'Hysteria Today' was held at the Primrose Hill Community Centre on Saturday
5th February and organized in association with the British Journal of
Psychotherapy and their new editor Jean Arundale. The Journal had in
the previous year published an issue commemorating the hundredth anniversary
of Freud and Breuer's 'preliminary communication' on hysteria in 1893.
The interest of the museum in hysteria was rekindled by the event we
held some years ago with Sander Gilman and Elaine Showalter. Hysteria then
was examined largely as a social construct and the focus was on the cultural
purposes that the concept might serve. In this event we eschewed the cultural
dimension in order to concentrate on hysteria as a possibly real and painful
clinical condition. This may not, perhaps, be the fashionable approach
to take. Jean Arundale made the telling point that the International Classification
of Psychiatric Disorders now has no diagnostic label with the word 'hysteria'
in it. Meanwhile, Susie Orbach, in her chairwoman's introduction, observed
that what began as a critique by feminists and cultural theorists of the
notion of hysteria has ironically led to a revision and rehabilitation
of the meanings of hysterical symptoms and has began to refresh the notion
as a useful clinical entity. This clinical emphasis was the basic premise
of the conference, which each of the speakers took up in their own fashion.
Jean Arundale gave an introduction to the topic by considering something
of the history of hysteria and its importance in the development of psychoanalysis.
The concepts of the unconscious, psychic conflict, fantasy, fixation, repression,
transference, 'the talking cure' and so on are all crucially linked to
the perception and treatment of hysterical phenomena. She pointed out that
Freud's theory of hysteria includes both conversion hysteria and 'anxiety
hysteria' or phobias.
David Smith addressed the central issue of the relationship between
the mind and the body. He showed that Freud was grappling with philosophical
problems that were crucial in the development of his therapeutic work,
and which still bedevil us today. David argued that Freud abandoned Cartesian
dualism in favour of what is now called an 'identity theory' of the mind-brain
relation. Taking up this theme to some extent, Ann Scott reminded us of
Freud and Breuer's aphorism that 'hysterics suffer from reminiscences'.
She asked whether these memories might be thought of as being somehow retained
in the body, and illustrated her idea by reference to the Dora case history
and the stage play Hysteria by Terry Johnson.
In a paper full of rich material and subtle insights, David Bell showed that the basic psychopathology and central preoccupations of many patients who come into analysis today is not greatly different from the patients studied by Freud and Breuer all those years ago. He described how it was that central to the hysterical patient's difficulties is the irruption into the mind of a primitive oedipal scenario, and explored this in detail using a Kleinian perspective. David Bell's paper, along with David Smith's is published in the BJP Volume 9 n.2 (Winter 1992), as part of the anniversary edition mentioned earlier. The last speaker, Estela Welldon, attempted to link up the theory of hysteria to her own well-known work on female perversion. She described the influence of anxiety and bodily sensation in the manifestation of perversion, and speculated on the pre-oedipal roots of hysteria. She explained how elements of sadistic or perverse sexuality can underlie hysterical anxiety and can enter into and distort womens relationships.
The afternoon session was introduced and expertly chaired by Susan Budd.
She made the important point that a pejorative use of the phrase 'the hysteric'
as a fixed identity does not accord with current psychoanalytic thinking
which takes a more subtle and fluid approach to these issues.