Hysterical Remembering

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Roth, Michael S. 1957- "Hysterical Remembering"Modernism/modernity - Volume 3, Number 2, April 1996, pp. 1-30 The Johns Hopkins University PressExcerptModernism/Modernity 3.2 (1996) 1-30
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Our moral health depends on the limitation of these two psychological activities, one by the other, on this equilibrium between the automatic force of the past, and the conscious and voluntary effort of the present.
--Pierre Janet 1
Everything comes back to phenomena of immobilization, of psychical forgetting. A hysteric who seems paraplegic behaves as if he has forgotten that he has legs; he has lost the mental representation of a part of his body.
--Jules Dérejine 2
Hysteria was surely the most prominent and memorable maladie de la mémoire of the nineteenth century: it served as an intersection for many points of cultural contestation, becoming a marker for positions on issues of gender, sex, mind/body, professionalization and secularization, to name only a few. And hysteria has remained a privileged site for discussing these issues in critical and historical writing over at least the last twenty-five years. Just as the conceptualization of memory and forgetting were at the core of writings on hysteria in the late nineteenth century, so recent writings continue to debate the ways we are to remember hysteria, those who supposedly suffered from it, and those who supposedly tried to understand or alleviate that suffering. The focus on maladies of memory forced nineteenth century physicians to consider what it meant [End Page 1] to have a healthy memory, and a normal relation to the past. 3 What does it mean to suffer from the past, to be pained by memory? How is it that some people manage not to suffer from the past, to orient themselves properly in relation to...