Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 21 Issue 12

Hysteria as an Aesthetic Expression Fernanda Pereira Medina 1 Abstract- This article introduces a new look at hysteria by examining hysterical phenomena from the perspective of Freudian-inspired aesthetics. 1 I ntroduction We will discuss a new femininity brought about by the discovery of hysteria and celebrated by the surrealists as a means of artistic expression, and lastly, we will approach hysteria from the relational standpoint, that is, from the relationships that the hysterical subject establishes with the alterity. Keywords: hysteria; sigmund freud; the uncanny; surrealists; psychoanalysis; aesthetics. ithin the perspective of Freudian-inspired aesthetics – which I have discussed earlier in an article entitled Freud e a estética da estranheza ( Freud and the aesthetics of strangeness ) 2 In the article, Freud discusses a specific genre of representation, capable of awakening in the reader a particular feeling of anguish, defined in German by the word Unheimliche . It must be stressed that The Uncanny is not merely a reflection on aesthetics. It announces the great theoretical revision of the 1920s that leads to a new theory of drives. At this time, Freud –, I propose an analysis of hysteria from the viewpoint of creation. It must be clear, first of all, that Freudian a es thetics does not relate to the sensitive representation of art – this is the object of consciousness. Freud's investigation in the realm of aesthetics concerns, first and foremost, the affective effect of the artwork on the viewer. And such affective effect refers to the mobilization of instinctual forces that are, by definition, unconscious. The article Das Unheimliche ( The Uncanny , in English), published in 1919 – a text in which the psychoanalyst looks into the short story The Sandman and the novel The Devil's Elixirs , both by writer E. T. A. Hoffmann –, served as a guiding thread to the development of all aesthetics inspired on psychoanalysis. 1 The author is a psychiatrist and art historian, with a master's degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and a doctorate in Art History from the University of Rennes 2, France. This article was modified from a fragment of her doctoral thesis entitled L’art conceptual, la psychanalyse et les paradoxes du langage: un dialogue entre Joseph Kosuth et Sigmund Freud ( Conceptual art, psychoanalysis and the paradoxes of language: A dialogue between Joseph Kosuth and Sigmund Freud ). 2 MEDINA, F. P. Freud e a estética da estranheza. Literartes, [S. l.] , v. 1, no. 7, p. 285-297, 2017. Available at: https://www.revistas.usp.br/ literartes/article/view/ 124456. begins to reconsider the boundaries of the pleasure principle, until then deemed to be the dominant tendency of the psyche. Here, he recognizes the existence of an even more primitive type of pleasure, subjected to the repetition compulsion. From this point of view, it may be said that the uncanny reveals the instinctual dimension of the experience of art. The aesthetics that emerges from such theoretical revolution represents, thus, a perspective of creation stripped of the illusion of beauty, harmony and goodness. It is from such standpoint that hysteria may be regarded as a creation, as a representation of a passion whose “pathography” (in the sense of writing a pathos ) and iconography (in the sense of a formal representation of passion) explicitly refer back to the painful and to the appalling, as explained by Freud in his 1919 article. This tragic character of hysteria was well explored by Charcot. The neurologist provided new meaning to quasi-religious ecstasy and demonic possession. But he also exhibited the hysteric, through a theatrical and surprising mise-en-scène, through hypnosis and exhibitions of the diseased – the famous “Leçons du Mardi ” (" Tuesday Lessons "). The world discovered, with Charcot, what a hysterical body was capable of. The discovery of hysteria opened up a world of possibilities for physicians such as Charcot and Freud, but for poets, writers and painters as well. “Beauty will be convulsive or it won't be at al l 3 ” was André Breton’s tribute to Salpêtrière’s hysterical women, with which he ended his narrative Nadja , published in 1928. In this work, Breton recounts the events involving himself and an “alienated” young woman he met in Paris on October 4, 1926, Léona Delcourt, alias "Nadja". It is a text – somewhat autobiographical – in which the author, identified with the insane woman, manages to fulfill his desire to write and to act out the convulsive beauty he had dreamed of while contemplating the iconography of the Salpetrièr e 4 Convulsive, passionate and chaotic beauty, hysteria is claimed by the surrealists as an emblem of a new art. In the same year as that of the publication of Nadja, Louis Aragon and André Breton commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria, which they consider the great “poetic discovery” of the late 19 th century, . 3 “La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas”. (Breton, A. Nadja, Paris, Gallimard, 1963, p. 190). 4 Roudinesco, E. Histoire de la psychanalyse en France. 2, 1925-1985, Paris, Fayard, 1994, p. 43. W © 2021 Global Journals Volume XXI Issue XII Version I 17 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2021 A Author: Master's Degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and a doctorate in Art History from the University of Rennes 2, France. e-mail: fernandape.medina@gmail.com