Psychoanalysis, illustration and the art of hysteria: Transcript from a talk, Worcester 2019

‘Psychoanalysis, illustration and the art of hysteria’ is a transcript of a talk. It explores the possibility of the disruption of meaning in both the analytic encounter and the encounter between image and text. In order to do this, it focuses on the photographs of hysterics taken at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the nineteenth century and asks, ‘what were the doctors doing to these women, and what were these women doing to the doctors?’ From here it goes on to explore Lacan’s four discourses (the discourse of the master, the hysteric, the analyst and the university) that provide a radically non-illustrative means of illuminating the logic of hysteria. The overall drive of the article is to articulate something around the transformative potential of unruly communications, arguing for the possibility that linear arguments and an insistence on sense-making are far from the only means of addressing the Other in order to bring about change.