Hysteria is the neurotic personality structure by excellence. Most of us are a bit hysterical. Let's see what is played in hysteria, in conflict with desire, based on two great films: gone With the Wind Y The eclipse.
Two cases of hysteria, one more classic, one more modern. The eclipI know it will serve as a hinge, in turn, to point out the current manifestations of hysteria. Let's see, in short, why we all lack a screw and what we can learn to take it better.
In order to have a desire of our own, and therefore to make our own life, (not the one that others want us to do), we have to have experienced our structural emptiness as a symbolic lack that we feel we can satisfy in some way. This lack is built in the psychic separation with the attachment figures, we separate and we remain in lack.
We want something because we lack (without fail there is no desire). And the lack always distresses us: that we lack work, that they reject us, that we lack health, that we lack competence, that we lack a partner, that our children lack.
But the opposite can also distress us: that they love us, that they pay attention to us, that they catch us in the job we longed for, that we be successful, that the girl or boy we like is interested in us ...
When desire is very conflicted, the defenses we use to protect our psychic apparatus can generate suffering, ourselves and others. Let's see it.
Hysterical subjects seek security, affection, and identity. They may believe that they do not deserve to be loved, that their feelings will not be respected. They are trapped in the desire of the Other. They repeat, in one way or another, the conflict they have with their primordial attachment figures, their parents.
As lack distresses them too much, they will be dependent, and they will try to gain some power by trying to control the person on whom they depend; they look for a master over whom to reign (Lacan, 2004).
They usually excessively idealize the partner erasing his fault, but if he falls into his seduction (another of his ways of obtaining power from his feeling of helplessness) they will despise him. Caught up in this long-suffering conflict it's no wonder many hysterical subjects fall in love with inconvenient partners.
Couples who confirm their own feelings of handicap, who blame them, or who show themselves without fail exercising almost total control over them. But there are many other possible combinations in this endless, and sometimes hellish game of denial of lack..
Counterphobic mechanisms make them expose themselves or provoke what scares them. For example, managing your partner pushing him to the limit, or looking for a partner who is indifferent to you.
How it reminds us Karpman, in his dramatic triangle, we can adopt the role of persecutor, victim or savior in our interpersonal conflicts. They are also ways of denying the anguish of lack.
The persecutor blames others, the victim seeks someone else to take care of her, while the savior seeks to feel more complete by looking for people who need him.
As one patient told me: "There are people who feel better by making others feel worse".
As we already learned in my article What Best… Impossible Teaches Us About OCD, the obsessive is armored against desire.
If the hysteric may need to hold on to desire with dissatisfaction, the obsessive he needs to make his wish impossible (Álvarez, 2017), or freeze the wish of the other in a demand that he can control and does not leave him lacking.
If the obsessive approaches the fulfillment of his desire, he becomes distressed. If you stop wanting, you get depressed. You can only stay in desire by pushing it away when it gets too close.
Scarlet, the character played by Vivien Leigh, in the famous gone With the Wind, It can illustrate what a mode of hysteria would be. In the movie, Scarlet can't stand the lack of being excluded or rejected, she falls in love with Ashley the moment he decides to marry another.
Faced with her helplessness, she uses her power of seduction, compulsively surrounds herself with men, men she uses, finally marrying one of them who, otherwise, is completely indifferent to her..
Presumably if Ashley had married her, Scarlet would have been quick to reject him again. From the family conflict, the matrix of this behavior, the film shows us a mother who does not want her father; the father's authority is erased.
When this lack of desire and esteem towards the father occurs, the daughter may be left without limits, without tolerance for frustration.
Vittoria is the character played by Monica Vitti in the film The eclipse, by Michelangelo Antonioni when we have the information. Vittoria is going through an identity crisis, she wanders through the film's settings as if she is estranged from herself and from what surrounds her. He seeks support from his mother, but does not receive it.
The father on this occasion is not deleted, but he is deceased. Vittoria does not seem to want anything, she frolics like a lazy cat, she asks herself important questions, but nobody knows how to answer them in an alienated society, men are not for her, in her own words, a different hobby than reading a book.
Here we no longer see the typical Freudian hysteria, that of the subject who appears helpless in search of protection, but simply that the Other does not seem to exist, or does not mean anything. Perhaps that is why the romance with the character played by Alain Delon is one of the most disturbing in the history of cinema and shows us an interaction scheme that is already close to relationships in postmodernity.
Yet No Comments