Body Language

It is generally assumed that the body of the hysteric speaks and its language can be interpreted through explicable causes and enunciable statements. I'd like to question the validity and pertinence of the conception and related metaphor of the speaking body in Freud's works. Although the symptoms of hysterics were duly interpreted by Freud as early as his Studies on Hysteria , he never seemed to consider them as fully comprehensible. While some somatic yet inorganic manifestations led him to discover the unconscious by revealing their traumatic origin, it would be an overstatement to assert that Freud ever acknowledged them as thoroughly translatable. Remarkably, Freud seems to feel more at ease and at home with the language of obsessional neuroses. In his Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis , when analyzing the Rat Man, he asserts that the language of obsessional neurosis “does not involve the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation— hysterical conversion—which can never be fully comprehensible to us” (p. 2128). In his later Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis delivered in 1916, Freud contrasts obsessional neurosis with hysteria: “obsessional neurosis, in which the puzzling leap from the mental to the physical plays no part, has… become more perspicuous and familiar to us than hysteria, and we have learnt that it displays certain extreme characteristics of the nature of neurosis far more glaringly” (, p. 3339).

This brings us back to the process of hysterical conversion, prompting us to interrogate Freud's side comment and elucidate the meaning of what he calls the “leap from the mental to the physical” (, p. 3339). If the language of obsessional neurosis is deemed to be “a dialect in which we ought to be able to find our way about more easily, since it is more nearly related to the forms of expression adopted by our conscious thought than is the language of hysteria” (. p. 2128), the reason why the process of somatic innervation is “never …