Hysterical Remembering

Our moral health depends on the limitation of these two psychological activities, one by the other, on this equilibrium between the automatic force of the past, and the conscious and voluntary effort of the present.

—Pierre Janet ¹

Everything comes back to phenomena of immobilization, of psychical forgetting. A hysteric who seems paraplegic behaves as if he has forgotten that he has legs; he has lost the mental representation of a part of his body.

—Jules Dérejine ²

Hysteria was surely the most prominent and memorable maladie de la mémoire of the nineteenth century: it served as an intersection for many points of cultural contestation, becoming a marker for positions on issues of gender, sex, mind/body, professionalization and secularization, to name only a few. And hysteria has remained a privileged site for discussing these issues in critical and historical writing over at least the last twenty-five years. Just as the conceptualization of memory and forgetting were at the core of writings on hysteria in the late nineteenth century, so recent writings continue to debate the ways we are to remember hysteria, those who supposedly suffered from it, and those who supposedly tried to understand or alleviate that suffering. The focus on maladies of memory forced nineteenth century physicians to consider what it meant to have a healthy memory, and a normal relation to the past. ³ What does it mean to suffer from the past, to be pained by memory? How is it that some people manage not to suffer from the past, to orient themselves properly in relation to the loss of the present? How does attention to the past develop from being a choice, a matter of taste, to being a duty, a matter of obligation, to being an obsession, a matter of mental illness? These questions remain crucial for us in our own fin-de-siècle, with memory disorders continuing to be a a major vehicle for their discussion. ⁴

The fascination with hysteria and the investigation of it have, of course, a very long history, about which there is now an enormous and high quality body of critical writing. ⁵ I focus on the moment of this history when the study of hysteria comes together with the study of hypnosis, both tied to a concern with the question of how one recalls and manages to live with the past. Hypnosis becomes an important subject of medical investigation in France after Eugène Azam brings the famous case of Félida X’s dédoublement (doubling of the personality, or the early form of what is now called multiple personality) to the attention of Paul Broca and the Academy of Sciences in 1859. ⁶ Hypnosis was a technique that seemed to show that radical disturbances of memory could be created in normal people, that our faculty of memory could be manipulated in ways that deeply compromised its function as the core of personal identity. Hypnosis and hysteria work together to create a crisis in thinking about memory and normality. Who is vulnerable to hypnotic suggestion and why? Who can claim expertise about such matters, when hypnosis in various forms had been part of popular culture long before the birth of psychology? The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot linked hypnosis to his investigations of psychopathology, ultimately concluding that hypnosis was a form of hysteria. And Charcot’s authority in regard to hysteria was second to none. But other investigators inside and outside the medical profession claimed that we were all more or less susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. They did not mean to imply that we were all vulnerable hysterics, but they left it unclear how we discriminated among these phenomena and among the classes of people with whom they should be associated. In the 1880s, the alienist Legrand de Saulle claimed that there were fifty thousand hysterics in Paris, ten thousand having attacks. ⁷ Did that not mean that there were forty thousand invisible hysterics in the city, radically disturbed people without the major symptoms of the disturbance? How, in this case, to tell the normal from the abnormal?

The effort to define normality and to...