Annals of Hysteria

Annals of Hysteria
George Dumas’s weekly presentations at Sainte Anne Hospital in the 1930s had a mere pentimento of the operatic extravagance Charcot brought to clinical theater at the Salpêtrière after 1881, when, after twenty years at the asylum, he was elevated to a specially created Clinical Chair of Diseases of the Nervous System.
Charcot’s Tuesday Lectures, where patients in the throes of convulsive hysteria were presented to an audience of doctors, had arguable utilitarian value, given their influence on Breuer and Freud, who learned hypnosis from them, though Freud, at least, was sufficiently repulsed that his methodology developed away from the visual exacerbation of symptoms in favor of private verbalization. Charcot’s exhibitions were as much theater as the public display of corpses in the Morgue on the Ile de la Cité, described in withering detail in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.
The spectacle of hysteria has been preserved in the Salpêtrière’s archival photography, mainly produced by Paul Régnard and Albert Londe, who also recorded, in photographs and engravings, Charcot’s gestural morphology while inducing trance. These pictures are usually paired with another trove of photopathology, the “electro-physiological experiments” conducted by the neurophysiologist Duchenne de Boulogne, some of whose photographs of facial contortions Darwin reproduced in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
The modern spectacularization of clinical symptoms and therapeutic intervention begins with Anton Mesmer, who discredited an earlier theater of madness conducted by Johann Joseph Gassner, a Catholic priest, whose method ascertained which symptoms required medical intervention, and which resulted from circumsessio, produced by the devil, obsessio, attack by sorcery, or possessio, the Full Monty that Linda Blair experienced so many years ago in The Exorcist.
Mesmer “secularized” the shamanistic practices formerly used to relieve disorders inflicted by supernatural forces. His theories seemed, at least, appropriate to the Enlightenment’s project of rational inquiry, though the ‘magnetic fluids’ he claimed the ability to manipulate were nearly as chimerical as Father Gassner’s demons. All the same, Mesmer dramatized the power of suggestion in such an overt and provocative fashion that later pioneers of mental healing found his work generative; Freud refers to him, in a letter to Stefan Zweig, as “a Columbus.”
Mesmer was, all the same, a showman, and it seems axiomatic that all medical exhibitionism is hubristic and inevitably carries a strong scent of quackery. Like triumphal militaristic rhetoric avant la guerre, the guarantee that a magic pill will give you seven-hour erections or change the gloom you see around you into a field of daffodils is destined to backfire. You may, for example, develop a satyrisis that impels you to expose yourself on subway platforms. Or you could mistake the smirk of a psychotic for the welcoming grin of your image of perfection.
Freud’s eventual mistrust of hypnosis, and the confessional “talking cure” he and Breuer employed in treating hysteria, privileges the verbal over the visual. Still the psychoanalyst retains something of the mesmerist’s otherworldly claim to unique abilities. Unlike educated contemporary people undergoing medical treatment, the psychiatric patient is never encouraged to become an informed patient, a patient exercising vigilant interest in the methods of his or her own care. In the privacy of the psychoanalyst’s office, the patient is as much a victim of mystification as the hypnosis volunteer made to crow like a rooster in front of a hundred spectators.
The patient learns, over months or years, that long after the crisis that brought him to the shrink has blown over, immensely difficult problems he had no idea fell under the category of “psychiatric” require analysis to continue into the distant future, perhaps forever: financial problems, housing problems, decisions about which computer printer to purchase, what garment retailers offer the best bargains, and so on. The patient is, in fact, paying to provide the analyst with an hour’s worth of entertainment; each visit to this emotional prostitute holds the promise of a fundamental change in the state of things, something well beyond any clinician’s ability or competence.
Mesmerism may have been, after all, more honest.

Puppet Horror
I have always been terrified by simulacra, especially those dummies employed by ventriloquists. I fear and loathe them, and naturally they fascinate me, as I suppose a spitting cobra would.
Like hypnotists, ventriloquists originally had the mystique of divine inspiration, and were used to minister to the spiritually distressed by “throwing the voice” of an angel or other invisible friend into the vicinity of the person in crisis. Early ventriloquists did not employ dummies, which make the “biloquism” of the ventriloquist explicit—a dummy, after all, is obviously being spoken through by the ventriloquist himself. Instead, the ur-hypnotist produced vocal phantasms in no way connected to himself, opening an auditory window into the Beyond.
And, like the hypnotist-exorcists of Gassner’s day, ventriloquists ran into career trouble when the power of theism and its superstitious folklore declined during the Enlightenment. Diderot laid the occult aspects of ventriloquism to rest in the Encylopédie, and cast it in absurdist terms in Les Bijoux indiscrets: compelled by a magic ring possessed by the sultan Mangogul, women disclose their darkest secrets by “throwing their voices” from their vaginas.
Ventriloquists found a temporary niche among alienists whose patients suffered dementia praecox, the schizophrenia of the 18th century: some believed that people hearing imaginary voices could be startled into sanity by actually hearing a voice that was real but had no discernible source.
This sidebar in the history of mental illness had an even shorter run than hypnosis, and ventriloquism inevitably turned into show business, and rather bizarre show business, when you consider that the heyday of popular ventriloquialism occurred when radio was the presiding mass medium. Listening to a ventriloquist on the radio is a nadir in illusionism, really, but somehow it enraptured millions.
Before the first ventriloquists arrived in America, a writer named Charles Brockden Brown, a native of Philadelphia, produced a curious novel, Wieland, or The Transformation. Its eponymous lead character is an overwrought religionist who hears voices warning of imminent danger, including a plot to murder Wieland’s sister Clara; soon, a friend of Weiland’s brother Henry, Carwin, arrives on a protracted visit.
More inexplicable vocal manifestations haunt the Wieland household. Carwin, in fact, is the “biloquist” responsible for them, to what end is never especially clear—he means, perhaps, to seduce Clara, and deceives Henry into “hearing” a compromising chat between Carwin and Clara. Weirder still, Wieland hears a voice he assumes to be God’s, telling him to kill his family as proof of his submission to the deity; Wieland obligingly murders his wife and children, and then stabs himself to death.
Wieland is a frustratingly open-ended novel, because it’s far from certain that the voice Wieland hears comes from the ventriloquist Carwin—the latter denies it during the inquest while admitting that he produced the other voices. Interpretations encrusted around Wieland generally emphasize its date—1798—as the same period in which the new United States government was being thrashed out among Federalists and Anti-Federalists; the ways and means by which “the people” would “speak through” their elected representatives still bore the taint of a dubious experiment. (Indeed, it still does.) Wieland was, and is, widely supposed to allegorize this historical moment.
But it’s also the provocative case that Brown’s novel is the first novel written in America, by an American, published in America—the originary American literary artifact. I have always thought Wieland a more encompassing and frighteningly apt capture of the American quintessence, the intractible nature of the people who came here and settled the land, and the manner in which they settled it—something that has never changed, never mutated, never shed its thick, matted pelt of atavism. A man hears voices from God and kills everyone around him and finally kills himself. If this isn’t the American narrative par excellence, it’s hard to imagine what else would be.

Gary Indiana
(New York, February 2005)