> For what it's worth:
>
> ***** Selections from: _The Female Malady: Women,
> Madness, and
> English Culture, 1830-1980_
>
> By Elaine Showalter
>
> New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
>
> Neurasthenia
Thanks, Yoshie (and Carrol, and Ian).
The specter of "will" has appeared here and there in discussing Foucault and other matters. Here's a bit from Leslie Farber on will and hysteria. Freud's passage below also suggests a further step, the role pathologization plays as a refuge for the analyst still too close to medicine--refuge from the challenge to, say, the DSM-dependent psychiatrist's clinical receptivity, and the anxieties this challenge stirs up. The passage, particularly the first part, brings to mind for me some of the arguments on the list around (mis)diagnosis and treatment, and the emergence of pseudo-pathologies in the context of modern, or bourgeois medicine, and its demands of productivity. Also the historically specific beginnings of "epidemics of the will."
In any case, I can hear Ferenczi saying in the background, "never force any feeling, least of all the feeling of conviction."
>From "Will and Willfulness in Hysteria," by Leslie
Farber, reprinted in Salmagundi 123, Summer 1999.
Early in Freud's career as a psychoanalyst, he suffered a spell of rapture in which he boasted to Fliess that he could cure every case of hysteria. Though he was now in his middle years, this exuberance really belonged to his therapeutic youth, a time when his medical past still suffused and shaped his view of psychology. If, at this stage, the strategies of psychotherapy seemed as specific as a scalpel, hysteria was for him, literally, a hidden abscess bloated with the debris of sexual trauma--and abscess that must be located, then opened to consciousness, before the systemic symptoms of this malady would disappear. . . . For Freud, at least, little time passed before he inflicted such drainage on an abscess of hysteria--only to discover that his patient shared neither his enthusiasm nor his optimism. In fact, after only a few weeks, she ended treatment, never to return. His account of this therapeutic disaster contains one of the most anguished statements in the literature of psychology, a *cri de coeur* which must have helped him to leave his medical youth behind:
["](She) had listened to me without any of her usual contradictions. She seemed to be moved; she said good-bye to me very warmly, with the heartiest wishes for the New Year, and--came no more. . . . I knew (she) would not come back again. Her breaking off so unexpectedly, just when my hopes of a successful termination of the treatment were at their highest, and her thus bringin those hopes to nothing--this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part. Her purpose of self-injury also profited by this action. No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed. Might I perhaps have kept the girl under my treatment if I myself had acted a part, if I had exaggerated the importance to me of her staying on, and had shown a warm personal interest in her--a course which, even after allowing for my postition as her physician, would have been tantamount to providing her with a substitute for the affection she longed for? I do not know. Since in every case a portion of the factors that are encountered under the form of resistance remains unknown, I have always avoided acting a part, and have contented myself with practicing the humbler arts of psychology. In spite of every theoretical interest and of every endeavour to be of assistance as a physician, I keep the fact in mind that there must be some limits set to the extent to which psychological influence may be used, and I respect as one of these limits the patient's own *will and understanding* [italics Farber's]."
Within this outcry can be discerned the frantic flailings of spirit that would declare to the world the pain this perverse creature had inflicted on him and, at the same time, give rational form to his outrage. It is despair that demands that she be charged with both the cunning to know that his "hopes . . . were at their highest," as well as the meanness to shatter these hopes. Equally understandable is the simultaneous conviction, barely skirting the edges of self-pity and self-aggrandizement, that such catastrophes must be the penalty for ventures as heroic as his. At this point his pain subsides, the rhetorical scale diminishes, and he turns to reason for consolation and even instruction, seeking an order and detachment that so far have eluded him. As if he had now forgotten his violent description of her impact on him, he wonders in his new mood if he might not have deliberately "exaggerated" to her the importance of remaining in treatment. But, he could not countenance such pretense on his part. Almost safely past the claims of indignation, he can now hope, in the teeth of what has just occured, that he has always contented himself with "practicing the humbler arts of psychology." He can acknowledge that there are limits to psychological influence. It is precisely at this point that he comes to a glimmering of the truth about his experience with Dora: "I respect as one of these limits [of psychological influence] the patient's own *will and understanding."
In other words, regardless of the inventiveness and accuracy with which he and Dora have traced the origins and meanings of her disorder, there is a force in her that says "no" to this mutual creation.
[. . .]
My thesis is that hysteria is a particular disorder of will whose principal expression is willfulness. By willfulness, I do not mean mere intention or determination, which are older definitions of the term. I am using here *Webster's* more contemporary definition, namely "governed by will, without yielding to reason; obstinate; perverse; stubborn; as a willful man or horse." This definition suggests that, in willfulness, the life of the will becomes distended, overweening, and obtrusive at the same time that its movements become increasingly separate, sovereign, and distince from other aspects of the spirit.
[end]
Alec
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/