Terry Johnson's Hysteria: Laughter on the Abyss of Insight

Terry Johnson’s Hysteria Laughter on the Abyss of Insight Luc Gilleman Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. —Nell in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame Semiotic Plenitude “If you are waiting for me to break the silence you will be deeply disappointed . The silence is yours alone, and is far more eloquent than you imagine.”1 These are the opening lines of Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis, Terry Johnson’s hilarious account of the meeting that took place between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí in London, in July 1938, shortly before Kristallnacht and a little more than a year before the outbreak of World War II. The audience has been looking at an old man dozing in a chair. When he suddenly speaks, his words never fail to startle, until the audience realizes it is not being addressed . Laughter relieves the tension. The audience has just been introduced to the power game and inconsistencies of psychoanalysis—the patronizing attitude of the therapist and the contradictions involved in the therapeutic transaction, as Freud is the one breaking the silence while denying he is doing so. Freud realizes he is alone in his study and moves to his desk to alert his daughter Anna, a psychoanalyst herself and here an offstage figure supposedly at the other end of the intercom. It is the middle of the night, and he is confused about a newly installed light pull that dangles in front of him, “a four-foot cord with a brass knob on the end”: freud. [. . . .] What’s this thing? anna. What thing? freud. This thing in my hand. Terry Johnson’s Hysteria 111 anna. Um . . . freud. It’s just dangling here. It’s got a knob on the end. anna. Mmm hmm? freud. What am I supposed to do with it? anna. Shall I call the nurse? freud. Shall I give it a pull? anna. No, just . . . leave it alone, father. He pulls it. The lights go out. freud. Scheisse! (2) In theatre, where ideas and situations have to unfold quickly, opening scenes are crucial. Here, too, information is closely packed as, beat by beat, hints are dropped about what is to come. Nothing is random—not even the choice of the expletive “Scheisse” (shit), which Freud repeats several times in the play. It is an ironic reminder that he is no stranger to the “anal obsessions” he ascribes to the English after watching a performance of Ben Travers’s Rookery Nook. If “English farce,” as he concludes , has a “seductive logic” (9), so has psychoanalysis. Hysteria makes good use of this similarity, linking the saturation of meaning that is typical of farce, a particularly tightly edited genre, to the semiotic plenitude that is one of the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis and, later, through the figure of Dalí, to the hyperconscious representations typical of surrealistic art. As Freud tugs at the light pull, darkness briefly descends, and laughter marks another site of unarticulated meaning. The audience has already experienced the power game and contradictions of psychoanalysis. That it is obsessed with sex only confirms a common prejudice. But the scene also suggests something less obvious yet central to the play’s argument, concerning the relationship between illumination and the phallus: when Freud sheds light on the darker regions of his patients’ minds, he does so as a man—not objectively, but with a primary allegiance to his gender. Freud, then, is not a larger-than-life figure, Dante’s vision of a Virgil who leads us through our own personal underworld. In the play he stands revealed as a fallible man, limited in his masculine point of view and therefore prone to fail, to hurt as much as to heal—and with this perception of human vulnerability the gloom of tragedy descends on a play that starts in laughter and ends in tears. After this scene Freud lies down on his famous couch, a visual reminder of the origin of psychoanalysis in solipsistic monologue, in Freud talking and listening to himself in the yearlong and later censored self-analysis that followed his father ’s death in 1896. The dream he tells is his famous account...