Perhaps no other disorder known to man has been more misunderstood than hysteria. Approaches to hysteria have tended to use outmoded models drawn from ancient medicine, relegating it as an exclusively female medical category. Within contemporary medicine approaches to hysteria have been further hindered by polemical arguments that it is exclusively or almost exclusively a female disorder and whether its causes are psychological or physiological, mind or organic. This paper takes a considered approach to hysteria and situates it as a universal condition that integrates both male and female, mind and body, medical and non medical. Its investigation over cross disciplinary territory gives us valuable insight into the causes of hysteria, its impact in a social context, its considerable role in the creative field and its attributes in the production and subjects of art work. Through my own work and the visual artists Annette Messager, Hanne Darboven, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape; the writer Marguerite Duras; and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, I interrogate the modern hysteric’s pain and numbness. Mallarmé believed that the essence of poetry was to use words to filter out our over supply of words by creating silence around them. The paradoxical strategy of expressing silence through the deployment of language, as opposed to silence as absence, highlights the devaluation and credibility of language or more precisely, inauthentic language. My thesis proposes a possible alternative language in art, for art’s dilemmas and strategies as well as to ease the pain and numbness of the modern day hysteric. This non-verbal language is based on a constant flow of energy, an ever-present activity of thinking and feeling, an ongoing process that takes place across time and space whereas the inside/outside, mind/body, either/or, I/other, artist/viewer become inseparable
