Hysteria

De la « femme enfant » (André Breton) et la « femme nature » (Xavière Gauthier), à travers la muse et la « séductrice perfide » (Alain Jouffroy) jusqu’à un type de femme étrange et angoissante, les surréalistes font toujours montre de leur fascination pour la femme et le corps féminin. Un genre en particulier de ces différentes images féminines  est au centre de leurs préoccupations : la femme hystérique. Prise entre fascination et appréhension, André Breton & Cie. ne semblent capables à échapper ce type de femme étrange qui se présente effrayant mais également sensuel.
        L’hystérie s’inscrit dans la recherche surréaliste d’un dépassement des limites qu’imposa une société détestée. Elle est un langage expressif du corps et les postures qui se manifestent pendant une crise sont libératrices. La femme hystérique devient donc, pour les surréalistes, un médium universel, permettant de libérer l’individu de carcans et de mécanismes d’oppression issus d’une bourgeoisie autoritaire. Mais en même temps, étant donné la rage psychique qui se déchaine pendant une crise, la femme hystérique devient terrifiante. Elle se transforme en symbole d’angoisse, car elle nous présente notre « soi intérieur » (Hélène Vanel) – complètement hors de notre contrôle. 
          Aucun exemple de ce genre de représentation surréaliste n’est aussi marquant que la performance intitulée Acte manqué, la caricature théâtrale d’une crise d’hystérie mise en scène pour l’Exposition internationale du surréalisme à la galerie des Beaux-arts de Georges Wildenstein en 1938. Hélène Vanel, une danseuse française, donna l’impression d’une « sorcière hirsute, cassante, cassée, spectre en charpie » . En faisant entendre des râles hystériques, elle se fraya un chemin entre des spectateurs, sauta sur un lit et s’y roula et se contorsionna « […] comme un tourbillon dans un mouvement inouï qui entraina toute l’assistance dans un délire démentiel […] » . En oscillation perpétuelle entre souffrance et extase, entre agression et gestes sexuels, Vanel, l’hystérique, éveille simultanément le désir et l’angoisse. Comme femme fatale surréaliste (belle mais dangereuse, sensuelle mais effrayante), elle incarne le portrait, d’un corps chargé d’une rage psychique – un rage qui ne se laisse plus contenir, qui devient dangereux, une rage qui peut faire « tomber une civilisation » (Don LaCoss).
        Une confrontation à la société, une enquête de la liberté, mais également symbole d’angoisse, ce spectacle agresso-sexuel semble prédestiné pour un colloque qui cherche à étudier les origines de la « femme fatale » et ses métamorphoses diverses. Je propose donc une étude détaillée de Vanel dans l’Acte manqué – en tant qu’hystérique, en tant que femme fatale selon l’image surréaliste.

This paper aims to concretize this notion of literary theories being in dialogue by exploring the intertwining of the Marxist theory, mainly depending on Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin’s theories, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, based on Sigmund Freud’s writings, in Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” with focus on Reverand Parris as a representative of the Bourgoise and John Proctor, Abigail Williams and the people of Salem as representatives of the Proletariats. “The Crucible” portrays the Marxist ideology of class division, yet more importantly, it traces religion, a concept long debated among the Marxists, as the trigger to the class struggle. The characters in the play have taken to 2 extreme measures for power attainment; Hysteria, triggered by the Id, and revolution, triggered by the Superego. This is what this paper aims to explore further with taking

Background Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a complex, multifaceted, heterogeneous disorder, affecting 4%–18% of reproductive-aged women and it is associated with reproductive, metabolic and psychological dysfunctions. PCOS affects quality of life and can worsen anxiety and depression either due to the features of PCOS or due to the diagnosis of a chronic disease. Methods In this descriptive-analytical study, 81 patients with PCOS were recruited from Vali-e-Asr Reproductive Health Research Center. A questionnaire with items related to pieces of information about stress was used for data collection. Stress symptoms were assessed using the Understanding Yourself questionnaire. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS Ver. 13.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, ILL, USA). The data are presented as mean±SD or as frequency with percentages. A p-value less than 0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Results The descriptive results showed that 8 (9.9%) participants did not have any ...

Special issue of "Culture Unbound". Through an introduction and six original articles, the issue investigates a variety of cultural and scientific discourses and practices that in different ways are related to neuroscience and the brain.

The special issue was edited by guest editors Peter Bengtsen and Kristofer Hansson.

There are certain thoughts - intimations - that will seem corny, or laughable, and therefore dismissed - and only seriously absorbed into the changing mind when felt, in the shelter of the quietly moving music of the soul.
It is the function of art, and of love, to make this music heard . . . 

  It is not the music of depression - it is the way through.

In this comparative study of Angela Carter's " The Lady of the House of Love " (1979) and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979) eating habits, relation to the domestic and to (ir)rationality are examined in the female and male characters in both works to show how their authors create gender hybridity. Drawing upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), the article proposes that the hybridity reproduces patriarchal transfer of power.

Known for photographic self-portraits in which she appears in a variety of (dis)guises, Sherman frustrates boundaries between self and other, reality and fantasy. Critics frequently inquire, “Who is the real Cindy Sherman?” Her response to such queries is the understudied "A Cindy Book." "Book" is a compendium featuring snapshots of the artist. However, its only text is the hand-written refrain, “That’s me,” inscribed beneath each photo.

Sherman circles her image with colored markers. Unlike the body of work she produced as an adult, "Book" is comprised of photographs taken by others. The album appears to be an artifact of the “real” Sherman from infancy to young adulthood.

"Book" is best understood as a performative scrapbook that provides an origin myth for the celebrity artist even as that myth is undermined by the text’s ambiguity. By providing no information beyond the images, Sherman asks audiences to construct a persona for the represented “me.” "Book" demonstrates how Sherman’s view of herself is mediated through her internalization of a gaze associated with an other.

I frame "Book" through the discourse of the hysteric who seeks to define herself through the view of her interlocutor. "Book" reflects the fragmented narrative of the hysteric who lacks a stable sense of identity and is incapable of providing a coherent life narrative. While "Book" seems to answer the question, “Who is Cindy Sherman?”, it unsettles any simplistic conception of the artist’s identity. Rather than offering an “authentic” Sherman, "Book" performs the mimetic instabilities that define hysteria.

By the antebellum years, popular and professional thinking about infertility and the birth of children with congenital disabilities followed a racialized pattern that hewed to the familiar contours of the United States’ larger racial and gender ideologies that legitimized slavery. Whites routinely blamed enslaved women for these conditions through toxic, intersecting discourses about race, gender, and disability that trafficked in racist stereotypes of black women’s supposed lasciviousness and immorality. At the same time, white women of elite or middling social stature were absolved of any imagined responsibility for these very same conditions on the grounds that their pure, delicate physicality left them vulnerable and susceptible to these “afflictions.”

Even though the Surrealists in general and their attitude towards insanity and psychology in particular have been extensively studied, their unique approach to hysteria through their first ever performance piece, L'Acte manqué/The Unconsummated Act, presented at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in 1938, has never been analyzed in detail. The opening of the exhibition featured at midnight, a half-naked dancer, Hélène Vanel, who, thrashing, twitching and shouting ran into the middle of the crowd to give a dramatic, and only too real, impression of a hysterical attack. Her seemingly chaotic movements have been dismissed by most scholars as a mere manifestation of sexual frustration. This article intends to show that, on the contrary, the Unconsummated Act has a complex, intriguing structure, which transforms the event into a fascinating example of avant-garde artistic approach to hysteria, considered by Surrealists to be an act of social rebellion.

Il testo analizza la figura della Gertrude manzoniana, nel transito dal Fermo
e Lucia alle due edizioni de I promessi sposi, alla luce della sintomatologia
isterica elaborata in ambito medico — specialmente francese — a partire dal
Settecento. Attraverso un serrato confronto fra il romanzo e alcune delle sue
più celebri trascrizioni iconografiche, come i due ritratti di Gertrude realizzati da
Giuseppe Molteni nel 1847 e da Mosè Bianchi nel 1867, esso rivisita una figura
complessa come quella della monaca di Monza con un duplice obbiettivo.
Da un lato viene individuato un corpus di fonti, sinora complessivamente
trascurato dalla critica, che illumina da una prospettiva inedita la costruzione
manzoniana della psicologia della monaca. Dall’altro, il testo analizza l'isteria
di Gertrude alla luce della teoria lacaniana dei quattro discorsi, rileggendo I
promessi sposi come un caso di ‘liquidazione del discorso del Padrone’ per via
di romanzo (Friedrich Kittler).

Sigmund Freud developed a specific interest in hysteria after his stay with Professor Jean-Martin Charcot during the winter of 1885–1886, although his previous activity mainly consisted of neuropathology and general medical practice. Most of his initial studies on hysteria (hysteria in men, influence of subconscious ideas, role of traumas, and psychological and sexual factors) were indeed ‘borrowed’ from Charcot and his immediate followers, such as Pierre Janet and Paul Richer. Subsequently, Freud developed with Breuer a theory of hysteria which encompassed a mixture of Janet’s ‘fixed subconscious ideas’ with the ‘pathological secret’ concept of Moriz Benedikt. After their book Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud interrupted his collaboration with Breuer and developed the concept of conversion of psychological problems into somatic manifestations, with a strong ‘sexualization’ of hysteria. Firstly, he believed that actual abuses had occurred in these patients (the ‘seduction’ theory), but then blamed them for having deceived him on that issue, so that he subsequently launched a ‘fantasy’ theory to explain the development of hysterical symptoms without the necessity of actual abuses. Like many of his contemporaries, and contrary to his claims, Freud did not follow a scientific process of verified experiments, but rather adapted his theories to the evolution of his own beliefs on psychological conditions, selectively emphasising the aspects of his ‘therapies’ with patients which supported his emerging ideas, with often abrupt changes in theoretical interpretations. While it remains difficult to get a clear, synthetic vision of what was Freud’s definite theory of hysteria, it is obvious that hysteria really was the origin of what would become Freud’s psychoanalytical theory. Indeed, psychoanalysis appears to have been initially developed by him largely in order to absorb and explain his many changes in the interpretation of hysterical manifestations.

Há uma imagem de Antero de Quental (1842-1891) que persegue como um
fantasma muitos estudiosos da sua obra: a que António Sérgio esboçou
num ensaio célebre ao falar de "os dois Anteros" (1929). Um, o Antero
apolíneo e viril, o outro, o Antero nocturno e débil. [...] Assim sendo, não é curioso que o líder da regeneração nacional seja tratado como um enfermo e que a visão que Sérgio nos deixe da sua obra seja a de um naufrágio? Partindo desta contradição, [...] pode-se analisar o diagnóstico dos dois Anteros como sendo um discurso. Este ensaio procurará, pois, reflectir sobre alguns pactos e nexos entre literatura, nacionalismo e medicina, nos finais do século XIX e durante o século XX, a partir das apreciações que suscitaram a figura e a obra de Antero.

In his 1688 dissertation, which first coined the word ‘nostalgia’, the physician Johannes Hofer noted that this ‘Swiss’ sickness (‘Schweizerkrankheit’) is often triggered in soldiers by sounds such as the ringing of cowbells. During her stay in Frankfurt nearly two hundred years later, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi is similarly stricken by homesickness, brought on by her acoustic hallucinations about her Swiss Heimat. Heidi’s ‘Heimweh’ is treated by her physician as a form of ‘hysteria’, raising the question: to what extent does homesickness manifest itself as a gendered disease? Focusing on the interrelationship between gender and her status as an orphan, I argue that the absence of trauma surrounding the early loss of Heidi’s parents becomes spatialised into a kind of intense, somatised homesickness. Building on the arguments of Sigmund Freud and Peter Blickle, I suggest that signifiers like Heimat and ‘Heimweh’ function as ways for Heidi to skirt more salient issues about her past, identity, and psychological development. The novel’s discourse around ‘Heimweh’ and Heimat, I conclude, becomes a coded way for Heidi to articulate the unspeakable trauma of losing her parents, a trauma that is never explicitly discussed in the text.

http://www.5harfliler.com/hayal-ve-hakikat/
Elli liralık banknotların arkasında yer alan bir imge olarak Fatma Aliye figürü zamanımızın (sözel) ekonomisinde tedavüle girmiş bulunmakta. Ancak Fatma Aliye’nin modern Osmanlı edebiyat alanına dahil oluşu çok daha meşakkatli.

Audre Lorde, in her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," describes the erotic as an intrinsically female source of power that "has often been misnamed by men and used against women” and moreover that the erotic becomes “confused, the trivial, the psychotic...". Inspired by and departing from Lorde's essay, I will explore the tenuous relationship between madness and eroticism through the case study of the Bloody Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
Bathory, a 16th century Hungarian noblewoman, killed and bathed in the blood of 600 virgin girls. In examining Bathory's sense of the erotic one comes to note that she is only able to "feel" a connection to her self in her acts of sexual perversion, torture and murder. I argue that Bathory's desensitization to "normal" life experiences fuel her pursuit of the female power of the erotic as an example that supports the patriarchal view of the danger of the female erotic as female power.
In fully embracing her desires Bathory feeds her sense of megalomaniacy thereby engaging in a sense of power of the erotic which is not curtailed by the normative socio-cultural roles. Does Bathory's megalomaniacy cause a distortion of the personal erotic that leads to a distortion of the self into pornography and obscenity as evidenced in her actions? Does the lack of feeling for the other and the more desperate desire for power make her acts of violence more obscene?

I was the editor not the author of this book. It includes essays by Pierre Janet, Frederic W. H.H. Myers, Raymond Roussel, Gheorghe Marinesco, Louis Aragon and André Breton, Henry Dircks and includes photographs by Baron Albert von Schrenk-Notzing. Unfortunately this website would not allow me to list these authors because they are no longer living and do not have email addresses.

This dissertation is the first historical monograph on somatics, a field of practices and related network of professions offering applied methods for mind-body awareness and integration. Although somatics has most commonly been associated with the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s, this study demonstrates the existence of related intellectual and practice genealogies that form the nineteenth-century background to somatics, and that themselves show continuity with forms of mind-body thought and practice in the early modern era. Using the tools of intellectual history, the research project covers a range of figures and schools from the 1820s through the 1950s, laying the groundwork for future projects in the history of somatics. Standout themes from the study include overlaps between the history of somatics and the history of Western esotericism; the syncretic quality of somatic worldviews, which has led to both creativity and instability in the relationships between somatics, science, and spirituality; the reciprocal flows of influence between somatics and the performing arts; and the prominent role played by women in the formation of early somatic methods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The central site in his corpus at which Freud elaborates his theory of obsessional neurosis is the ‘Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis’, which details the case of Ernst Lanzer. Lanzer entered treatment with Freud in 1907. His personal and professional life had come to an impasse in the face of inhibitions and compulsive thoughts. Freud called Lanzer ‘the Rat Man’ in his published ‘Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis’, since many of these compulsions were organised by the theme of rats. Whilst lateral relations are not highlighted in the published text, the significance of Lorenz’s siblings to his neurosis is evident in Freud’s case notes. It was Freud’s practice to make written notes on his cases ‘on the evening of the day of treatment’ ([1909a] 2001, 159). Usually these were destroyed. However, the first four months of case notes on the Rat Man were found among Freud’s papers in London upon his death. In reframing the ‘Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis’, the chapter sheds new light on the significance of siblings to the Rat Man case study, and through this lay the groundwork for future reflections on the role of the lateral axis in obsessional neurosis.

A longstanding trope in Indian psychiatry, and in popular representations of it, involves the efficacy of incantations and exorcism in healing afflictions of the mind, notably hysteria. In many accounts, from nineteenth century medical journals to twenty first century popular films, a medicine deemed at once 'western' and universal is granted the ability to diagnose neurotic afflictions, but rendered incapable of curing them, while bodily techniques referred to as 'Indian' are granted efficacy. In this article, I explore the subtleties and implications of this recurrent knowledge paradigm. I argue that a particular arrangement - one in which difference is established through equivalence - undergirds the terms by which medicine comes to be viewed as a cultural encounter. As these progressive formulations are often founded on stories about women's madness, I ask, what are the implications of an arguably pragmatic ethos founded on an uneven - and deeply gendered - resolution to postcolonial knowledge problems?

Born around the year 460 BC , Hippocrates is known as one of the most remarkable physicians of all times. The ancient Greek patients had several choices when they were severely ill. But many patients turn directly to the gods, typically Asclepius, the God of medicine. Many asclepieia (healing temples) were built and from the 5th century BC onwards, and people would come to the temples hoping for a cure or a dream containing some sort of a cure. Hippocrates insisted on medicine being practiced according to natural sciences and anatomy hence physical observations of symptoms and natural treatments. But the persistent notion of the woman inhabited by a "wandering womb", "an animal within an animal" and the coexistence of Goddesses unable to control their drives and their mind contributed to the idea that women were driven to madness for anatomical and mental reasons. But with the birth of a rationalized medicine,  what would be the impact on the representation of the image of the Woman in the city-state and how would that translate into the medical field ?

Centered on Hysteria, this paper uses Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Nellie Bly's "Ten Days in a Mad-house," and Ophelia to demonstrate the illness as a protest against Victorian Patriarchy. Treatment methods performed by S. Weir Mitchell, Sigmund Freud, and Josef Breuer are argued to be a way of further oppressing women rebelling against their social norms to create a "new woman." Feminist critics such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Hélène Cixous are included in the analysis of patriarchal medicine.