Preface

Bedlam, originally Bethlehem, was the name of a hospital for the mentally ill in London. During the eighteenth century a visit to the hospital, where for the price of a penny one could see ’the freak show of Bethlehem’, became a popular outing for London’s citizens. In a single year there were more than 100,000 visitors, all of whom could bring sticks with which to prod and push the incarcerated patients. The word ’bedlam’ became an expression for turmoil, uproar and confusion, a dreadful place.

In the exhibition ’BEDLAM – normality and other Obssesions’, eight artists examine images of insanity in works with a critical approach to the concept of normality. ”You can’t prove your own sanity by locking up your neighbour,” said Dostoyevsky, but if we look at the history of madness we see that most societies have indeed sought to safeguard and protect normality (and sanity) by isolating and locking up those who were different, whether the difference was religious, political, sexual, ethnic or mental. According to the French philosopher, Foucault, the history of insanity is a reliable way in which to understand a society. By labelling the others as dangerous, deranged or completely insane, society’s definition of normality and the superiority of that normality is strengthened. Seen in this light, human injustices begin to look like plain good sense.

We can see the same tendency in our own time. To a large extent we live with a media-created idea of reality that contains some pretty solid assumptions. We need then to ask ourselves some questions, for what is normality? Who defines it and where are its limits? The dominating climate today maginalises more and more people and there is more and more control over the individual. Prime-time television entertains us with programmes that are bizarre cross-breeds between the freak-show and the docu-soap; stories of the deformed or unfortunate, spiced up with tales of horror, exposing the plight of the abnormal. From our sofas we can spy upon them and point our fingers and so safely reassure ourselves of our own normality. There’s not much that separates this from ’the freak show of Bethlehem’.

Welcome.

A tribute to the hysteric
by Lilian Munk Rösing

”Don’t say anything! Don’t touch me!” Such were the words said by Frau Emmy to her doctor in 1889. The doctor’s name was Sigmund Freud and he obeyed them. That moment marked the birth of psychoanalysis. The moment when the doctor resigns himself, when he ceases to be the active man of science who can treat his patient by word and touch, is the moment of psychoanalysis. Freud resigned himself, Freud abandoned action, Freud leaned back and listened. And what Freud listened to was what nobody wanted to hear: the speech of a hysteric. Not spectacular, heroic, brilliant madness, but the words of a hysterical woman.

”The status of the unconscious is ethical” said the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This means nothing less than that psychoanalysis is neither a science nor a religion but an ethic, a way to relate to another, to be open to another , as Freud was open to the hysteric and to the unconscious in the moment when he ceased to seek control through diagnosis and laying on of hands.

If psychoanalysis were a religion or a science, it would have to prove the existence of the unconscious, just as theology proves the existence of God and science proves the existence of neurons. If, however, psychoanalysis is an ethic, the question is not whether the unconscious exists: the claim is that it insists, as the hysteric insisted on controlling Freud and as her desire insisted through her physical symptoms.

Lacan also said that the unconscious took its status from its discoverer. The unconscious took its ethical status from Freud: his discovery of the unconscious was an ethical action – or perhaps rather an ethical resignation. In proclaiming Freud as the heroic explorer, Lacan changes the image of such a hero. He is not the proud adventurer who believes in his vision and holds on to it through thick and thin; no, he is the man who doubts and changes course, resigns in powerlessness, becomes open to the most rejected: the hysteric.

Who then is the hysteric? She is the person seeking a master (as Frau Emmy sought a healer), the person who wants the master to tell her the truth, but also the person who drives the master to the point where he breaks down as master, the point where it becomes clear that he is unable to give the hysteric what she wants. Her demand is, as Lacan puts it, ”Give me a master that I can overpower”. When the master, Freud, allowed himself to be overpowered by Frau Emmy, psychoanalysis was born.

The hysteric is driven by a desire that cannot be satisfied. Such was Freud’s understanding of the hysterical wives and spinsters of the middle class in Vienna around 1900. He saw a desire that could not be satisfied, could not be acknowledged, could not be expressed in any other way than through physical symptoms: hysterical limping, hysterical phantom pain, hysterical throat-clearing, hysterical abscesses. Freud fell back into the role of master when he believed that he could overcome this desire by interpreting it; when he forgot Frau Emmy’s words ”Don’t say anything!” and told Dora that she cleared her throat because she had fellatio fantasies (although it is very possible that she did), or when he wrote a prescription for ’repeated doses of penis’ (although it is very possible that this was what was needed).

However, it was not just historical or cultural restrictions that prevented the satisfaction of the hysteric’s desire. The fact that her desire could not be satisfied is not a piece of historical bad luck but a basic truth, both about the hysteric and the desire. It is the nature of desire that it can never, or can only momentarily, be satisfied: as soon as it has got what it wanted, or thought it wanted, it wants something else. It’s like Strindberg’s story of the little boy who screamed for a green fishing-net and complained when he got it that ’it wasn’t that green I meant’, or the little boy in Kierkegaard who screams for ’Maren’ and complains when she comes ’it wasn’t that Maren’. It wasn’t just that after all. It wasn’t just that gadget, it wasn’t just that pair of shoes that could satisfy me, at least not for more than a short moment. It wasn’t the iridologist who could tell me the truth about myself, it wasn’t the numerologist, and it wasn’t Freud either.

What is it then the hysteric desires? She doesn’t really know; it’s too big and secret and strange and special to be put into words. Something inside her wants the master (the therapist, the shaman, the numerologist, God – whoever) to tell her. Tell me who I am, tell me what I desire. Sooner or later, though, she will reject his answers, sooner or later she will drive him to the point where he falls apart as master. The hysteric does not desire satisfaction, she desires NOT to be satisfied. As Lacan says ”The hysteric desires desire”.

Are we now living in a society that has allowed hysterical forces to control everything? Isn’t consumerist thinking based on this desire of the hysteric, on the desire that can never be completely satisfied but must constantly be dissatisfied in order to breed more desire? Isn’t the hysteric the shopper par excellence, whether she shops around for clothes and shoes or for new forms of therapy? Isn’t it true that in Freud’s day the hysteric was a despised freak and now she is the star of Sex and the City?

But hysteria is still the way to recognition. To place a theory in the role of master and then pursue it to breaking-point (as Lacan did with Freud) is to reach a point where thought does not just accumulate and reproduce knowledge, but where it creates new insights.

Perhaps what keeps consumerist thinking alive is not so much a submission to the hysteric’s truth – that what we desire is desire itself – as it is the illusion that desire can be fully satisfied. The moment we all become true hysterics and all embrace the hysteric’s truth and realise that our prime mover, desire, is a redundant paralytic mechanism, can perhaps be the beginning of a different, creative St. Vita’s dance instead of the sufferings of the unfortunate freaks or the shopper’s waltz with the carrier bags.

Translated by Maureen Egerup
from catalouge “Bedlam - Normalitet og andre tvangstanker”
Den Frie - Copenhagen - August 2010