Hysterical Desire

Abstract

The rise of an individualistic society also means an increase in the expectations placed on individuals to know what they want, to know their desires and to seek answers in everything from horoscopes, to TV talk shows to new age therapies. Beck points out that

The overtaxed individual ‘seeks, finds and produces countless authorities intervening in social and psychic life, which, as his professional representatives, relieve him of the question: “Who am I and what do I want?” and thus reduce his fear of freedom.’ This creates the market for the answer factories, the psycho-boom, the advice literature—that mixture of the esoteric cult, the primal scream, mysticism, yoga and Freud which is supposed to drown out the tyranny of possibilities but in fact reinforces it with its changing fashion.

The hysterical body is of course typically, from Hippocrates through Freud, a woman’s body, and indeed a victimized woman’s body, on which desire has inscribed an impossible history, a story of desire in an impasse.

(Peter Brooks 1995, xi–xii)

The hysteric’s question, then, is related to how we all position ourselves in, and are positioned by, the forces of our culture.

(Patrick Fuery 1994, 129)