The Return of Belle Epoch Hysteria

Sigmund Freud’s project of psychological enlightenment seems to have failed. For his struggle to tame the 19th century plague of hysteria could well have come to nothing because it is back with a vengeance. His first major work, published in 1895 together with his teacher Joseph Breuer in Vienna, was titled “Studies on Hysteria”. In it the authors assumed an external trauma being responsible for that neurotic condition. Yet soon afterwards Freud abandoned not only his teacher but also the concept of trauma as the driver of neurosis. In his famous psychoanalytic turn he ceased to believe in the role of traumatic abuse in girls reporting rape by adults.

This was a kind of opportunistic move in his part for it helped deflate political tensions concerned sexual inhibitions exacerbated by the widely covered Hilsner Affair of the Bohemian town Polna in 1899. Soon enough it would be denounced as ritual murder and rape of an underage girl blamed on the innocent Jew Hilsner, exploiting the old anti­semitic trope of blood libel. Throughout his career Freud hypothesized that neurosis had no external cause and in particular hysteria emerged form the sexual drive feeding into imagination. Only at the end of his life with Hitler’s henchmen on his heels, forcing him into his London exile Freud deigned to concede again a role of external trauma in neurosis, at a time when hysteria had gone mainstream under Hitler.

However in the 21st century hysteria has made an unwelcome reappearance. Evidence for this seems to be all over the place. I myself witnessed it recently at the birthday party of my godchild in Hamburg Germany. After dinner the talk not unexpectedly turned to Donald Trump, as a result of which my wife and myself had to endure a full throated cacophony of unanimously derogatory remarks – a ritual which has taken hold all over Germany these days. Yet when we tried to point out the prevailing conformism of Trump­bashing as intellectually sub­standard, hell broke loose. This was the moment when the Millennials at the party, among them my godchild, began crying hysterically and yelling at us. Never before in my life have I felt so intimidated and isolated among what I considered family and friends.

Mirror thinking as the default mode of Greek metaphysics prevailed as the cultural standard well into the 19th century, right before the onset of the gay movement, as M. H. Abrams has shown in his epistemological study “The Mirror and the Lamb” of 1953. He makes it plausible that in Fin­de­Siecle, the romantic climax as it were, mirroring expressionist sex would become all the rage. No doubt, the famous Greek Narcissus falling in love with his own mirror image remains the template for same­sex attraction.

In the 1880s Friedrich Nietzsche explored the limits of Greek mirror metaphysics in his trilogy of “Zarathustra”, “Beyond Good and Evil” and “Genealogy of Morals” all of which introduced the new paradigm of “fiction” or pop fantasy that still rules the Western mind.

In Philip Rieff’s historical periodization antiquity had been governed by “Fate”, the Middle Ages by “Faith” and modernity keeps being animated by “Fiction”. Ushered in by the romantic outreach to infinity this era is marked by the rejection of limits – a motive that is still driving Western consumerism as well as secular expressionism culminating in recent identity politics. Yet its first innocent female version emerged early on in Victorian times and was called hysteria. Obviously today it is safe to assume that sexual repression can certainly not be the reason for the return of hysteria, as it is believed to have been the case in Freud’s time.

Back then as today the greater role in coping with out­of­control­expressionism fell to medical drugs, alcohol and all sort of recreational sedatives. Even psychoanalysis, designed as a coping strategy, was not powerful enough to overcome Freud’s own lifelong addiction to cigars which eventually killed him. Good old religious conscience, fiercely rejected by Freud, would probably have done the job. This delicate stuff was laconically commented on in “Zeno’s Conscience”, the 1923 novel assisted by James Joyce and jotted down by his close friend Italo Svevo in Triest – the city at the time described by some as a splendid sea resort of Vienna brimming with Freudian “oceanic feeling”.

The English translation however rendered Svevo’s text in plainly Protestant terms as “Zeno’s Confessions”, surely unthinkable in the Mediterranean culture where consciousness and conscience are almost one and the same. Now in times of the legalization of cannabis one would be forgiven to suspect liberal censorship at work here, breaking everybody loose of religious categories such as conscience and guilt. Perfectly fitting into this state of denial of transcendence is a new bestselling novel “The Tabacconist”. Its Austrian author Robert Seethaler enthusiastically embraces Freud’s addiction to cigars, telling us that as a regular customer Freud helped a poor Viennese Kiosk owner to survive. All this is set against the dark and sligtly morbid prospect of Hitler’s looming annexation of Austria. Yet again this novel exploits the fashionable trend of plunging into Fin­de­Siecle decadence – a cultural turnaround that is quitting decades of Western anti­smoking rationale under the new gender fancy of giving in to passions.

By getting rid of our conscience we come dependent on external recognition and are craving for proof, the shared weakness of Protestantism and genderism. It is this craving for being taken seriously that is the mark of hysteria and it is certainly a result of two generations raised under the auspices of anti­authoritarian gods.