The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (review)

Elisabeth Bronfen. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xviii + 469 pp. Ill. $19.95 (paperbound).

It is by now axiomatic that hysteria as a medical diagnosis disappeared in the twentieth century, despite a persistence since classical antiquity. Yet, abandoned by one set of caretakers, this charismatic orphan has been solicited and fussed over by others. A steady rise of interest in hysteria as a philosophical and critical object continues, particularly within the history of medicine, art history, literary criticism, cultural studies, and feminist theory.

The Knotted Subject is unique among this new body of research. Elisabeth Bronfen's study is expansive and magisterial in its extended discussion of hysteria from the eighteenth century to the present. It moves confidently from medical history to gothic novels, from Freud to contemporary film. But its greatest accomplishment lies in its considerable theoretical interest, as an original attempt to merge two nominally irreconcilable approaches to hysteria. Bronfen, at one point, refers to another author as a "psychoanalytically-informed cultural critic" (p. 121), and her own writing clearly aims at this fusion of psychoanalytic generality with historical specificity.

Bronfen proposes a remarkably well argued revision of the theory of hysteria. Drawing on Freud's early theory of the traumatic etiology of hysteria, she shifts the problem of causation away from sexuality to a more elemental sense of "traumatic vulnerability at the core of our psychic and aesthetic representations" (p. 12). Freud associated vulnerability with the fear of castration, but the symbol of lack that interests Bronfen is the nongendered wound suggested by the navel. Hysteria becomes a language associated with this elemental trauma. Because that trauma is inaccessible, the language of hysteria is constructed around a conceptual "nothing," so that hysteria is a "malady of representation" (p. 40). Bronfen supplies an astute analysis of the paradoxical tendencies that this language produces, which she then explores in her individual readings.

As a disease of representation, hysteria is necessarily a cultural object. Bronfen is "interested in the phenomenon of hysteria as a cultural construction, rather than as a strictly clinical syndrome," and her study focuses on interpretations of hysteria, rather than on its biological facts. The chapter titled "Medicine's Hysteria Romance" is an original and refreshing analysis of the history of hysteria in medical literature through the eighteenth century. Bronfen relies on the existing histories, like those of Veith and Trillat, ¹ rather than primary texts, and while this is a weakness, the considerable strength of her argument lies in the big-picture emphasis she brings to the material.

Bronfen argues that the medical category of hysteria is a mutable sign for medicine's imperative to account for what is, basically, unaccountable. Hysteria served as the "wastebasket" category in medicine, but Bronfen offers a significant insight into this commonplace observation by viewing the disease category of hysteria itself as a protective fiction for medical practitioners. It provides a false sense of mastery over the body, while simultaneously serving as the evidence of medicine's lack of nosological comprehensiveness. The category of hysteria is thus hystericized as a collective self-reflection of the interpreters' own insufficiency. Thus Bronfen looks at the history of hysteria by focusing on how "a wish for such a classification generated such a grand historical narrative" (p. 105). In studies of Freud, Charcot, Janet, and Karl Jaspers, she extends this self-reflexive logic to individual practitioners, and she is particularly compelling in her study of Freud's and Breuer's "almost magical belief" in the "infallibility of a coherent analytic narrative" (p. 262).

This is a compelling argument, and one that, I hope, will lead to further reinterpretations of hystericized cultural productions. It has moments of weakness: there is a repetitiousness to Bronfen's readings of literature and film, in which hysterical knots are everywhere, and everywhere signifying the same inability to signify. This repetition points to a...