An Affair with Hysteria: From Feminist Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis to New Studies of Hysteria

  • Irina Zherebkina
Keywords: Feminist post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, “hysterical engagement,” “case of Dora,” non-phallologocentric desire, female pleasure, female writing, new studies of hysteria, mania, hysterical simulation.

Abstract

This article is dedicated to post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalysis—an influential current of twentieth-century feminist theory, and to rethinking the problematizations made by this psychoanalytical current within the field of contemporary feminist theory. It presents the project of reinterpreting the psychoanalytical theory of hysteria within the framework of the so-called hysterically engaged feminism and its methodological influence upon the theories and practices of feminist literary criticism. It furthermore presents the polemic and main critical arguments against the “hysterically engaged” feminism in feminist theory of the 1990s and the attempts to reboot this kind of feminism in the 2010s and 2020s. It also shows that, largely thanks to the feminist theoreticians of psychoanalysis of the 1980s onward, the opposition between psychoanalysis and feminism, as well as that between feminism and hysteria appear archaic and methodologically unproductive in the third decade of the twenty-first century. According to many leading researchers of psychoanalysis, such as Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Theresa de Lauretis, Mariam Alizade, Jacqueline Schaeffer, and others, psychoanalysis, more than any other discipline, has contributed to the rise of female self-identity and feminist mobilization, despite its masculinist tradition and frequent overtly manifested antifeminism.

Author Biography

Irina Zherebkina

Professor of Philosophy
V. N. Karazin Kharkov National University,
Svobody Square 6, Kharkov, Ukraine
E-mail: irinaz@univer.kharkov.ua

References

Benvenuto, Sergio (2005). “Dora Flees... Is There Anything Left to Say About Hys- terics?” European Journal of Psychoanalysis 21.2 http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/ number21/benvenuto_dora.pdf
Butler, Judith (2009). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Butler, Judith (2020). The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political. London: Verso.
Cixous, Hélène (1976). “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1.4: 875–93.
Cixous, Hélène (1994). Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clement (1986). The Newly Born Woman. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Devereux, Cecily (2014). “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited: The Case of the Second Wave.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 40.1: 19–45.
Faludi, Susan (1991). Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: The Crown Publishing Group.
Foucault, Michel (2000). “Lives of Infamous Men.” In Power, p. 157–174. New York: The New Press.
Gallop, Jane (1982). The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gallop, Jane (1985). “Keys to Dora.” In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, ed.
Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, pp. 200–220. London: Virago Press. Gallop, Jane (1992). Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge.
Irigaray, Luce (1985). This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kelly, Mary (1990). “That Obscure Subject of Desire: An Interview with Mary Kelly by
Hal Foster.” In Interim, New York: The New York Museum of Contemporary Art. Kristeva, Julia (1988). “Women’s Time.” Signs 7.1: 13–35.
Kristeva, Julia (2019). “Prelude to an Ethics of the Feminine.” Julia Kristeva. http://www.kristeva.fr/prelude-to-an-ethics-of-the-feminine.html.
Mitchell, Juliet (1974). Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laining and Women. New York: Vintage Books.
Nussbaum, Martha С. (1999). “The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler”. The New Republic, February 22. https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/
professor-parody
Schaeffer, Jacqueline (2000). “L’hystérie: une libido en crise face à la différence des sexes.” In Hystérie, ed. Annie Anargyros-Klinger, 107–38. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Schor, Naomi (1995). “Depression in the Nineties.” In Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular, pp. 159–164. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Showalter, Elaine (1993). “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender.” In Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, Elaine Showalter, 286–344. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Verhaeghe, Paul (1994). “Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and Hysteria.” The Letter 2: 47–68.
Zerilli, Linda (2015). “Linda Zerilli on the Hysteric, Disciplinary Power, and Resis- tance.” Michel Foucault’s Collège de France Lectures (1970–1984).
http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/2015/10/30/foucault-413-linda-zeril- li-on-the-hysteric-disciplinary-power-and-resistance.
Zherebkina, Irina (2007). Sub’yektivnost’ i gender [Subjectivity and gender], St Pe- tersburg: Aletheia.
Zherebkina, Irina (2018). “Izobreteniye isterichki” [The invention of a hysteric]. In Strast’. Zhenskaya Seksualnost v Rossii v Epohu Modernizma. [Passion. Female sex- uality in Russia in the age of modernism], pp. 10–17. St Petersburg: Aletheia.
Published
2022-01-25
How to Cite
Zherebkina, I. (2022). An Affair with Hysteria: From Feminist Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis to New Studies of Hysteria. Stasis, 12(2). Retrieved from https://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/196