André Michels – Hysteria and Femininity
 
THE LETTER 13 (Summer 1998) pages 50-68
 
The Freudians appear to have been outstripped by a modernity which they contributed in fashioning, and by a femininity which up till then had not dared to be spoken or to show itself, which besides they were amongst the first to bring to light; they had even given it a prime place in setting it at the centre of their clinical and therapeutic project. They feel out of their depth to see displayed in broad daylight what constituted one of the knots of repression for them and so, some of them at least, question themselves about their responsibility in this ‘return of the repressed’, astonished, sometimes shaken, to meet a bisexuality for which their theoretical struggles must have paved the way, and which corresponds to their most daring hypotheses, on the first street-corner. Could it just be the most recent and the most provocative disguise /unveiling of a never-mastered hysteria? They find themselves, sometimes in spite of themselves, at the place of the elder or ancestor, a position which in a way they have always occupied and even claimed as theirs, powerlessly witnessing effects of their teaching that they had neither foreseen nor wanted, at least in that form. There’s no doubt that a certain modernity is overtly inscribed on the other side of their discourse which nevertheless authorises it implicitly, even to the finest detail.