Hysteria Neurosis
Series in clinical structures
Our last investigation of a clinical structure was obsessional neurosis, a sub-class of the neurotic structure first elaborated by Freud and later by Lacan and others. The other large branch of neurosis is perhaps more well-known: hysteria. While the structure has an interesting and very political history, I would like to focus on how it is worked with in contemporary theoretical and clinical contexts.
The Archetype of Repression
Hysteria is perhaps most well-known for the nature and prominence of the mechanism of repression, something Freud articulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You will recall from our last installment that repression is indeed a clinical marker for neurosis in general. It operates in obsessive and phobic subjects just as it does in hysteric subjects, though the relation may not be as clear.
The classical hysterical symptom of limb paralysis is a great example of repression and the return of the repressed. It is conceivable that some time early on in the person’s life, a dangerous idea (e.g., sex) was somehow linked with the particular limb — most likely an arm. The loss of movement of the arm is the symptom which is protecting the subject from thinking about the idea of sex.
Lacan calls this linking up ideas “metaphor,” which is derived from Freud’s “condensation.” It’s what allows the hysteric’s speech to be caught up in its own non-coincidence. In other words, the hysteric will always wonder, “Have I said too much?” or “Have I said it correctly?” or even, in difficult analytic moments: “Is it possible to say ‘it’?”
Contemporary symptoms may look a little different, but function in the same way. Stomach aches, for instance (or gastrointestinal discomfort in general) in response to a stressful situation can be interpreted as a conversion symptom. The dangerous idea (e.g., you aren’t living your life to its potential) is supplanted by the bodily one (in this case, the fact that you “can’t stomach” your life).
Alienation and Separation in Subject-Formation
In my essay on obsessional neurosis I failed to mention the roles that Lacan assigned to alienation and separation in the formation of all neurotic subjects. And while these are typically given a rather developmental pathway (e.g., Zizek sometimes hints that one moves from alienation to separation in political development, etc.), they should not be thought of as a development, but rather as positions, perhaps closer to how we think of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In other words, they are not stages of psychological maturity, but different ways that people relate to the Other’s desire.
The difference in how alienation or separation shows up in the clinic can reveal something about the underlying clinical structure of the patient. Obsessionals can be said to operate on lines according to separation, whereas hysterics, according to alienation.
Alienation, simply put, is oral: “the hysterical patient subject drinks everything in from the Other, particularly the signifiers for desire, knowledge, and authority” (Verhaeghe, p. 367). The hysteric subject, in its attempt to solve the riddle of bodily excitation (sexuality) and knowledge/authority (the two elements of the Other, argues Verhaeghe), looks to the Other’s answers given to it for guidance. Whatever the Other says, the subject-in-formation takes this in and identifies with it. Hence the almost universally positive transference in the therapeutic relationship: the clinician is easily put in the role of master. The clinician, of course, must not mistake him or herself as master in the treatment with the hysteric.
(This positive transference is complicated, however — we will address that in the section on jouissance.)
This tendency of the hysteric also accounts for some of the important historical and contextual aspects of the diagnosis. It has been noted by psychology and psychiatry that, since the disorder is inconsistent in its presentation, it is not a reliable diagnosis — but as we just learned, the inconsistency is part of how the structure manifests! Depending on “what Other is on duty” (as Verhaeghe puts it), the symptoms will appear slightly different. In On Being Normal, he cites quite a few studies that have shown how varied symptoms can appear depending on what the patient expects the professional to expect. E.g., the symptoms might appear more somatic to a medical professional and more psychological to a psychotherapist.
But what exactly is alienation in the psychoanalytic sense?
Joel Dor (1997, p. 76) puts the hysteric’s alienation in terms of the role of the phallus:
If the object of oedipal desire, the phallus, is what the hysteric basically feels he has been unjustly deprived of, he can delegate the question of his own desire only to the one who is supposed to have it. In this sense, he questions the dynamics of his desire only with reference to the other, who is always presumed to possess the answer to the enigma of the origin and workings of the desire in question.
When coming to terms with separation during early development, the subject-to-be must make right on this loss. The obsessive does this by claiming whatever was ‘lost’ is actually something entirely separate from the Other. The hysteric compensates for separation by trying to deny it entirely, and identifying his or her own subjectivity as still tied to, belonging to, the Other in some essential way.
As Bruce Fink states: the hysteric “constitutes herself as the object necessary to make the mOther whole or complete (the object that plugs up or stops up the mOther’s desire)” (1997, p. 120). In this sense, the obsessive tries to eradicate the Other, whereas the hysteric tries to eradicate itself. Both can be read as attempts to overcome the basic lack of human subjectivity — i.e., the fundamental fantasy.
The fundamental fantasy of the hysteric is to be the perfect/ideal object for the Other. Hence we see many hysteric women who mistake their outward appearance for their self-worth; and hysteric men who think having the biggest or fastest car in the city means something.
This dynamic of wanting to be what the Other lacks hinges on the dialectic of having vs being the phallus, and how this informs desire and demand.
Being and Having; Desire and Demand
So the hysteric can only make sense of her desire by looking to the Other and trying to conform to it’s desire. Etiologically, this is the result of the subject-to-be feeling that they have been robbed of the phallus during the installation of the oedipal dynamic, i.e., the function of the father. Perfect harmony, they feel, is intruded upon by some external alien which introduces prohibition.
When my mother’s family moved from Cuba to America, the father was left behind to wrap up some loose ends and arrived three years later, after my mother was three or four. My mother completely rejected her father (my grandfather) as a valid addition the family for many years, viewing him more as an intrusion, an accident, than essential to the family itself.
While the father will fulfill a more maternal function early on (as Christopher Bollas points out in his Hysteria), or even in a single-parent household, he will increasingly take on the prohibitive function common to most nuclear families as the child grows older.
The hysteric first tries to overcome the separation engendered by the function of the father (i.e., language and reality/culture) by appearing to be what the Other lacks. Trying to be pretty enough, smart enough, loud enough, and so on. But if this fails, the other strategy for the hysteric is to have the phallus. And the subject may oscillate between these two or settle on one more strongly than the other. We will address both being and having below.
Identification is a favorite feature of the hysteric: ‘Well, if I cannot be the phallus, I can try my best to get it.’ This quest to have the phallus can look very differently among hysterics: from ex-military soldiers boasting about their bravery to desperately trying to keep up with new trends in order to look more appealing in/through the Other. In Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home” we see this dynamic beginning to fall apart for one particular WWII veteran (loosely based on Hemingway’s own experience).
But identification with having the phallus is not the only fantasy-informed practice of the hysteric subject, which also always has being the phallus in its repertoire. The hysteric will feel being deprived of the phallus early on as not being loved enough (note the difference for the obsessive, who is smothered with love and suffocated with the Other’s overwhelming body and desire). To correct this mistake, the hysteric will attempt to be the ideal thing that could satisfy the desire of the Other. Hence the always-unstable identity of this kind of subjective position as well as trying earnestly to be ‘the best’ child or ‘the best’ employee.
Much of a clinical structure is relayed through how the subject is situated in relation to his or her desire and demand — and how these two dynamics (because they are radically different) relate to each other.
As we saw for the obsessional, the idea is to get as far away from the desire of the Other as possible, excluding it in every activity of the obsessive. It is the opposite for the hysteria neurosis. Now for a rather baffling comment by Fink (1997, p. 126):
By orchestrating the circuit [of desire in the Other], the hysteric becomes the master of the Other’s desire — the cause of his desire — yet at the same time she attempts to avoid being the person with whom he satisfies his desire. She keeps his desire unsatisfied to avoid being the object of his jouissance. For Lacan, like Freud, the hysteric is someone who finds the Other’s sexual satisfaction distasteful, and attempts to avoid being the object that the Other gets off on. She refuses to be the cause of his jouissance.
So we have a difference between desire and jouissance and how they are handled with the hysteric in relation to the Other. The hysteric wants to be the cause of desire for the Other but not the cause of the jouissance of the Other. Let’s look at desire first, and then how jouissance is managed in the libidinal economy of the hysterical subject.
According to Fink, neurotics (obsessive and hysteric) keep a strong anti-jouissance stance. They want to stimulate desire (they want to keep on desiring) in either themselves (for the obsessive) or the Other (for the hysteric) — but neither want this desire to reach a point of satisfaction: “The purity of desire veers in the direction of a kind of obscene jouissance” (p. 129).
As Mari Ruti emphasizes in The Singularity of Being, desire could even be thought of as a defense against jouissance. Jouissance is enjoyment beyond the limit; in the case of the hysteric, this limit is the (function of the) father. Other names for this function: paternal law, prohibition, reality testing, superego, and so on. Basically, there is an externally imposed limit which is taken in, literally internalized, psychologically by the neurotic subject. And the installation of the superego commands the neurotic to satisfy him/herself. But enjoyment is dangerous and destabilizing, so desire is erected to keep it at bay, to always circulate but never close in on it.
Indeed, one of Lacan’s primary formulations of anxiety is the experience of the subject when the Other is too close!
Negotiating Jouissance
Let’s take a moment to consider how the hysteric goes about managing jouissance.
By identifying with the Other’s desire, we are not ridding the hysteric subject of its own agency or response-ability. Rather, we are also saying something about how it manages jouissance.
Let’s take the case of the ‘butcher’s wife’ in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. The wife of the butcher teases her husband day after day that she could eat caviar sandwiches daily, and that he should consider buying the caviar for her. But then, at the same time, she says that it’s too expensive, and that it would be wasteful.
Okay, so she has both stimulated a desire in the Other (in this case, the husband’s desire to give) and squelched it (by telling him not to bother with it). What’s going on here?
The butcher’s wife has “detected” (to use Fink’s term) something lacking within her husband. She realizes she is not ‘everything’ to him (and he functions as the Other in this scenario), and she tries to go about rectifying that. So she titillates his desire — but doesn’t give him an actual recourse to satisfy it. In this sense, she is identifying both as an object and an obstacle to the jouissance of her husband. For if he were to buy her caviar every day, his desire would be satisfied and aligned with hers — but nobody wants full satisfaction, because then everything collapses. It’s much better, for the neurotic, to keep on wanting than to have something satisfied.
But more than just identifying as the object which the Other desires, the hysteric seeks to become the object cause of desire. Hence, in transference, the therapist might notice that the hysteric will attempt to ‘be the odd-one-out’, the patient which always escapes classical or routine diagnosis and treatment. They might try to force the analyst to innovate their approach to clinical work, effectively being the lever of the analyst’s desire.
In the butcher’s wife example, she tries to show Freud that his wish-fulfillment dream isn’t always accurate. She shares a dream in which she wishes to host a luncheon at her house on a Sunday, but comes to find out that it’s too late to order catering, as most of the shops have closed for the day. “See!” she says, “in this dream, my wish was frustrated.”
By assuming the position of objet a (the object which stimulates, not satisfies, desire) of the Other, the hysteric can keep the Other desiring. Like wanting to eat caviar everyday but also putting a stop to eating caviar everyday. And remember, how the subject relates to objet a is always an attempt to overcome their own subjective division!
In other words, the hysteric can be said to be engaging in an unsatisfied desire. Compare this with the obsessive impossible desire: “the closer the obsessive gets to realizing his desire (say, to have sex with someone), the more the Other begins to take precedence over him, eclipsing him as a subject” (Fink, 1997, p. 124). In the hysterical dialectic of desire, the subject tries to desire as if it was the Other. In the case of the butcher’s wife, the wife unconsciously tried to don the desire of her husband. But in order to keep desire alive — the aim of every neurotic — the desire has to remain unsatisfied. Hence we have that classical Freudian symptom of doing and undoing, wherein the subject tries, e.g., to masturbate with one hand while the other hand literally tries to stop it. (This is different from the obsessive doing/undoing dynamic in which the action is chronologically undone in an attempt to reverse the damage potentially caused to the Other.)
References
B. Fink, Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. (1997)
P. Verhaeghe, On Being Normal and Other Disorders. (2004)
C. Bollas, Hysteria. (1999)
J. Lacan, Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious. (1957–58)
J. Dor, Clinical Lacan. (1999)
