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A patient vehemently described his disgust and bodily tightness when viewing The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. He detailed his anger and disgust and said he had walked out on the film. Libido and disgust have an associative link and as Freud pointed out in a letter to Fliess, disgust stands in the way of pleasure. Disgust transforms a body into symptoms. In a similar way, the denial of pleasure—a jouissance linked to disgust—led to my patient's turning away from all pleasure because of repression and obsession about what he called “a chronic limp dick” because of “the horror of the hole.” The patient's desire, however disgusting to him reflects the ego's repressive might and what emerged in the form of his hysterical symptom—impotence.
David-Ménard presents an evolving view of hysteria quite different from Freud's insofar as it is an epistemological break between the psychical and physiological rather than a continuity. The language is the language of jouissance, which in hysteria is elaborated in terms of the desiring body. Hysteria in this sense signifies discourse topologically transported into the organic symptom of disgust. It is this break from biologism into linguistics that establishes one part of the French psychoanalytic movement reflected in the works of Jacques Lacan. David-Ménard presents Lacan's view around jouissance so that psychoanalysis itself is the hystericization of discourse. According to Lacan, through the hysteric, Freud was led to an understanding of the relation of desire to language. That is, the theory of conversion describes the conversion of the discourse of hysteria into the discourse of psychoanalysis. The patient cited earlier was unable, in this paradigm, to construct an erotogenic physical body because the hysterical part experienced the dimension of movement as an