A Story of Hysteria and Mystery

Abstract

This paper refers in the first place to “The etiology of hysteria”, Freud’s lecture of 1896, offered at the Psychiatry and Neurology Society of Vienna, where it was received as a scientific fairy tale. Then, the paper includes a listing of the main clinical narratives, to which Freud referred as histories and also as cases, in line with the usual psychiatric jargon used at the time. These histories were read as one might read a novel, and even the deliriums of paranoiacs, a poetical alienation derived from an alienation in the lineage, were informed by Freud as a family novel, as he did also with the cases of neurotics. The paper turns then to certain considerations on several paired notions: sleep/death, melancholy/sadness, mania/joy, and sacrifice/religion, and adds that the same treatment might be granted to the pair memory/fiction. History in psychoanalysis may be histerized. Psychoanalysis does not deal with the history dealt with by physicians or with the chronicles developed by historians. The psychoanalytical history borrows a little from both, but psychoanalysis justifies its nature “from itself’. Gilles Deleuze, who deals in detail with the stoic thought in his book “A logic of meaning”, refers to the paradoxes of Lewis Carroll’s Alice as an introductory reference to the effects of illustrating the psychoanalytical narrative in a different manner. Other considerations question whet-her it is the notion or the presentation developed into a discourse which will be more operative for both the patient and the analyst, referring to a “well-saying” which unveils the scars in the symptoms, since the “wild writing of the symptom is a scarred writing” (Mayette Viltard). The act of saying by the analyst, in its quality as a verbal action, must avoid common places, adjetives, and nosologic labels, and also extreme hermeneutic attitudes, as these tools offer evidence of a psychological or psychiatric subject rather than of an unconscious subject. This act by the analyst should rather point to temporality and change, to the signs which amount to a symptom and produce a surface effect. In this connection it is worth noting incorporeal events, language events which insist in the patient’s narration of his/her life and require from the analyst a listening attitude, caution, sounding-out and an heteroclitic approach, including the paradox, the non-sense, and humor as essential tools to make history.