BRUNEL UNIVERSITY LONDON MA Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society Course: Clinical Interventions in Psychoanalysis Professor: Antonios Vadolas Student: María Fernanda Cordero Hermida 2014-2015  ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ The term Hysteria has been very commonly used but, above all, misused in our societies. Very frequently we hear people calling ‘hysteric’ to women whose reactions are by some means disproportionate or exaggerated. And it is precisely mostly the feminine gender the one that is often given that adjective. But where does the term Hysteria come from, and why is it related to women? Elaine Showalter highlights that when it was first introduced as a medical matter, Hysteria was considered a physical disease that somehow affected the mind, although, later on, many physicians started believing that hysteria was a mind condition which was reflected in the body, and they explained that the unconscious desires were converted into physical symptoms and pathologies. Typical symptoms, the author emphasises, were “limps, paralyses, seizures, coughs, headaches, speech disturbances, depression, insomnia, exhaustion, eating disorders”. (Showalter, 1998, p. 14) Hysteria has been attributed to women due to the fact that its name, clarifies Showalter, comes from the Greek term hystera that means uterus, and many healers believed that convulsions, random pains and other alterations found in women had to do with the uterus, they used to think that this was traveling freely along the feminine body, and producing all these symptoms; although, after discovering that the uterus was located in one and only place, doctors referred to hysteria as coming from the nervous system. (Showalter, 1998) Doctor Michael Weintraub explains that hysteria became more known and doctors started to be more interested on it due to the French neurologist Charcot, who, with his Hypnosis method proposed a treatment for this malaise. The author says that Charcot believed that hysteria had to do with a congenital degeneration of the brain, and called it the ‘great imitator’, due to the vast amount of suggestibility and imitation that the patients showed regarding their symptoms. (Weintraub, 1983) Many neurologists became really interested and started to study this phenomenon with Charcot, but one of the most influential was undoubtedly Sigmund Freud, who, later on, related hysteria to sexuality. After his time with Charcot in Paris, Freud continued working with hypnosis and catharsis in hysterical patients, although, he found that hypnosis was not completely useful for some of them, so he moved on to a new technique called Free Association. (McGrath, 1986) Freud in his book Studies on Hysteria explains that the precipitating causes for this pathology, are psychical traumas. “Any experience which calls up distressing affects - such as those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain - may operate as a trauma of this kind” (Freud & Breuer, 1955, p. 6). According to Paul Verhaeghe, Freud in the beginning differentiated three types of hysteria: Hypnoid hysteria, retention hysteria and hysteria of defence, all three have a common basis with a failing in abreaction, although, “With hypnoid hysteria, abreaction fails due to the particular condition – a hypnoid one- in which the experience took place. With retention hysteria, there are special external circumstances, mostly social ones, obliging the patient to renounce abreaction. Thirdly, with the hysteria of defence, the cause is to be found in an internal conflict; the ego represses certain painful contents, thereby making abreaction impossible.” (Verhaeghe, 1997, p. 21) The author highlights that Freud later on, focused more deeply in hysteria of defence, recognising it as the proper Hysteria. When Freud analysed the neuroses and its causes, he referred to it as a defence against something incompatible, like Colette Soler recalls, “something in what we call the subject is pushed aside.” (Soler, 1996, p. 249) That something, the author highlights, is sexuality. Freud considered that sexual experiences in childhood were the origins for hysteria as well as for obsession. In ‘My views on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the Neuroses’, Freud recollects his memories on past hysterical patients and emphasises that the psychical traumas always had a starting point with sexual experiences in childhood, more specifically with the repressed memories of these events, but they also had to do with the patient’s phantasies; he explains, “They were now no longer to be regarded as direct derivatives of the repressed memories of childhood experiences; but between the symptoms and the childish impressions there were inserted the patient’s phantasies (or imaginary memories), mostly produced during the years of puberty, which on the one side were built up out of and over the childhood memories and on the other side were transformed directly into the symptoms” (Freud, 1968, p. 274). Unconscious phantasies, Freud corroborates, are the antecedents of many hysterical symptoms, and since the symptoms are somatic, they are a result of the sexual sensations that the hysteric felt during the phantasy. The author tries to give a more specific significance to hysteric symptoms, by adding different formulas to them; first, he says that the symptoms are mnemic symbols of traumatic experiences, second, they are considered substitutes of these traumatic experiences, due to conversion, hysterical symptoms are also explained as an expression of the fulfilment of a wish, or of an unconscious phantasy. They are the return of a sexual satisfaction that was repressed in childhood, and they may be the representation of different unconscious impulses, which will always have a sexual reference. (Freud, 1959) Freud in Studies on Hysteria says that in his therapies, hysterical symptoms had immediately disappeared right after bringing back to the patient’s memory both, the event that provoked the symptoms and the affect it produced to the individual, by letting him or her produce them with words. Freud also explains that hysterical symptoms are formed due to the fact that the patient, instead of releasing the affect, after an event that generates it; for example crying, screaming, etc., the patient represses the reaction, and the affect remains attached to the event in the memory. Language, for instance, can be a substitute of the reaction, in the therapeutic space, and Freud explains that the affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost in the same way. (Freud & Breuer, 1955) Doctor Michael Weintraub explains that the hysterical personality according to Freud means a failure in the resolution of the Oedipus Complex. (Weintraub, 1983) and, it is Freud himself who explains in his book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ that the parents play a special role in the formation of neuroses; “Falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent stock of the psychic impulses which arise in early childhood, and are of such importance as the material of the subsequent neurosis” (Freud, 1997, p. 155). But how does this relationship manifest in the hysterical individual? Let us slightly recall Dora’s case study, in which Freud based his theory of hysteria; Dora was an eighteen year old patient who had the typical symptoms of petite hystérie. The outcome of the causations of her pathology, Freud explained, was the everlasting love Dora had for her father, and how despite this love, she felt used by him (because of his relation with Frau K). It is also very important to remember that for Dora, her father was a sick and impotent man, unable to fulfil any woman’s desire, and at the same time, he was the reason why Dora had been ill “I am my father’s daughter… he has made me ill, just as he has made Mother ill. It is from him that I have got my evil passions, which are punished by illness”. (Freud, 1953, p. 82) So, this repressed feelings towards her father had no other outcome than symptoms of conversion. Breuer’s patient, Anna O. for instance had developed a paralysis of her right arm when she had a daydream about his father being attacked by a snake; Bruce Fink explained that her arm refused to protect him, so her arm would be the symptom of her relationship with the father. (Fink, 1999) However, as we know, Freud indicated that Dora’s treatment was a failure; she left treatment after only three months, but what happened in the therapeutic space that made Dora leave the treatment? When Lacan analysed Dora’s case in an attempt to understand Freud’s failure on this particular case, he proposed that Freud’s mistake was that he could not understand the hysteric’s desire, so Lacan imparted a formula that, as he said, was originated in the hysteric’s experience, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (Lacan, 1994, p. 38) to give a simpler explanation, Lacan recalls that Dora felt that there was something especial in Frau K., given the fact that her father was in love with her and Herr K. married her, therefore, for Dora, Frau was a mystery that represented her own femininity, and this mystery was appealing to the girl. Lacan explains that Dora had a problem accepting to be the object of desire and this is what motivates her to idolise Frau K. So, the hysteric’s desire is nothing else but what the big Other desires. (Lacan, 2006) Now, Lacan explains that a Hysteric subject is the one that, despite Dora, wants to become the object of desire, what happens in the hysteric is that, since the very beginning, when the separation with the mOther takes place, the subject constitutes herself as the object that the Other is lacking. Fink recalls Lacan when he highlights that the hysteric subject considers her mother as incomplete when the separation occurs, and the hysteric becomes the necessary object to complete her mOther. Later on, when the Name of the Father is instilled, the hysteric comprises herself as the object of desire of the Other, for, as long as she remains desired, she has assured a space in within the Other. (Fink, 1999) Lacan declares that the structure of neurosis is basically a question, and in one of his seminars he expresses that the hysteric ruminates around one specific question, Am I a man or a woman? He explains that everything a hysteric says, expresses or manifests, operates as a function in order to answer that question. But when he refers about Dora’s case, he explains that her question had nothing to do with her identification as man or woman, “Where does she end up in fact, if not confronted by a fundamental question on the subject of her sex? Not on what sex she is, but what is it to be a woman?” (Lacan, 1993, p. 171) After introducing the hysteric’s question, Lacan explains that this has a compound beginning in the imaginary and symbolic order in the Oedipus Complex, the author affirms that the female’s process of castration experiences a detour from the original process men go through, more specifically, regarding the fact that the woman lacks the phallus, she is characterised by an absence, a gap, she feels that she is less desired than the male, hence, the question ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ gives her an identification; this detour that the female sex has to take in the symbolisation process is the precise justification Lacan gives for the major presence of female hysterics than of male ones. (Lacan, 1993) But it becomes more complex in the matter that, the hysteric does not only want to be the object of desire, but as she also identifies herself with the Other, henceforth in a particular way, she becomes the desiring Other (‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’) Fink explains “The hysteric’s position as a desiring subject is dependent upon the Other’s desire; in other words, it involves a detour via a man. She desires like a man”. (Fink, 1999, p. 125). Žižek explains that the fundamental problem of a subject’s desire is that it is already the other’s desire, so what happens with the hysteric is that she does not know how to differentiate what her true desire is from what the others desire in her. (Žižek, 2006) Now, if we consider Verhaeghe’s paper about Lacan’s four discourses, he exposes that the hysteric subject is always looking for someone who could help her solve the question that is set in her, although this encounter seems to fail every time, let us say, the man (who can be a spouse, professor or therapist, etc.) fails to maintain the role of the master, because at the same time, the hysteric seems to fail at signifying herself as a woman, nothing seems to give her the sexual identity she asks for. Nevertheless, the hysteric will always try to find in the Other, the answer for her search; she is always looking for the ‘subject supposed to know’. So, what Verhaeghe poses is that the hysteric’s desire is that of knowledge as a means of jouissance, always with the same ending: Lack. (Verhaeghe, 1997) Žižek declares that hysteria needs to be understood as an ambiguous protest against the Master’s insertion, although this is a problematic and complex matter, given the fact that the hysteric needs of this Master, the author highlights that the hysterical subject cannot do without a Master. (Žižek, 1995) So, when in the therapeutic space, the Master’s role is being played by the analyst, from whom, the hysteric expects a solution to her riddle. Gérard Wajcman acknowledges that the question the hysteric subject presents to the analyst is that of herself, she is the question, the barred subject marked by symptoms that she does not understand, although these symptoms create her discourse as a question to the Other, meanwhile, the analyst would act as the Master of knowledge, the one who is supposed to have the answer that should calm the hysterical subject. Wajcman articulates that all of her speech acts as if she was commanding the Other to give her an answer to who she is, although she depends entirely on him, because the answer of the Other is what she thinks makes her a subject. (Wajcman, Spring 2003) So far we have seen Freud’s and Lacan’s approaches to the hysterical subjects; for both of these authors, hysteria has played a major role in the development of their theories and teachings. Freud based his whole Psychoanalytic method, by studying a group of hysteric women in his early stages; the behaviour of these particular individuals made him try to give an answer to the performance of human beings. At first he followed Charcot’s steps, by hypnotising hysterics, in order to get to their unconscious, but later on, Freud discovered how difficult it was for some patients to respond to suggestion, so he created a new technique called free association, ‘the talking cure’. Through which he came to an understanding of the hysteric subject and his/her relation to the infant sexuality. If we take a deeper look at all the studies that exist on hysteria, we can consider that this malaise is the proper reason why Psychoanalysis was founded. Freud based all his theory on his studies on hysteria, but what stopped him at a certain point in his life, and this becomes even clearer in his case study with Dora, is the specific question that he once posted to Marie Bonaparte: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is what does a woman want?” (Jones, 1953, p. 421), question to which Jacques Lacan, years later tried to give an answer by re-analysing Dora’s case and hysteria in general terms. What Lacan postulated is that, when it comes to the hysteric subject, she considers herself as the object α of the Other; she is what the Other is lacking. As we have reviewed before, the hysteric feels the need to be the object of desire in order to feel that she exists, that she is a subject. Marie-Hélène Brousse elucidates that Lacan “reinterprets Freud’s rapport with hysteria and what knowledge he was able to extract from it for psychoanalysis: the wound the hysteric feels from phallic deprivation cannot be compensated by the satisfaction that the carrier (of the phallus) could get from pacifying her. It is, on the contrary, revived by its presence in the form of the regret that causes this wound. It is from this point on that one understands that the hysteric symbolizes primary dissatisfaction” (Brousse, 2012, p. 42) What Lacan explained is that even if the hysteric feels the need to be the object of desire of the Other, she does not want to fulfil that desire, she only wants to be there, as long as she remains untouched. Fink expressed that in the therapeutic space, this modality of becoming the lack of the Other takes place in the relation with the hysteric and the analyst. (Fink, 1999) The hysteric comes to analysis for one reason, according to Lacan, and this is to find the answer to the one and only question that marks her hysteria ‘Am I a man or a woman?’, she tries to find a master to give her the answer, a master who is supposed to give her the knowledge he has. But further beyond this, Marie-Hélène Brousse highlights that the hysteric looks for the master in order to expose his impotence, she needs to ask this question, but at the same time, the answer cannot be given, because the master (in this case the analyst) does not have it. (Brousse, 2012) The discourse of the hysteric that Lacan introduced is, according to Patricia Gherovici, what allows us to understand the relation between jouissance and desire, more specifically, to understand that desire is just a wish for an unsatisfied desire, also to understand that the hysteric constructs the man (the master) stimulated by the desire for knowledge and similarly, the hysteric discourse makes us think of the analytic cure as a “hysterization of discourse” (Gherovici, 2014). To finish with this analysis, we recall Gérard Wajcman, who explains that the discourse of the hysterical subject is essential in the clinical practise, because it reveals the structure of the speech and also because it highlights the dimensions of the human discursive practise. The hysteric’s demand forces speech, because it needs an answer, instilling her in the structure of language that, after all, shows the need for the subject to be dependant of the Other (Wajcman, Spring 2003). This means that the years of study on hysterical subjects have taught psychoanalysts to comprehend the various and complex mechanics of the human being. The question ‘Who am I?’ is the riddle that suffocates the hysteric’s mind, but, is it not this question the one every neurotic subject asks himself during his lifetime? If so, I believe that this paradox can be answered in one only way, “I am who I want to be” the only one that can give me that answer is me, the Other is there only to accompany me in the discovery of myself.  References Brousse, M.-H., 2012. Lacan Circle of Melbourne. [Online] Available at: http://www.lacancircle.net/MHBDeathand.pdf [Accessed 11 April 2015]. Fink, B., 1999. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. 9th ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Freud, S., 1953. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume VII (1901-1905). 7th ed. London: The Hogarth Press. Freud, S., 1959. 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