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Laima Kreivytė. The birth of psychoanalysis from the babble of a hysteric

2011-10-19

Around the exhibition Bedlam. Normality and Other Manias at the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre

“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.

Lilian Munk Rösing, A Tribute to the Hysteric. From the exhibition catalogue

Contemporary art can be a cheap trick, tedious intellectual exercises, DIY video crafts – you name it. The question of what art is and what it is not concerns only esotericists. I don’t care what one should call certain spiritual and physical practices that end up in museums and galleries, unable to fit elsewhere. I am concerned with the intensity of such activity, its capacity to generate mental or sensual energy. No institutional patronage can guarantee this. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing to worry about if some high-ranking author does not give a heck about you, or does not appear on your radar. The postcard imagination of post-conceptualist art fades without a whimper before the mountain obsession that has swept the Netherlands. The country that lies below the sea level (but refuses to surrender to it!) has succumbed to a fatal desire for a mountain. Craving for the latter, it already makes plans, creates visualisations, and fantasizes about mountain skis, sledges, and violet Alpine cows. This as-yet virtual project is the best conceptual art work of the recent time. Not only because of the paradoxical power of the imagination, but also due to its intertextuality – the echoes of other mountains emanating from the imaginary one. If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, then the mountain… If the mountain did not give birth to a mouse, then surely a mouse did not give birth to the mountain – it is naïve to think that the Dutch mountain mania was started by a sports reporter’s prank. The imagination, bound to contemplate an open field in the horizontal plane, has been raising this mountain, one grain of sand at a time, for centuries. Until finally the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel (1525–1569), upon visiting Italy, could not help it and squeezed the Alps, which had caught his eye, right into his Dutch landscapes. A perfect theft, an appropriation, to use the art critic lingo. How many times did I want to perform such a copy-paste operation while driving along the Vilnius–Klaipėda highway! The road to Klaipėda is, in general, a place for the purification and soiling of all kinds of ideas (one could remember here Juozas Laivys’ highway art), especially when there is a place to share them upon arrival. For instance, the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, which currently hosts one of the most intriguing exhibitions of research based art shown in Lithuania during the recent decade – Bedlam. But we will reach it a little later, in small steps.

Speaking of creation of imaginary collections (which is also relevant in the context of Bedlam), so far I have found the best examples in the form of books rather than in art institutions – Orhan Pamuk’s documentation of a masochistic mania, The Museum of Innocence, and Griselda Pollock’s Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Both authors concentrate on something other than they “ought to” – Pollock, for instance, meticulously scrutinizes the statuettes excavated from Egyptian tombs that Sigmund Freud collected, arranged in his cabinet in such a way that the analyst could see them, but not the patient (there is a loftier word today, but, alas, we are not writing for the sake of the beauty) pouring his or her heart out on the couch. Freud could watch the patient while remaining at the head of the couch, invisible. Meanwhile, a painting with unseeing eyes of a sphinx hung in front of the patient. Blind sphinxes will solve all riddles. Loaded with paintings and sculptures, this whole “stage set” of Freud’s, in which he assumed the role of the invisible God the Father, is quite eloquent in itself. Even more interesting is the relationship between mental processes and the gaze, looking, and visualisations.

In the Bedlam exhibition, Nanna Gro Henningsen explores the twisted gaze of madness. Surely, her exploration cannot do without Freud’s teacher Jean-Martin Charcot, whom we see in a reproduction of André Brouillet’s painting (1875). In this painting Charcot demonstrates an unconscious female hysteric to a suit-wearing male audience during a lecture at the Salpêtrière hospital. This hospital, located in a former gunpowder factory, became an isolated world for more than 4000 female epileptics, hysterics, vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes. Not all of them were incurably ill – often poor women who were rejected by their families or simply had none ended up here. In the end of the 19th century neurologist Charcot began his research of hysteria at Salpêtrière. For this research, he employed the newest technology of that time – photography. It was believed that the camera lens was impartial, although due to long exposure time the depicted scenes would be staged. The famous researcher hypnotised his patients, and they convincingly demonstrated the symptoms of hysteria.

Yet even then photography was not just a neutral document. The patients understood perfectly well what was expected from them, and sought to meet the audience’s expectations. Some of the patients became celebrities of sorts, as Charcot not only demonstrated his experiments to his colleagues, but also held public hysteria treatment sessions, which the crowds, hungry for spectacles, paid money to see. One of such “show girls” was the “queen of hysteria” Marie Wittman, called Blanche by Charcot. She became known as the performer most susceptible to hypnosis and able to simulate the symptoms most realistically. Real and supposed hysterics quickly realized that posing for photographs, drawings and wax figures or performing before an audience was way better than being locked up together with the insane. Asti Hustvedt tells the stories of the acquiescent Blanche and Charcot’s two other exemplary hysterics – the stubborn Augustine and the possessed Geneviève – in her book Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

It is precisely this spectacle, performance aspect of hysteria, as well as the controlling power of the gaze, that Nanna Gro Henningsen explores in the exhibition. She stages the photographs taken at Salpêtrière, casting Christina Johansson as Augustine. Interestingly enough, Augustine’s hysteria attacks ceased after Charcot’s death. The gaze of madness, just like all other gazes, is constructed, objectified, alienating. The gaze, especially that of an expert who can determine your fate, controls, convinces, forces to obey. It opens up a social as well as psychological divide: most of Salpêtrière’s patients were hardship-stricken women from the poorest stratum of society, while the renowned neurologist who made them and himself famous was a wealthy bourgeois living in central Paris. Henningsen’s installation can be viewed as a layout of a system of power: it features a model of the hospital, Charcot and Freud, and other medical documentation of (imaginary?) illnesses. The “visual diagnostics” practiced by Charcot proved to be faulty, yet even to this day there are occasional “experts” who determine others’ degree of normality by eye. Or, alternatively, from the TV screen.
Freud, Charcot’s student, switched from image to sound. The teacher paid no attention to the hysterics’ utterances; only sporadic testimonies remain in their clinical records. Freud, on the contrary, kept his ear open for the hysteric’s “meaningless” babble. It turned out that the latter had stemmed from repressed traumas, rather than from physiological causes.

One of the most uncanny (and forceful) works in the exhibition is Lotte Tauber Lassen’s video installation Story of Brains. The journalist Jon Kaldan shares his childhood memories of seeing brains removed from the skulls of dead people in the chapel of a psychiatric hospital near his home. According to the catalogue, the brains of 9479 people, collected in the whole of Denmark between 1945 and 1982, are stored at the Århus psychiatric hospital, preserved in plastic buckets. The cranium of a deceased person would be crammed with old newspapers upon the removal of the brain. Unexpectedly, this video film resounded as an uncanny paraphrase of today’s junk media society. There is no need for dissection anymore – we are already brainless, our skulls stuffed with Facebook junk.

A walk around and inside Bedlam is an excellent act of self-therapy. The gaze of madness lies within – you are simultaneously its subject and object. Not accidentally, at the beginning (and at the end) of the exposition the viewer encounters an installation assembled from furniture and equipment items from Klaipėda’s Seamen’s Hospital, stacked in one pile and periodically trembling. And those imaginary hospital hallways with real hospital benches that open in the wall, identified as photography only from a closer distance. There is also that mysterious voice in a box, the schizophrenically doubled faces painted by Vicky Steptoe, and the same author’s video work about repetitive actions – the washing of hands with a pink baby-like bar of soap until the latter disappears. When you look at the figures haunting Pernelle Maegaard, drawn on the wall, Karen Gabel Madsen’s chaotic paintings and her installation from hospital clothes created in collaboration with Jeanette Land Schou, the flitting image of Hitler on Nina Maria Kleivan’s glittering screen, Bodil Brems’ landscapes, filled with “verified errors”, you realize that all of those manias already reside in you. Normality, just like abnormality, is a construct that reflects the customs of a certain society at a certain time, and it is very easy to end in the margins, especially if the norms are set from the positions of power.

Would we still have been on this side of bedlam had we not heard the babble of a hysteric?