Ladies and Gentlemen! These Women Who Speak Are Still Not “Hysterics” (2024)

Ladies and Gentlemen! These Women Who Speak Are Still Not “Hysterics”

Published online, February 2024.

After October 5, 2017, with the Weinstein affair (indicted in 2018, found guilty in 2020 for rape and assault), the cry launched in the New York Times by two voices of women wounded by masculine and patriarchal domination in the Hollywood film industry broke the silence. Then, other sisters in misfortune made themselves known, and three weeks later 93 women revealed and denounced acts of harassment, assault, or rape implicating this man. One, then two, then ten, and so on.

Since then, each act of speaking that uncovers what remained in the shadows of phallocentric systems seems to follow the same path of revelation, of denunciation of crimes and offenses suffered that judicial and social systems seem to hear for the first time in this manner, with resounding impact. One by one at first, then in series, in sisterhood making the sharing of the symptom the necessary tool of solidarity and rescue.

It was therefore necessary to challenge Society to awaken Justice. Society commented, reacted. Not so much to the horrors reported as to the effects experienced on the occasion of these revelations, as the shock revealing swaths of truth came to strike the immobility of minds and consciences. Justice, for its part, struggles to accomplish its missions, but receives this moral summons inviting it to reconsider its ways.

In 2017, in the echoes of the American MeToo, I wrote the following:

“The incredible opening that has just occurred with the Weinstein affair invites us to think differently about the terms that these sexual assaults reveal. To emphasize, among other things, that this is not only a system of oppression whose mechanisms must, moreover, be dismantled and denounced. It is also, let us not ignore it once again, if possible, about what the sexual is in human life, what it creates as disturbances, many painful manifestations of which persist today as in the past. The sexual causes traumas and often encourages them, because it carries within it this capacity for intrusion. It is neither moral nor political to observe this. Taking it into account can contribute to the work of civilization.

At the origin of psychoanalysis, there is an attempt to take seriously the denunciation, by those called hysterics, of the sexual trauma from which they seemed to suffer in a specific manner through their symptoms. Before discovering that sexual trauma, in assaults, in seduction, became a cultural norm for arranging even the unconscious. And that other women could also speak sexual truths outside the constraints of phallic power.

Since Freud, psychoanalysts have been able to take up this challenge of taking very seriously what speaking means, beyond the impossible speech about impossible things. Speaking is not saying. But one does not go without the other. Those who come to the analyst make this extraordinary effort to attempt to say, with speech, and in doing so to modify the effects, the consequences of their lived experiences. The good ones and the others, the assaults, the harassment, the mistreatment, the rapes.

But times have also changed somewhat since Freud. Those who speak today are not patients nor necessarily victims; they are women who say what we do not like to hear about what we know. Today, that these voices rise is not a symptom, or rather that of the system that prevents speech. These voices are not stigmata, or exaggerated complaints like the encouraged theatricalizations of patients of the era; they are truths. The scars are elsewhere, and all possible denunciations speak of other things than the accumulated suffering. Nothing can make it known; each person manages it, but can draw support from this sudden solidarity.

For finally, speaking opens the way to freeing oneself from the power that assigns, subjugates, through the sexual, and of which speech remains the best means of seizing the opportunity for change. Not without society also being able, alongside this, to modify its ways of inscribing these offenses and crimes in paths that are not only legal, but also cultural and political. Not without the unconscious, for it is by ignoring it that this system of oppression is erected, and it is by refusing it that it is reinforced.

What has opened may perhaps close quickly, through the effect of ambient discourse. No matter. If we do not forget to continue welcoming what is said, others will eventually hear. And who knows, the harmful solidarities of the commissioners of sexuality will diminish somewhat under the pressure of what we are certain of and about which there is no doubt. For what is symptomatic resides indeed in the reactions of some, men and women, taking offense at the falsely discovered violence and demanding the unspoken to crush the facts. Truth may make one cry, but it does not kill; the unspoken does.”

One must often reread oneself. In 2024, it has not closed, evidently! The French MeToo unfolds and brings to our more open ears what must be heard, not merely tolerated or muted (“Yes, yes, that’s enough… we understand”), but repeated, said and said again until it reaches and deforms our symbolic reference points. For yes, this is indeed a fortunate and belated direct attack on that damned symbolic order that must be reformed in light of what re-turns from the shadows, that returns from the psychic, social, and cultural enclaves where these acts of death imprison those who pay with their suffering for the tranquility demanded for the comfort of the ambient fantasy of our supposed fraternity.

It has not closed, it continues, it only keeps going, just as what insists on being said persists so that speech may support the effort to live and the progression of our civilization.

Repeating is not enough; it is necessary.