Les Hystériques: en attendant Freud. Par Jean-Christophe Abramovici

Extract

Rather than a history of hysteria before Freud, this collection of texts, stretching from Galen’s De locis affectis (c. 160) to Georges Gilles de La Tourette’s Traité clinique et thérapeutique de l’hystérie (1891), aims to bring readers closer to the writings that invented hysteria, an ideological construct of women’s bodies. While the chronological sweep is vast and does not pretend to be exhaustive, this anthology shows a clear development from a discourse that is exclusively livresque — almost completely divorced from encounter — towards one that is more scientific and based on observation. The latter, while bringing us closer to the sick person, also increasingly prioritizes the imperious voice of the doctor. For example, the concluding text by Jean-Martin Charcot appears to give his patients a voice, yet he ultimately controls the message and the entire spectacle of his patients’ illness, informed by the ideology of his time, casually antisemitic, racist, and sympathetic towards, but ultimately distrustful of, the poor. The authors presented here were savants whose knowledge is communicated or (quite often) hidden by a particular use of medical language. The later texts are particularly prone to brandishing obscure italicized terms as signs of learned innovation. While the chronological leap from Galen’s early text to Ambroise Paré’s Deux livres de chirurgerie (1573) may seem huge, in intellectual terms it is a small step, as the famous physician of Pergamon remained a major reference point throughout the early modern period. As Jean-Christophe Abramovici notes, ‘tout change et rien ne change’ (p. 32). Indeed, several of the texts here show little more actual knowledge than Galen and often amount to variations on a familiar theme. Such variety relates to differences in interpretation about, for example, the links between hysteria and nymphomania; the transmission of the illness through the body by humours versus sympathies; or the slow displacement of the seat of hysteria from the uterus to the brain. Unlike Freud, who would bring a focus to the ‘dark continent’ of female sexuality, these writings show a certain amount of theoretical eclecticism. The accounts of symptoms and remedies reveal the violence of medical practices, including hair pulling, beating, forced vomiting, or sexually invasive procedures, both the use of pessaries and masturbation, which was generally left to midwives and increasingly denounced on moral grounds, such as in Nicolas Chambon de Montaux’s Traité des maladies des filles (1785). Most characteristic is the repetition of the remedies proposed for hysteria. Examples include goat hair, cloves, animal horns, melons, cold-water baths, or, if all else failed, marriage (to be understood as regular sexual intercourse). The variety within texts and repetition between them suggests that these remedies drew, like the diagnosis they were used to treat, on both pre-scientific traditions and the social imaginary of women’s difficultés. Reading the informative Introduction, the texts, and the useful contextual information provided reminds us that the phantoms of hysteria remain in the male mystification and domination of women’s bodies.