The name alteration indicates that the posthysteric has gone beyond the
hysteric's positioning as a servant to Freud and psychoanalysis: in the nineteenth century, the tracks of psychoanalysis were laid on the back of the
hysteric.
Approaching her project with a preconceived notion--that because hysteria was in part "an illness of being a woman in an era that strictly limited female roles,"
hysterics must be victims "of a misogynist institution led by the tyrannical Charcot" (4), Hustvedt was surprised to discover "something far more nuanced" (5): the Salpetriere may have been % warehouse for the women Paris no longer wanted" (38), but it gave
hysterics a home and a language to articulate their suffering.
She remained there for the rest of her life, first as a
hysteric patient and later as an assistant in the radiology labs.
Chapters 3 and 4 of The
Hysteric's Revenge turn to women writers who adopt the opposite strategy and challenged the link between virility and intellect by explicitly appropriating the dominant male-authorized discourses of naturalism and decadence in their novels.
Irigaray links hysteria to obsession (Whitford 40) and stresses that the
hysteric's symptoms are always excessive (Grosz 135).
For both Freud and Janet the notion of representation refers in part to the fact that the
hysteric disorder renders visible fantasies, or ideational contents that, having become abundantly exaggerated, have gone awry, even while as protective fictions [Schutzdichtungen] they shield the
hysteric subject from directly addressing the traumatic knowledge that is also the motor behind all its resilient and respondent histrionic self-display.
Hysteric patients revealed the unconscious to Freud and helped him invent psychoanalysis.
The fourth chapter is dedicated to the successful decadent writer Rachilde (she and Colette are the only ones among the authors considered in The
Hysteric's Revenge to have received in recent years critical attention, both in the United States and in Europe).
Apparently gone forever are his days of monumental Detroit
hysteric chopped model A Fords, '59 Cadillacs and the like.
At the heart of this book there is an interesting examination of some of the actions of Ernest Richmond, an architect and sometime partner of Herbert Baker, but also an anti-Semitic
hysteric and Bellocite Catholic convert, who used his position within the British Mandatory government of pre-Israel Palestine to cause trouble between the Arab and Jewish populations of Jerusalem.
Gorgon, lost
hysteric. Marsupial men in blue tiaras.