The globus hystericus, or a loss of voice, is one of the most classic hysterical symptoms. And yet the hysteric is miming something beyond what the images and words capture. Charcot’s inscriptions and Freud’s narrations, though, speak in the doctor’s voice. Years after Charcot, Sigmund Freud, his pupil, popularized the writing format of the clinical case history, revealing not only conditions and treatments, but the profound relation between patient and analyst. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating hysteria in a patient at the Salpetriere. Such mimetic ability earned hysterics a reputation of inventing their symptoms, of lying and malingering, of making it up. This mimetic practice, coupled with a tendency to over-identify, is constitutive of the hysteric the hysteric seeks to be (like), not to have (to enjoy): ‘mimesis of the other is a relation to someone we do not wish to have but to be’ (Campbell 2005: 335). According to Georges Didi-Huberman (2003), hysterics at the Salpêtrière took on epileptic symptoms, copying those with whom they shared a ward and whom they thought were taken seriously by doctors. How hysteria is made manifest changes with the times. As can be seen by the first phase, hysteria has a mimetic quality-‘a more creative imitation or copy of human behaviour and nature’ (Campbell 2005: 334)-which makes its symptoms mutate, from the well-known nineteenth century convulsions, to possessions by the devil or spirits, eating disorders, epileptic fits, delirium, the inability to speak or sexual voracity. These phases, predominantly manifested in the body, were recorded, in drawn and photographic form, in the archive known as the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, overseen by Paul Richer, a professor of artistic anatomy at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
Preceded by auratic prodromes (often melancholia, overexcitement, vomit, lack of appetite), the four phases are: In the nineteenth century, it was common for these attacks to be public and to happen in a series of poses which were categorized into four phases, or périodes, by Jean-Martin Charcot. ‘Hysteria (…) involves the use of the patient’s body as a stage for the body of the other’ (Phelan 1995: 97). Hysteria is defined as the manifestation of psychological trauma in a physical symptom without an underlying physiological condition. Let me take them in order (of appearance): Moreover, this disappearance is one of hysteria’s key traits, of which I define five. This makes hysteria uncanny, homely and strange at the same time.
The disappearance of hysteria is illusory, enhanced by the ghostly quality of something which has vanished but returns, symptoms that should not be there but clearly are. While the disappearance of a disease is not unique (Micale 1993)-think of vapours or melancholia-what makes hysteria different is the fact that it is still present in the body, and some doctors work with it as a category (Stone et al. From the inception of disease classification manuals, however, it had begun to disappear from the medical vocabulary, consulting rooms and psychiatric papers, to be finally eliminated from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1990s (Ávila and Terra 2012). In Ancient Egypt, a papyrus recorded an illness in which the womb wandered in the woman’s body (Veitz 1965). Hysteria is a condition that has been diagnosed since before Hippocrates’ time. Performance artist Professor Laura González on paying attention to the hysteric utterance
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