Organization in the Age
of Hysteria
By
Howard
S. Schwartz
Oakland University
Rochester, Michigan 48309-4401
USA
(248) 370-2122
(248)
684-5345
Schwartz@Oakland. Edu
Journal
of European Psychoanalysis (in press)
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the International
Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations in
Organization in the Age of
Hysteria
Summary
Civilization and organization require interplay between
the spontaneous imaginary and the objective character of the symbolic, but
these two are always in tension. Hysteria represents an attempt to end that
tension through the destruction of the symbolic by the imaginary. A
psychoanalytic theory of hysteria, based on the work of Lacan, Verhaeghe and Chasseguet-Smirgel is developed. The interdependence and
antagonism of the imaginary and the symbolic are explored. Four aspects of this antagonism toward
organization are discussed.
Key words: Hysteria, civilization, dark
ages, imaginary, symbolic
Organization in the Age of
Hysteria
Writing of the difference between classical civilization and the Dark
Ages, historian Thomas Cahill observed:
The
intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had
once been the glory of men like Augustine were unobtainable by readers of the
Dark Ages, whose apprehension of the world was simple and immediate, framed by
myth and magic. A man no longer subordinated one thought to another with
mathematical precision; instead, he apprehended similarities and balances,
types and paradigms, parallels and symbols. It was a world not of thoughts, but
of images… They did not argue, for genuine intellectual disputation was beyond
them. They held up pictures for the mind... By the mid-seventh century, the
visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought.
(Cahill, 1996: 204-5)
These patterns of mental activity are familiar to
psychoanalytic theory. The mental sphere of the “intellectual disciplines of
distinction, definition, and dialectic,” lies within the register Lacan called
“the symbolic.” The symbolic comes to us through internalization of the father,
who represents external reality and the order we have made to deal with that
reality. The sphere of “similarities and balances, types and
paradigms, parallels and symbols,” is characteristic of the imaginary. It has
its roots in the early state of fusion between infant and mother before
reality, represented by the father, intruded upon that intimate connection (Verhaeghe, 1999;
Schwartz, 2003).
Optimally, the imaginary and the symbolic coexist with one
another in a state of fertile tension, a tension whose specific resolutions
give us the capacity to adapt to change through the creation of new form, which
the sociologists call the diachronic aspect of society. Yet every tension may
be seen as a confrontation of two forces, each of which is trying to dominate
the other; and we may identify dynamics in which psychological life is
organized by one or the other of these forces’ attempts at domination. When
psychology is organized by the attempt of the symbolic to control the
imaginary, we get what Freud called the “anal character,” the
obsessive-compulsive personality. This is well known. What is less well known,
and which I wish to assert, is that when the imaginary takes upon itself the
task of dominating the symbolic, we get the mental configuration known as
hysteria.
The question of which of these dynamics predominates is of
critical importance to organization. The obsessive-compulsive dynamic is
consistent with organization, though organization that gives no place to the
imaginary may be lifeless, strained and destructive of the human spirit. The
hysterical dynamic, however, is not consistent with organization at all, and in
fact takes organization as its enemy. If it were to gain too much relative
power and become dominant, that could mean the ascent of barbarism.
The
Age of Hysteria
Not too long ago, received wisdom was that hysteria was
long gone. For example, Wheelis (1966) maintained that the hysteria that
patients presented in Freud’s consulting room, in the form of apparent physical
maladies with no discernible organic cause, had disappeared from the practice
of psychoanalysts. Our times, Wheelis argued, were too psychologically
sophisticated to support the kind of repression characteristic of Freud’s time.
As a result, hysteria, based as it was on repression, has become extinct by
becoming impossible.
An alternative view is that hysteria is not only alive and
well, but positively thriving, and has simply shifted its symptoms. The shift
of symptoms is not some way that hysteria has hidden; it is precisely part of
hysteria, and has been since it was given its name and thought to be the result
of a moving womb.
This view is suggested, for example, by the work of
Showalter (1997), who discusses the rise of widespread social movements that
have certain sorts of fantasies at their core and irrationality in the
mechanism of their promulgation. The narratives Showalter provides of these
movements, which she calls “hystories,” supports the view, though she does not
fully draw this consequence, that
hysteria is not a “disease” that exists entirely within the person, as for
example cancer does, but is a form of relationship between the hysteric and the
other.
In this sense, hysteria may be seen as a kind of collusion
between the hysteric, usually a woman[1],
and a person functioning as a doctor, or a therapist, or an expert of some
sort, who is usually a man. The hysteric engages in a performance that is
designed to bring a sympathetic response from those around her. On the basis of
this performance, the expert diagnoses the malady of the hysteric in terms that
reflect social concerns. These terms change over time and circumstance, and
hence the performance that will create the effect changes; it is geared toward
engendering that response. That is one reason that the “symptoms” of hysteria
change; one principle of motion of the hysteric’s womb.
Showalter finds hysteria in a wide range of contemporary
social phenomenal. Some of these, such as chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf War
syndrome, are close to the classic picture. Others, including the terrible fear
about sexual abuse of children in day care centers and alien abduction, range
farther afield. Still, disparate as they appear,
these phenomena have a number of things in common.
For one thing, the collusive relationship between the
hysteric and the expert never results in “cure” of the hysteric. The symptoms
always remain, though they may change a bit, and are always seen as, in some
sense, mysterious. The function of the expert, then, properly speaking, is not
to cure the hysteric, but to give a name to her condition. In this way, he
legitimates it and makes it, in some sense, real. As such, he is not really an
independent expert at all, but rather a part of the hysterical drama. I will
call him a co-hysteric and the group consisting of the hysterics and the
co-hysterics I will call the “hysterical group.”
Second, these are very noisy affairs. There is no
suffering in silence among these folks. Rather, such suffering is extremely
assertive, constituting the basis of a demand that attention be paid to it.
Third, there is nothing outside of these dramas. They are
taken by the hysterics to be the whole world, reducing everything else to
triviality. The demand they make is, therefore, categorical and absolute, and
is asserted without recognition of feasibility or circumstances or any other
limitation that reality might impose.
Fourth, on the basis of this demand, a confrontation
always takes place between established forms of understanding and the
hysterical group, which claims special knowledge that established authority
refuses to credit. In every case, the knowledge of the special group is
legitimated on the grounds that the hysterics just know what they know. The
claimants, that is to say, demand to be taken seriously in the face of a
skepticism that asserts the accepted contemporary criteria of what counts as
evidence. They feel abused, outraged, and personally attacked when they are
not. Indeed, the institutionalized forms of understanding are seen as partly
causing their suffering. The co-hysterics, of course, do take them seriously,
which makes them part of the same confrontation.
Finally, the narratives of the hysteric, as adumbrated by
the co-hysterics, always involve imagery of a certain kind of penetration. Specifically,
we find the narrative of a penetration by an alien substance that is damaging
to the hysteric or someone with whom she identifies. This penetration may come
in a variety of forms; from children being raped, to penetration by a
mysterious organism, to being sexually probed by alien beings. However, it is
always present and almost always has an explicitly sexual referent, which is
experienced with disgust.
We may recall that this was so right from the beginning of
the psychoanalytic study of hysteria, when Freud found, or perhaps as a
co-hysteric placed, the origin of the symptoms of his patients in sexual
molestation by the father.
The one case that may be thought to be at odds here is the
hystory of abduction by alien beings from outer space, who are thought to
represent a superior form of life. There is penetration in this hystory through
the defining narrative of being probed by these aliens, apparently for
scientific reasons. This probing is experienced as sexual, but it is embraced
and valued, and not seen as molestation. The reason for this difference is that
these aliens are, after all, alien and superior. Penetration by them is not
seen as debasing the hysteric but as raising her up. This is sex that she will
allow, largely because it stands in sharp opposition to, and superiority to,
what she can get from the local guys.
Yet rich as her descriptive material is, Showalter takes
no clear stand on the causes of hysteria, referring to a variety of theories
that posit, among other things, emotional distress, women’s powerlessness, the
authentic voice of silenced women, and so on. In the end, her argument borrows
from the theory of hysteria as a disease, and the hysteric as a sufferer whose
condition should elicit sympathy. In this way, she passes over the deeper
realization, implicit in her own material, that hysteria is not an underlying
condition to which attention must be paid, but rather a drama of an underlying
condition engaged in for the purpose of garnering attention. To explore the
question of where the need for that attention comes from, and the reason why it
leads to the dramatics, we need to go beyond Showalter. Fortunately, we are
able to do that.
Verhaeghe’s Theory of Hysteria
Current understanding of hysteria owes much to the work of
the Jacques Lacan, whose impenetrability bids fair to be considered an
hysterical manifestation in its own right. We are fortunate to have the work of
a number of his students who have cast his thought in constructive and creative
ways, and whose work stands on its own merits. In this connection, I will rely
on the work of Paul Verhaeghe (1999).
For Verhaeghe, whose debt to Lacan I will take for granted
and will not explore, what is characteristic of the hysteric is a discourse, a
form of relatedness to the analyst. At its root, the condition of the hysteric
arises from the fact that there is no signifier for the woman. This leaves her
as a split subject, stuck in the contradiction between being herself and
knowing herself, her life therefore bereft of stable meaning. She turns to the
therapist, a term we can generalize to refer to the masculine expert, with the
demand that he provide her with meaning, putting him in the position of the
“one who is supposed to know.” He takes up this challenge and offers her a
discourse within which she is supposed to be able to find herself. But all he
has offered her is language and it therefore, as she makes manifest, always
misses the point. The problem is that his language is always his language. It
is always masculine, and with regard to her it never suffices. There is always
something left over, which Lacan calls object a, which is part of “the real,” and which represents her
spontaneity. So his discourse always fails, and she asserts her demand again.
What we can see from this is why the therapist always
fails, and why he is not really functioning as a therapist or expert at all.
The female subject always remains out of his reach, but by staying out of his
reach, yet bringing him to function in the manner of “he who is supposed to
know,” she comes to be dominant in the relationship. The confrontation between
the hysterical group, of which he is a part, and the world of established
meaning is therefore grounded in the spontaneity of the hysteric, which it can
never capture. In a sense, it is a battle for control over who will establish
the terms of her meaning, and of how they will be established. Hers is a bid to
establish her meaning through this confrontation, defined only by her
identification with object a, which the language necessarily misses.
What we see here is a refusal of the Oedipus complex, and
of the father who represents the common meaning through which the world is
organized, but which always leaves her unique and ineffable self out of its
account. Hysteria is her assertion of her
unique self as against the common meaning that the father represents.
But this analysis leads to a further question. Hysteria, I
have said, is a conflict between one’s spontaneity and the shared meaning that
makes up the world. But there is the basis for such a conflict in every human
being. Why does hysteria seem to be a feminine preserve? How does sex come into
this? For Lacan/Verhaeghe, this sexual differentiation arises from the fact
that there is no signifier for the woman. But why not? What is there about being a woman that resists
signification?
On one level, the idea is absurd. Obviously, there is a
signifier for the woman. It is “the woman.” How is that not a signifier? But,
of course, that is not what Lacan/Verhaeghe have in mind. What they surely mean
is that “the woman” is a term that stands for the woman, but it does not
signify. It gives meaning to no course of action. It is like a chain of
signifiers with only a single link. It goes nowhere.
Now, to be sure, there are plenty of meanings that have
been taken to follow from the idea of being a woman. One is a mother, a wife,
and so on. The problem with these is that they provide a meaning for the woman
only in the context of a relationship with a man, whose meaning has been
antecedently, and presumably independently, established. Taken as referring to
an independent self, the term “the woman” has no meaning. In other terms that
Lacan/Verhaeghe would find useful, there is no desire specific to the idea of
the woman that would structure a woman’s life. The structure of her life
requires the desire of a man. That could drive anyone nuts. Hysteria is just
what we call that particular brand of madness.
But why does “the woman” have no meaning, while “the man”
does? Why is there no desire specific to the woman, while there is specific to
the man? To answer this question, I will turn away from Verhaeghe/Lacan for a
while and toward another French psychoanalyst, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
(1986)
For Chasseguet-Smirgel, the
central feature of sex differences arises from different relationships to the
maternal imago. The maternal imago, the primordial image of mother that we all
carry, is the central figure in the psychic life of the child. As we imagine
her, she is perfect and will make our own lives perfect. Her love is all we can
ever need, and is indeed the end of need. From this arises the fact that her
image is the most powerful in the psyche. What is more, her image is not only a
powerful image, it is an image of power. Her very presence will make life
perfect for us. Her power, and this is what marks feminine power off from
masculine power, inheres in her simply being who she is. She does not have to
do anything, but only to be. She is Aristotle’s unmoved mover.
To again be merged with her is the ultimate object of all
of our desire. By the same token, though, it is also the end of our separate
existence. Yet since her power simply consists in her presence, the withdrawal
of that presence means absolute devastation. Therefore, she is the object of
our love, but for the same reason she is also an object of terror.
The boy and the girl relate to the primordial mother in
different ways, though of course the difference is not absolute. The little
girl loves the mother, just as the boy does, but she can imagine becoming a
mother. The boy cannot do this; at least he cannot do it as easily. So the girl
can identify with the mother and her power in a way that the boy cannot.
Therefore, she does not need to fear the power of the mother to the same
extent. The mother’s power, in the girl’s imagination, and of course this is
all taking place within her imagination, is the girl’s power.
The boy is in a much more difficult position. He cannot
identify with the mother’s power, at least to the same extent, but needs it.
Yet his very neediness makes him absolutely vulnerable to the loss of that
love. His attitude toward the mother, and therefore his attitude toward women,
is marked by total ambivalence.
This ambivalence may be resolved in a number of ways. In
Western culture, the traditional way is through the formation of an agenda, which
will on the one hand offer fusion with the mother, but on the other postpone
and detoxify that fusion through the project of doing something that will earn
it on grounds that maintain the man’s existence. He will make himself worthy of
her love. He will do something she desires, and this will provide a reason for
her to keep him around, to grant him the ground on which he can comprehend and
maintain his own existence.
But what does she desire that will lead her to grant the
ground of his independent existence? What, Freud famously asked, does woman
want?
This is the question that breaks the matter wide open. It
is the key to answering the question of why there is no signifier for “the
woman,” while there is for “the man.”
The answer is that woman wants herself, or rather, she
wants to be the self that she is in her fantasy. What else could she want? She
is perfect in every way. Her very existence is perfection. She cannot want
anything beyond herself because she herself is the very satisfaction of desire. She is the very meaning of the satisfaction
of desire. She cannot have desire because, as Lacan says, desire requires lack;
and she has no lack.
The man has plenty of lack. The desire to satisfy this
lack provides the meaning for his agenda. What he lacks is her. She cannot have
desire, but for that reason she can be the cause of desire. She wants herself;
he will give her herself. She is omnipotent; he will create the conditions in
which her omnipotence can be realized.
These conditions are what we call home, and it will be the place where
their fusion is realized. They will have children.
And all of this will take place within a symbolic
framework appropriate to its time. The man will attempt to realize it within
the world as it is, as he understands it through language as it is.
But he will always fail. The fantasy of fusion will always
elude him. Object a will always be left over. Yet there is nothing for
it but for him to try again. In the renewed hope of fusion, he will create new
possibilities for thought and for action. In this way he will create the world
as it becomes. It is this created world,
insofar as she buys into it and accepts the terms he has created, or even as he
imagines that she does, within which he grounds the basis of an independent
existence.
Out of this grows the chain of signifiers, with her as
their end. And the meaning that these signifiers have arises from their
position within the chain, the chain which leads from him-without-her to
him-with-her. That is why there is a signifier for “the man.” It means that a
man can find himself within the chain of signifiers. And it is why there is no
signifier for “the woman.” She cannot find herself within a chain of signifiers
because a chain of signifiers leads to her, and she is already there.
Now what we can see from this is that the chain of
signifiers, in its inevitable failure to reach her, will always be inferior to
her. But she needs signifiers because without signifiers there can be no
desire, and without desire there can be no directed action, there can be no
structure for one’s life. One can only be overtaken by the upwelling of feeling
and self-referential imagery that constitutes the psychotic dissolution of the
self. Quite a problem. What will she do?
Well, traditionally, she has done the only thing she could
do. If there cannot be female desire, but only male, she will find her place
within male desire. She will define herself in the terms he has created to make
sense of his own life. She will be a wife. And in this way, she will bring into
herself his desire for fusion with her. She will see herself becoming the
mother of his children.
More recently, she has fit herself into social structures,
such as organizations of various sorts, created through male desire and,
ultimately, given meaning by it. We can foresee that her place within these
structures will always be occasioned by a certain strain, perhaps even an
anomaly. This is a matter to which we will return.
Meanwhile, we must pause here to reflect upon how
marvelously the traditional arrangement fits things together. Neither man nor
woman, though for different reasons, has meaning without each other. Yet these
two hopeless contraptions, taken together, provide meaning for each other and
through that have created the world in which we all live. Without that, there
would be nothing; take it away and nothing will remain. It is almost as if men
and women, like penis and vagina, were made for each other.
She was full and lacked nothing. But lacking nothing, she
was nothing. Being full, she was empty. He was nothing and needed her fullness
to have the idea of becoming something. His attempts to do so created
everything, for the purpose of filling her, as they both needed her to be. The
world created in this way was and will remain imperfect; but world it is, and
is there for all of us to enjoy.
We have not yet gotten to the discourse of the hysteric.
We will get there, but first we must go farther in our reflections on this
arrangement.
The woman’s desire for the man turns out to be her desire
for herself, as mediated by the man. It is based on her recognition of the
emptiness implied in her fullness. In the absence of an agenda, she cannot
simply be herself because that would simply be psychotic explosion. Yet she
cannot provide signification for herself because the entire signification that
is available takes her as its purpose. It is all directed toward her pursuit
and always contains the limitations of the man’s lack. Yet how can she be
limited at all, since the whole premise of her need is her fullness?
She can resolve this dilemma by using her power as object
of desire to influence the man. He may have an answer to who she is, but for
the reasons we have just seen, this can never be a really good answer. His
signifiers, after all, can only be his signifiers. They can never suffice to
tell her who she is, since they will never fit. There will always be something
left over, which is precisely her, or at least her as they both fantasize her
to be -- the object of desire in the first place. He must therefore renew his
pursuit of her, refashioning its terms in the hope of success, and each time
trying to refashion those terms to better represent her. In this way, she gains
meaning by being the object of his attempt to make meaning, ever renewed
through the relationship of this pair and the tension between them. End that
tension and they both disappear.
So it is that we understand what the tension is all about.
It is a contestation about the source of meaning. His meaning is the masculine
meaning of the symbolic, which ultimately gains its meaning from its attempt to
encompass her perfection, which it can never accomplish. Her meaning is derived
from her identification with the primordial mother, which validates and even
deifies the spontaneity of her imaginary, but which goes nowhere without the
symbolic that only he can provide. It is
through the conflict of this tension that the imaginary and the symbolic
interpenetrate each other and create the relationship without which both of them
are nothing.
And so the tension is and has to be absolute. There is, as
Lacan again puts it, no such thing as sexual rapport. And it’s a good thing,
too. There can, however, be rapport between human beings, who understand the
meaning of this tension and recognize their individual dependence on this
tension and therefore their mutual dependence on each other. This does not make
the tension go away; it simply has its function understood. In effect, what has
developed is a relationship between split subjects who know themselves to be
split subjects, a form of relationship that we may call existential.
But where is the hysteric in all of this? What I have
described here is the tension between the sexes. Hysteria may fit into that,
but it is not the whole thing. Where do we draw the line between the hysteric
and the feminine?
I think we draw it at the point where the meaning of the
tension is not yet comprehended, where the dynamic is not yet seen as the
eternal game that men and women play with each other, but is seen as being
one-sided, as an invasion of the perfect female by the inferior male. We may
therefore recognize it a developmental stage, occurring at the point where
sexuality is gaining its ascendancy in the female, but where the place of
sexuality in adult relationships is not yet understood. It is therefore the
characteristic dynamic of the teenaged girl, which we knew all along.[2]
Now if the place of sexuality within human relationships
is not understood, its meaning must be represented with imagery that gains its
power from the girl’s specific self-reference, both as a sexual being and as a
plenum. Inevitably, then, the imagery will be that of penetration or invasion,
and specifically sexual penetration by an alien entity that seeks to corrupt and
dominate the girl’s perfection and self-sufficiency. Her attitude toward it
will be disgust and the rage to expel it. There we have hysteria[3].
Hysteria therefore represents, on one or another level of
abstraction, the attempt to expel the masculine, with all of its desire and all
of the symbolic order that it has given rise to, and its place within the
relationship between men and women. Within the dynamic of hysteria, the
masculine is experienced as a threat to her perfection and self-sufficiency,
indeed to her very existence, by an inferior agency, which seeks to limit her
through terms that do not represent her. The attempt to expel, therefore, comes
with a feeling of righteousness and the assertion of the absolute
self-sufficiency of her spontaneity -- in other words, of her imaginary. But
consider that the whole framework of the symbolic, of shared meaning, is a
product and representation of that masculinity and you can see that we have
gotten to what we were trying to show. Hysteria is the motivating force through
which the imaginary attempts to subordinate and even destroy the symbolic.
This analysis helps to explain one of the more peculiar,
but characteristic, features of the hysteric. It enables us to answer the
question of whether the hysteric is lying when she makes charges that are
patently untrue. The answer is that she is not lying. She is telling the truth
as she sees it, but her idea of the truth is not the one that is characteristic
of the symbolic. Truth is not, as it is in the symbolic, a correspondence
between a statement and an objective fact. Her whole project, after all, is to
deny and undermine the symbolic, and therefore to deny the validity of that
form of truth.
Her criterion for truth is essentially aesthetic. For her,
truth means the vividness of the imagery she is using to represent her
experience of invasion. This imagery, at the time, is all she is about. There
is nothing outside of it. If she says, for example, and sincerely believes,
that she was raped by someone, that means that the image of that rape
represents, for her, at that time, the experience of being penetrated that is
the center of her psychic life[4].
That is why another image could serve just as well, in another time, and one
should not be surprised to find movement here, for precisely the same reasons
that the ancients thought that hysteria represented the movement of the womb.
We shall now turn to consider the way hysteria opposes
organization, but before we do that, there is one irony that needs to be
mentioned. The hysteric, as we have seen, makes a life of expelling the
symbolic, with its inevitably masculine root. But, in truth, she is as much in
thrall to the masculine as is any housewife, since the structure of her life is
the same as the structure of the male discourse she is trying to expel; it is
only its negation. She needs that masculine discourse if her rejection of it is
to give her life any structure at all. The difference between her and the
housewife is not that she is free of men, but only that she is related to them
in a different way: not collaboratively, but parasitically.
Hysteria
and Organization
To understand the threat that hysteria poses for
organization, we must recognize that organizational structure is part of the
symbolic, the register of shared meaning. The root of its meaning is derived
from objective self-consciousness (Schwartz, 2003), through which one comes to
be able to see oneself from outside oneself, a way that represents reality, as
the members of one’s society define it. This form of self-consciousness, which
begins when one comes to see oneself from the point of view of the father, is
not objective in the sense that one sees oneself as one really is, but in the
sense that one sees oneself as an object, as others would see you who have no
subjective interest in you. Its terms represent the social conventions that
have been negotiated as a basis of exchange. It is a way for members of the
society to pursue their interests in a way that others can understand and which
can serve as a pattern of exchange. When a node of this pattern of exchange
acquires a certain stability, and when individuals come to rely on it and
depend on it, and when they give it an identity and take steps to preserve it,
it can be said to be an organization, and the agreed upon patterns can be said
to be the organization’s structure.
Organizational structure may be considered the synchronic
aspect of organization – the specification at any given time of what behavior
is expected of participants as part of their jobs and of how these individual
behaviors coordinate with each other. The fact that these structural elements
are within the symbolic means that we can step outside of them and consider
their advantages and disadvantages with some objectivity. In and of themselves,
they are not important to us. This makes it possible to design an organization
so that it can attain a goal in the most efficient way. This is, of course the
great advantage of the bureaucratic form of organization, an advantage that
carries forward into their more organic successors -- a transformation that can
be thought of as representing only the rapidity with which bureaucratic design
is reformulated.
This is not to say that the imaginary has no place in
organization. On the contrary, it represents the principle according to which
organizations move through time, both on the level of individual desire and on
the collective level of refining organizational structure to pursue a
collective goal. In either case, it contains the ego ideal, the motivational
substrate that makes organizational behavior meaningful to participants and
breathes life into what would otherwise be ritualized behavior. But an
organization from which the imaginary excluded the symbolic is impossible. It
can exist, so to speak, only in the imaginary, only as a fantasy. The attempt
to get there would have to mean destroying organization insofar as it exists,
and can possibly exist. Ultimately, that is the danger that hysteria poses to
organization.
The antagonism between hysteria and organization plays out
through four phases, each of them representing the increased power and danger
of hysteria. I will refer to these individual hysteria, organized
hysteria, cooptational hysteria, and
internalized hysteria. In what follows, I will discuss each of them.
Individual
hysteria
As was intimated before, what we can see from this is that
the organization must be the site of a permanent confrontation between its
behavioral expectations and the hysteric’s experience of herself. She will always
experience these demands as other and as alien, having no way to align herself
with them in pursuit of an ego ideal. She will experience the organization as
constraining her in an intolerable, stupid, and even destructive way. Her
allegiance will be limited and she is liable to be seen by others as having a
permanent chip on her shoulder, or perhaps to be a bit screwy. She will see
making personal progress within the organization as a way of removing
encumbrances to her being herself. Her
orientation to the organization will be marked by an attempt to personalize her
relationships with powerful figures, especially men, in this way bringing the
organization’s symbolic under her dominion and have it revolve around her[5]
Of particular note with regard to the hysteric’s reaction
to the organization are those confrontations that come under the form of
charges of “sexual harassment.” In saying this, I am referring to “hostile
climate” sexual harassment and mean to clearly exempt the sort of sexual harassment
that is generally called “quid pro quo.” The latter represents the demand for
sexual favors under color of authority, and should be seen as a form of
extortion.
The charge of “hostile climate” sexual harassment is
something else entirely. The American Bar Association defines it this way:
This
occurs when an employee is subjected to comments of a sexual nature, offensive
sexual materials, or unwelcome physical contact as a regular part of the work
environment. Generally speaking, a single isolated incident will not be
considered hostile environment harassment unless it is extremely outrageous and
egregious conduct. The courts look to see whether the conduct is both serious
and frequent. http://www.abanet.org/publiced/practical/sexualharassment_hostileenvironment.html
But what the courts will establish as a valid claim is not
entirely predictable and is expensive to find out. As a result, as well as for
reasons arising from the shared hysteria, organizations tend to follow very
conservative approaches in addressing claims of sexual harassment, which has
the effect that often simply the claim of having been sexually harassed invokes
the presumption of guilt.
This, obviously, is a situation tailor-made for the
hysteric, whom we have defined through the fantasy of having been penetrated by
masculine meaning, which is to say by the symbolic. This may easily lead to the
experience of violation even where it has not occurred, either through
interpreting innocent or consensual behavior as invasive, or through the
fantasy that such behavior has occurred. These seem to often mark experiences
with figures of authority, which may led us to the hypothesis that it is the
penetration by authority itself, as an agency of the symbolic, that is often
experienced as a sexual violation. The destructive consequences that can follow
from this, in the form of the damage authority itself suffers, and in the
wreckage of working relationships that often occurs, are clear enough.
Organized
hysteria
The second form of the conflict between hysteria and
organization develops when hysteria becomes organized.
The idea of organized hysteria may appear to pose a
problem for us. Organization must depend on shared meaning. Yet if hysteria is
a revolt against shared meaning, how can it be organized?
Hysteria can be organized through shared imagery. It
represents shared subjectivity, rather than shared objectivity, as organization
based on the symbolic represents. It rests on identification and analogy,
rather than a common framework of exchange.
Hysteria consists in the experience of being penetrated by
masculine meaning, and the attempt to expel it, undermine it, and destroy it.
But how that meaning is defined and experienced is susceptible to infinite
representation. When hysterics share a representation of that penetration, that
forms the beginning of a form of organization. Such organizations proceed
through the promulgation and elaboration of the imagery and the social appeal
of which it forms the base. They tend toward the informal, which is not
surprising given the hysteric’s general antipathy toward organizational
structure, but they can be quite extensive nonetheless. For example, with
regard to the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome hystory:
Patient
support groups started up in the
But this is only half the matter. The other half proceeds
through activities aimed at the expulsion and undermining of masculine meaning.
The destructive potential of organized hysteria arises from its power to gain
the emotional energy of large numbers and in the belief they hold in common
that they are in hostile combat with standard frameworks of meaning, which often
have organized forms that are seen as aiding, if not identical with, the
penetrating force.
Thus:
Hillary
Johnson [author of Osler’s Web: Inside
the Labyryinth of the Chrnic
Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic] charges that powerful members of the scientific
establishment and Centers for Disease
Control are biased against patient accounts or have their own turf to protect.
She argues that medical and scientific explanation is a fetishized worship of
method and laboratory evidence. When doctors at the Mayo Clinic suggested that
CFS could be caused by stress reactions or emotional problems, Marc Iverson, a
young banker with severe CFS symptoms, who had `spent thousands of dollars at
the clinic, was indignant: “There can’t be anything in the world they don’t understand
– because the understand everything! They read their printouts, but they never
really to what you’re saying. It’s the worst of modern medicine.” (Showalter:
125-6)
And:
…chronic
fatigue hystories have always staged a conflict between patient and doctor,
with the skeptical doctor as the enemy of the helpless patient…. Every year patients
and advocates intensify their attacks on the medical establishment, and find
new links in their theories of conspiracy… In August 1996, the conflict came to
a head with an uproar over a televised confrontation on the BBC between ME
(i.e. CFS) and a skeptical physician. On “The Rantzen Report,” host Esther
Rantzen, the mother of an eighteen year-old-daughter with ME, staged a shouting
match between patients and Dr. Thomas Stuttaford, a former Tory member of
parliament and Times medical
columnist, who represented 75 percent of the British physicians who view ME as
a psychological problem. Audience members, some in wheelchairs, but most
looking surprisingly fit, hissed and booed when Stuttaford called ME a form of
depression. “I was set up, no doubt about that,” he later told reporters.
“There I was in my red socks and dark blue suit, typifying the English Trad. I
was like Daniel walking into the lion’s den…” (Showalter: 128)
In all this, one must bear in mind that there is no
reliable objective evidence that there is such a thing as Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome:
In a
1993 study of 13,500 people who had been diagnosed with CFS… Rumi K. Price and Carol S. North of Washington University
School of Medicine fou8nd only one person who met the CDC’s criteria. Medical
problems, psychiatric complications, or side effects of medication could have
accounted for the others. (Showalter: 124)
Cooptational Hysteria
As I have said, because of the
antipathy that the hysteric feels toward organizational structure, organized
hysteria tends to be rather informal. It eschews division of labor, hierarchy,
and so on. The result is that, while it may be quite powerful, its power is
limited to what can be accomplished through the direct application of mobilized
emotion, as well as subjected to the instability and lack of focus that always
attends emotional force.
A great advance in the potential
power of hysteria is accomplished when an hysterical movement gains a formal
structure, not by developing one through its own processes, but by gaining
control over an existing organization. I call this cooptational hysteria.
A fine example of cooptational
hysteria arose recently at
One is what I would
call the … high-powered job hypothesis.
The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high
end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of
discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks
in exactly the order that I just described.
His second hypothesis was the one
that got him into trouble. He said:
It does appear that on many, many different human
attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical
ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever
the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the
standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population…. If one
supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at
a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are
two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about
somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about
people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the
one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard
deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool
substantially out.
Now, Summers moved immediately to
distance his feelings about the data from the data themselves. He called it
an “unfortunate truth” and said “I would
far prefer to believe something else.” And he also said “I would like nothing better than to be
proved wrong...” But, as we shall see, these demurrals had no effect on
mitigating the storm that followed.
In assessing that storm, one
should bear in mind that when he was speaking about the greater variability
found among males, Sommers was saying something that has
been known since Charles Darwin made the observation in The Descent of Man (Kleinfeld, 2005). It is one of the best established finding
in all of behavioral science (Browne, 2002).
It is against the background of this rock-solid finding that the furor
against Summers needs to be understood. The point I wish to make is that, from
the outset, it was pure organized hysteria.
Let us begin at the beginning,
which was the moment that an MIT biologist named Nancy Hopkins walked out of
the talk. This is from a January 19 account in the Washington Post (Dobbs,
2005):
"I felt I was going to be sick," said Nancy
Hopkins, a biology professor at
the
speech Friday at a session on the progress of women in
academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research in
"My heart was pounding and my breath was
shallow," she said. "I was
extremely upset."
“When he started talking about
innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe
because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,”
And again that if she had not left
the room, she would have “"either blacked out or thrown up" (Bombadieri, 2005a)
The classic hysterical character
of
Is this the fruit of
feminism? A woman at the peak of the academic pyramid
becomes theatrically flurried by an unwelcome idea and, like a
Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, suffers the vapors and collapses
on the
drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines until revived by smelling
salts
and the offending brute's
contrition?
But aside from the dramatics,
there were other signs of hysteria that will be familiar to us. Most notably is
that
On the next day, headlines
reflected the outrage over his remarks felt by many, first among the attendees,
second among the female faculty members at prestigious universities, and third,
all over the country, if not all over the world. In general, the criticism
focused, as had
For example:
A leading female astrophysicist at Yale, Meg Urry, says she and her female
colleagues in science "have talked of little else for
days." In the Bay
Area, members of the
Science "discussed this around the table" at
their latest meeting, says
their chapter secretary, Paula Shadle.
"The reaction was frustration, disappointment, and no
surprise," said
Shadle, a quality assurance consultant
to the pharmaceutical industry who
has a doctorate in biochemistry from UC San Diego.
"One person said, 'Maybe
this attitude explains why Harvard hasn't been able to
attract women.' " (Davidson,
2005)
In all this, we can see a second
index of hysteria. The symbolic has been brushed aside, its existence not
recognized. Summers’ statements are not acknowledged to have any significance
as objective propositions, but only as conveying his feelings, which represent
the only reality that needs to be taken into consideration. And the remedy for
the low representation of women is also said to be in the realm of feeling.
Thus, an essay critical of Summers, written by the presidents of MIT, Stanford,
and Princeton, said “''Until women can feel as much at home in math, science,
and engineering as men, our nation will be considerably less than the sum of its
parts… ''low expectations of women can be as destructive as overt
discrimination." (Bombardieri, 2005b)
Interestingly, Summers remarks
appeared to be only the latest in a string of offenses, which had caused his
enemies to feel aggrieved. What were these offenses? In a report on a faculty
meeting called to hold Summers to account:
Most speakers took aim at Dr. Summers for what they
described as an
autocratic management style that has stifled the open
debate that is at the
core of the university's values. (Rimer,
2005)
But an article by law professor
Daniel J. Meltzer (2005) offers some insight into what this is about:
Faculty complain that Summers is
intimidating, and there is no doubt that he can be. Complaints that he has
silenced people, however, need to be rounded out. He seems not yet to have
fully found his way in making the transition from faculty member to President,
and, alas, the two are not the same; criticism from the President feels
different than criticism from a colleague. But that is different from refusing
to tolerate dissent. I’ve crossed swords with him in more than one setting, and
while being criticized directly and forcefully by the President can be
unnerving, especially in the company of others, one can criticize him back just
as directly. That, indeed, is one of his great virtues; he seems to care not
about the fact that someone is expressing disagreement but instead about
whether the disagreement is persuasive. …So while undeniably there is room for
improvement in his leadership style, the cries of silencing seem somewhat
misleading.
Here again, Summers’ crime was to
speak from within the symbolic, with the offense being felt within the
imaginary. Having felt penetrated, it moved toward his expulsion. As I write,
it has largely succeeded. Summers has kept his position, but the symbolic has
not.
From the outset, Summers’ knew
exactly how to grovel:
I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize
for not having weighed them more carefully… I was wrong to have spoken in a way
that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls
and women. (Summers, 2005)
But, by itself, groveling would
not do. Summers appointed two committees, packed with his critics, to look into
rectifying the situation at Harvard. He accepted their recommendations. Among
the concrete results were that Harvard set aside $50 million to address the
“gender imbalance,” despite the fact that Harvard had already been doing as
much as any university to deal with that already, and there was precious little
yet to do (MacDonald, 2005) But they had to do something, and what they did was
to enshrine the hysterical criticism within the very structure of the
university.
This
took the form of implementing some of the proposals of the task forces he
created. Among them was the establishment along with a number of new deanships,
of a new Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity. This new
Vice Provost would participate in all faculty appointment and tenure decisions,
and would have the responsibility of improving the climate for women and
minorities. Among other ways to improve the climate, she would “create a
training program to teach professors involved in faculty searches about
research indicating that even well-meaning people can harbor hidden biases
against women and minorities.” (Bombardieri, 2005c)
So
what do we have here?
One
does not want to raise alarms without certainty, and pointing to the ways in
which institutional arrangements will play out in the future can never be
assured of anything like more than mild probability. Yet it is difficult to see
these organizational developments as anything but the institutionalization of a
system of commissars who would have control over the hiring and promotion of
faculty, and therefore over the main process through which the university
defines itself and specifies appropriate behavior. The impetus behind this
transformation was hysteric, and therefore the source of its legitimacy lies in
hysteria. Its mission would be to push this hysteria forward. What is more, it
represents the authority to overrule policy on the basis of feelings that are
presumed to underlie what would otherwise be, at least ideally, rational
deliberation. Control over $50 million, by itself, represents a base of power
with which to move the institution as one likes.
One
could go on, but the point of the matter is fairly simple. Going beyond the
limited capacity to organize present in hysteria itself, hysteria has gained
great influence in an already existing powerful institution that has the full
panoply of institutional arrangements necessary to get work done efficiently
and reliably and to plan for the future.
Hysteria
has coopted
Internalized
hysteria: Hysteria as a philosophy of management
The final phase of the conflict between hysteria and
organization comes when hysteria is adopted as a philosophy of management. I
call this internalized hysteria[6].
Internalized hysteria may begin with a campaign against
the organization waged by those who see its processes as penetrating them, or
to use the term commonly employed, oppressing them. Often it is built, as
campaigns of the imaginary often are, by anecdotes and stories that relate
instances in which the oppressed individuals or groups felt violated. Those who
identify with them amplify the force developed here. As of yet, this is nothing
but organized hysteria taking place in an organizational context. It becomes
internalized hysteria when the management of the organization identifies with
them and becomes a part of the hysterical group.
However, internalized hysteria can turn against the
organization in an even more basic way, attacking it, not for oppressing this
or that sub group within the organization, but for oppressing those who belong
to the group consisting of the employees of the organization. When that
happens, it can take the organization’s structure, the organizational
necessities that the work requires and imposes, as oppressive, as penetrating
the subjectivity. Through this, the organization’s energy can be mobilized
toward the end of expelling the system’s impositions. When that happens, an
organization’s processes are redirected toward the organization’s own
destruction, which is to say the destruction of the organization in its aspect
of shared meaning developed through the process of exchange.
I believe that this redirection
encapsulates the purpose of much of what is called “critical management
theory,” a way of thinking about organizations that now has a large following
in schools of business, especially outside the
Hirschhorn (2004) describes a case of this at the New York Times. The story revolves
around the role of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who became publisher in 1992.
Sulzberger, Jr. took up a role that had been defined by
previous members of the Sulzberger family in terms of its position in the
management and leadership of the institution. Hirschhorn shows how Arthur
Sulzberger, Sr., in accordance with this tradition, subordinated himself to the
transcendent, shared meaning of the work of the Times, permitting his interactions to be circumscribed and defined
by the necessities of his position within that framework of meaning.
Arthur, Jr., however, a child of the sixties, redefined
the role so that the work of the Times was given short shrift in favor of a
project that Hirschhorn calls moralization, whose object was the transformation
of the Times itself.
On one level, this moralization took place under the
now-familiar concept of increasing "diversity," whose emotional
significance derives from the idea of the organization as an instrumentality
for repairing past injustices. Thus,
[W]hen
he first took the publisher role Sulzberger told a journalist "that his
greatest challenge will be to bring more racial diversity and sexual equality
to the paper".
Hirschhorn comments:
What is striking about this statement is that Sulzberger did not say that his
most serious challenge was to sustain the quality and excellence of the Times while creating profits for the
Times Company. If he failed in this goal, the goal of seeking diversity would
be immaterial. It is as if he took the work of the Times for granted…
But he goes on to suggest that, for Sulzberger, the
morality of oppressed versus oppressor is only a part of a broader project of
moralization. In this regard he quotes the journalist as continuing:
"He
wants more minority positions. He wants more women in executive positions. He
wants a less authoritarian newsroom and a business side that is more nimble. He
wants each member of the staff to feel empowered as part of the team."
Evidently, Sulzberger sees this project in which staff are
"empowered as part of the team" as part of the same process of
moralization in which the oppressed will prevail over the oppressors.
Hirschhorn goes on to show that the object under moral assault in this campaign
is the Times' authority structure,
which undermines its necessary function within the work of the Times itself.
For instance, he describes a town hall meeting in which
embattled editor Howell Raines faced the Times
staff over his handling of the Jayson Blair fiasco, in which an African-American
reporter had been found to have been fabricating and plagiarizing stories on a
wholesale basis, as well as other shortcomings on his
part:
Strikingly, at the "town-hall" meeting at which
Raines first confronted the staff, Sulzberger unfortunately played a similar
role. There was a sense in which he did not convene the meeting with dignity.
Participants complained in harsh terms about the way Arthur had conducted
himself. As one participant asked, "Why hold a meeting where it was certain
to become a spectacle. Or say, when asked his opinion of the situation,
something as coarse and inarticulate as "it sucks?" Or not put on a
necktie? Or worst of all, reach into a paper bag and take out a stuffed toy
moose-apparently a tool out of some management manual, symbolizing the 'moose
in the room,' that nobody wants to talk about, used to loosen things up -and
hand it to a perplexed Raines?" The participant is suggesting that Arthur
behaved disrespectfully, in a manner not befitting his "office." It
is plausible that by behaving this way Sulzberger stimulated the participants
to behave disrespectfully to Raines. This may be why their fury was unchecked
and what gave reporters license to complain about the Times and Raines on unrelated web sites- an assault that the
family, as protector of the newspapers' institutional standing, could hardly
tolerate. This may also be why Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the Times, said that the attack on Raines
reminded her of the novel, Lord of the
Flies, in which young boys, in the absence of adult authority, form groups
that engage in primitive and destructive acts. This suggests that the staff
cried to express regret for their destructive behavior, when Raines, at a
subsequent meeting, announced his resignation,
Thus while Raines acted counter-culturally so did his boss
Sulzberger. In this sense, we can say that Raines derived his authority to
attack the culture of the Times from the publisher of the Times.
In brief, as Hirschhorn puts it, Sulzberger "elevated
insubordination as a principle of leadership."
All of these destructive processes came to a head through
the case of Jayson Blair, whose systematic lying had been known to the Times
for several years before his case became public. In this regard, the
subordination of the Times' work to
the process of moralization was deeply implicated. Figures at the Times simply could not hold Blair
accountable because the moralization program had undermined the shared meaning
of the work when the two came into conflict. It had placed the realistic
discussion of his deficiencies under the taboo of race, and in that way wrecked
the meaning of the work of the Times, as defined within the symbolic and the
process of exchange:
The
result of such taboos is that people are unable to make meaning together on
issues that deeply concern them. Such restrictions on shared meaning-making
alienate people from one another, make them feel powerless, and undermine the
psychological sense of community. This helps explain why the editorial
community at the Times could never
come together to create a shared picture of Blair's frauds, and their
implications. The taboo undermined such meaning making.
In analyzing the causes of this moralization, Hirschhorn notes the culture of
"personalism"
[which] elevates the salience of feelings in institutional life. This trend is
rooted in the currents of a post-modern culture with its emphasis on
subjectivity and psychic depth.
And also:
long
standing currents in Western thinking associated with utopian thought and
strivings - the idea that social life can be constituted so that conflict can
be eliminated; that people can live in the social world without experiencing
any alienation, any distance between what they wish to experience and express
and what opportunities others afford them.
Taking these together, we can see the elevation of the
imaginary as a principle of organization. With personalism, we see the
apotheosis of individual spontaneity. With the utopian element, we see the
guarantee that individual spontaneity may be safely followed, and therefore
that objective self-consciousness is not necessary. Psychoanalytic thought
leads us to see that the omnipotent, benevolent mother must be the source of
that guarantee. What it suggests is that the image of the group implicit in
this model, the "empowered team," in Sulzberger's terms, is indeed a
group: it is a fusion of infant and child, together with their associated
identifications.
Taking this as a model for organization would certainly
lead to the idea that the demands of exchange, demands based on a negotiated
shared meaning which, by definition, is not our own, would be seen as an
imposition, a violation, and a penetration. This draws the linkage with
hysteria that we have come to recognize and leads us to appreciate the threat
it poses to organization.
Conclusion
The descent of
The
vast extent of the
The great emperors of
As Kenneth Clarke (1969) has put it:
Civilisation
requires a modicum of prosperity - enough to provide a little leisure. But, far
more, it requires confidence -confidence in the society in which one lives,
belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one's own
mental powers.
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Bombardieri, Marcella (2005a) Summers'
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(1996) How the Irish Saved Civilization.
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the Mother in the Psyche.
Clarke: K.
(1969) Civilisation: A Personal View.
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Academics Critical of Remarks About Lack of Gender
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ENDNOTES
[1] There are certainly male
hysterics. My argument here is that hysteria is based on identification with
the early maternal imago. We all have that imago within us and men are capable
of this identification, but I suggest that it does not come as naturally to
them as it does to women.
[2] Consider in this regard Brown and
Gilligan’s (1992) study of teenaged girls in which they are impressed by their
revolutionary potential.
[3] Some may call it “borderline,” a
term that Lacan himself abjures. I will follow his lead, in this analysis,
rather than trying to sort out the mass of confused and contradictory
theorizing that characterizes this area.
[4] Properly speaking, the root of the various images of penetration
is an unconscious phantasy, in the same way that the images of the ego ideal
represent fusion, which is also an unconscious phantasy. Note here the spelling phantasy,
rather than fantasy, a usage that points to its underlying, unconscious
nature
[5] See here Kerry Sulkowicz (2004) discussion of the “insulator” type of CEO
confidante.
[6] I have previously (Schwartz, 2002) called this organizational nihilism.