Conversion Disorder

199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat in your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting ‘the fundamental impermanence of all things’. This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness). -Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“I have a sounding board in my abdomen … if anything happens, it starts up my old pain,” said a woman to Breuer in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1893/1955, p. 204). While hysterical conversion was mostly a feminine problem (the book consists of five cases, all women), in the section on “Hysterical Conversion,” Breuer is quick to evoke the figure of a man:

All degrees of affective excitability are to be found between, on the one hand, the ideal (which is rarely met with today) of a man who is absolutely free from ‘nerves’ … and, on the other hand, a ‘nervous’ man who has palpitations and diarrhoea on the smallest provocation. (p. 203)

The scarce, masculine ideal, absolutely free, without “nerves,” is opposed to the nervous woman with the sounding board in her abdomen that can revive any old pain. It is the electrified, nerve-ridden body of the hysterical woman that gives the ideal—the unprovoked—and at the same time undermines it. He is rarely met with today. But yesterday?

Only thirty some odd pages later, Freud takes over, as he would do, this hysteric's imagery as his own, laying down the foundation for the existence of “unconscious ideas” and the “splitting” of the mind on the basis of her words. It is not the masculine that proves universal, but his failed other half, woman, who gives to Breuer and Freud a new model of the relationship between mind and body. Freud writes:

The impressionability of hysterical patients is indeed