Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder at the Sydney Review of Books:
Almost a century on, and with pithiatism relegated to the nosological archive, the case of Trénel and Lacan’s ‘strange patient’ remains interesting for several reasons. Firstly, their diagnosis is very much situated in a peculiar French psychiatric milieu, where broader questions about the nature of hysteria converge less on sexual repression and free association, and more on the French state and institutionalised psychiatry. (If Lacan would later become famous for his theatricality, it might in fact be traceable to this psychiatric milieu rather than psychoanalysis.) Secondly, the abasiac woman’s status as a fixture of the Parisian psychiatric scene – her constant appeals to doctors and the medical gaze’s equally intense fixation on her – could be seen to express the rhythms of her symptoms. Her relationship to the medical establishment takes the form of a game of proximity, repeated approaches and pullings away. In consulting numerous doctors, she would, as Lacan and Trénel aptly put it, attach the ‘utmost importance to every step she took’. Thirdly, there is a social and historical poignancy to the case. In Lacan’s early work as a psychiatrist, he wondered if symptoms were not themselves expressions of, or responses to, particular historical moments and contradictions. The final form her gait took – walking backwards on tiptoes while rotating regularly – could be read as a silent assessment of the impact the War had had not just on her, but on everyone: it was no longer possible to walk straight-forwardly into the future, now that it was wholly uncertain. One could only fix one’s eyes on the past, advance away from it carefully so as not to disturb it, and introduce one’s own regularities into a landscape bereft of clear, collective markers.
more here.
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