Hysterical Intimacies

An excerpt from my book "Touch Me, I'm Sick"

Hello dear ones,

As I mentioned in Monday’s newsletter, I’m hitting pause on Wounding/Wanting Diaries as I move into doing edits on my book Touch Me, I’m Sick, with my editor!!! So instead, I’ll be sharing pieces of the book on Fridays.

In this excerpt, I talk about excess and ambivalence, 4th-wave feminist art, and what I’ve called “hysterical intimacies.” To get the definition, you’ll have to read through, but the TLDR is that embracing excess and ambivalence enable us to foster forms of intimacy that refuse to see our trauma and sickness as barriers in our relationships.

You’ll be able to read some of the writing here for free, and then some will be behind a paywall (though if you can’t afford the paid sub, please email me at hello@margeauxfeldman.com for access. Money should never be a barrier).

I have a complicated relationship with paywalls, but I’ve chosen to have one here because this writing is truly special to me, took years and years to write (this began as my PhD dissertation) and because I dream of reaching 500 paid subscribers by the end of the year (I’m currently at 210, so this feels like a lofty but hopefully achievable goal).

Thank you for your understanding.

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Prelude

You’re sixteen when you lose your voice. For weeks at a time, you’re unable to speak. The only sound that leaves your mouth is a cough that is unrelenting. You’re haunted by a scene at the lake. You’ve taken a walk with a family friend, a man who could be your surrogate father. Suddenly, he’s pulled you close to him and is trying to kiss you. You resist. And, eventually, you manage to push him away from you. 

You try telling your parents what happened, but no one believes you and this man continues to visit. When he leaves, so too does your voice. But your parents fail to notice this correlation. As you cough and cough and cough, they become concerned. A psychoanalyst is called to come and see you. He’s a family friend. Before he can figure out what’s wrong with you, your voice returns and the cough disappears. 

The lake scene continues to haunt you. A year later, when your symptoms return, and you lose consciousness, the psychoanalyst is called once again. You’ll be diagnosed as a hysteric. He will eventually realize that this scene at the lake was a site of trauma for you (that, in fact, this isn’t the first time this man has attempted to kiss you; trauma upon trauma). But the psychoanalyst can’t wrap his head around your psychosomatic response: You should want this man’s advances. You should be flattered by his attention. After only a few sessions, you tell him that you won’t be returning. You refuse to be gaslit by him any further.

Except this isn’t you. This is Dora’s story. Or, more accurately, Ida Bauer’s story (Dora is the name that Freud gives her). But it could be yours, if you replace a few details.

In your story, the lake becomes a forest. Instead of the old family friend, it’s a seventeen year-old boy. You’re fourteen. You’ve gone to the park by your childhood home, where your old babysitter’s son hangs out with some boys a few years older than you. They get you high. Then one of them takes you into the forest. He’s not interested in kissing you. Instead, he pulls down your pants and pulls you onto his lap. The pain so sharp it takes your breath away. That is not the only thing it takes away from you that night.

Instead of a cough, a rash spreads like wildfire over your legs. The etymology for eczema is something thrown out by heat. Trauma as heat. Eczema as that which is thrown out of the body, externalizing that which is internal. 

Like Dora, you also cannot speak. You don’t yet understand that there’s a word for what happened to you in the woods that night. Four letters haunt you and take up residence in your body. The body, it turns out, always knows before the mind is able to reckon. Even if you did have the language, you know that you cannot tell your father. There will be punishment. He will blame you for what happened and keep you under lock and key. You’re poor, and so there is no psychoanalyst to call. You remain silent. While your body continues to speak for you.

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From Chapter 1: Touch Me, I’m Sick

When I started my PhD, I knew that I wanted to talk about teen girls and their ability to sit with ambivalence and revel in excess. This line of interest led, very quickly, to the hysterics. 

Excess and ambivalence, which were once read as symptoms of hysteria, have been reclaimed by fourth-wave feminists and artists such as Petra Collins. Collins first big claim to fame came when she was asked to design a t-shirt for American Apparel. Entitled “Menstruation Power” Collins’ t-shirt depicts a femme hand with long painted nails gently touching the clitoris, legs spread, pubic hair, menstrual blood, and all. Her t-shirt was called “vile” and “disturbing.” 

Continuing in this tradition, Collins launched an exhibit entitled Discharge in 2014. The exhibit uses a variety of mediums to discuss the sexuality of those assigned female at birth: from neon lights that say, again and again, “I love it, I love it, I love it when you eat it” to sculptures of beautiful panties stained with menstrual blood.

Instead of feeling humiliated or disgusted Collins’ revels in her secretions. And her pleasure is excessive. It’s not just one pair of panties, but many. It is not just one iteration of “I love it when you eat it,” but ten – with “I love it” being repeated twenty-two times.

Collins’ most explicit engagement with the legacy of hysteria came in her 2016 exhibition, 24hr Psycho. Collins displayed ten large-scale portraits of her friends’ faces while crying.

In an interview with Dazed Magazine, Collins explains her motivations for the project: “Women’s emotions are constantly labeled. Any slight deviation from ‘pleasantness,’ and we are labeled as hysterical. When we are angry, sad, depressed, or manic, we are immediately seen as unfeminine, or ugly, or weak.”

Collins’ decision to print these photos on such a large scale makes the images excessive in both form and content – evoking the ways in which the feelings of girls and young women have always been “too much.” In embracing the hysteric, they have refused to be isolated, locked away, and silenced. Instead, they’ve put their trauma on display for all to see. When I see 24hr Psycho in San Francisco, I get my friend to take a photo of me in front of a blue neon light, shaped like a teardrop, enclosing the words 24 HR PSYCHO. I feel at home.

Reading through the pages of Freud’s case study of Dora, you’ll find the word “excessive” and its synonyms come up again and again. There is Dora’s “excessively repulsive fantasy”; her “excessive reinforcement”; the “surplusage of intensity” she experiences; and “excessive overaccentuation.” In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud categorizes hysterics as “excessively civilized persons,” due to the strength of their restrictive forces: shame, morality, and most importantly, disgust. Within the hysteric exists an “exaggerated sexual craving” to borrow Freud’s phrasing. 

Excess isn’t the only symptom of hysteria that’s being reclaimed by feminists. Ambivalence has also found itself at the center of fourth-wave feminist art. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis define ambivalence as the “simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings in relation to a single object, especially the co-existence of love and hate.”