

[ix] what is madness? the name of the Other?

[x] transcendental disease.