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82 Why are Joan and Gertrud so “hysterical”? The phrase “theword made flesh,” was first applied to the studyof Dreyer’s films by Mark Nash, in an essay on what he identified as the “hysterical” qualities of Dreyer’s film texts. For the word made flesh is, of course, also the formula for conversion hysteria, the construction of a paradigmatically female body whose symptoms, as Freud argued, “speak” the repressed contents of the unconscious. Before taking up the issue of the “hysteria” of Dreyer’s films, though, let us take a look at how the theatrical staging of the female hysterical body relates to the iconographical history I’ve just delivered—and to the conversation Nygren and Gertrud have in front of the tapestry about his psychiatric studies in Paris. For the iconography of the hysterical attack, as it was choreographed and analyzed by early modern psychiatry, bears a striking resemblance to the iconography of the Annunciation. In fact, hysteria (the word comes from the Greek word hysteron , “womb”—hysteria thus being the disease of the wandering or dysfunctional womb) is, in its performance, a perfect parody of the Virgin’s conception of Christ. And the categorization of the Virgin Mary’s “laudable conditions” or positions in the Annunciation, and early psychiatry’s categorization of the phases of hysterical attack, are amazingly identical. My claim is that hysterical pregnancy is thus a miscarriage of the Word; the diagnostic grids that read the image of the woman’s body for symptoms of her displaced symbolic maternity perform the same attempt at the textual control over the errant female body that the theology of Gabriel’s announcement attempts. The images of this theater of hysteria come from the last part of the nineteenth century, from the by now somewhat familiar photographic records of La Salpetrière, the vast hospital complex in Paris, which, at its heyday, housed more than four thousand women. Freud went there in the 1880s to study under its renowned leader, Jean-Martin Charcot, whose Tuesday afternoon lecture/ demonstrations at the Salpetrière amphitheater, the famous Leçons du Mardi, W hy a re Joa n a nd G ert ru d s o “hyst erica l ” ? 83 were attended by many of the leading Parisian intellectuals of the day. During these sessions Charcot would bring out his hysterical patients, and, inducing hysterical attacks by any number of means (often by hypnotizing them, or by pressing down upon, not uncoincidentally, the ovarian region), he would lecture while the patients performed their symptoms. It is precisely these kinds of demonstrations in Paris that Gertrud’s friend Axel Nygren referred to in front of the tapestry. Charcot was constantly trying to categorize the various phases of the hysterical attack and label them; his labels changed continuously, and he always held that the different phases didn’t necessarily succeed one another in a regular order, but he still kept up a constant effort of discrimination. Sometimes there were four phases: an onset; an “aura hysterica,” which was a kind of nimbus of anxiety; an epileptic phase (“now the real drama begins!” Charcot would shout to his audience); and a final, semi- or unconscious phase called “clonic.” Or the four phases went like this: an epileptoid phase (Charcot ’s hysterics acted much like epileptics, probably because after he took over La Salpetrière he decided to house the hysterics in the same ward as the epileptics ); a phase of “large movements,” of “attitudes” or poses called “passionelles” (fig. 15); hallucinations; and finally deliria. The archetype of the phases of attack was probably three-fold: epileptoid; exotic movements; hallucination. I think the general pattern, as well as its affinities with the stages of the Annunciation, is clear. An initial moment of fearful recoil, a series of poses and gestures (many of them, here, simply parodies of the poses of sexual  See Jean-Martin Charcot, Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, trans. George Sigerson (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1879), 252ff.  Charcot, Leçons du Mardi a la Salpetriere: Policliniques 1887–1888. Notes de cours de MM. Blin, Charcot, et Colin (Paris: M. Delahaye et Emile Lecrosnier, 1887), 251.  Charcot, Charcot the Clinician: The Tuesday Lessons, trans. Christopher G. Goetz (New York: Raven Press, 1987), 112.  Charcot, Leçons, 203. This was Freud’s and Breuer’s understanding of the “grande crise hysterique .” Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey and Alix Strachey (New York: Penguin, 1974), 13.  Charcot, Charcot...

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