Hysterical inquiry: A methodology emergent through a dutiful daughter

A daughter’s story

Some years ago, I became a caregiver for my mother, who was terminally ill and had a short time to live. Given that I was the only daughter, I fully understood that this is what daughters do, having witnessed my mother care for both her mother and my father’s mother at the end of their lives. My mother wished to die at home and there was never any question in my mind that it should be any other way: I set out to accommodate her wish. Given that my mother’s health deteriorated rapidly as she came out of remission, virtually overnight I became endowed with “what it takes” to responsibly care for a beloved family member. Some years later, I sat down to write of my experiences. I initially wrote something like, “I was my mother’s caregiver.” That’s all. Where were the linguistic pathways to consciously remember and inscribe a daughter’s intimate encounter with her mother? No words… just tears and an hysterical display of emotion… a symptom recorded by Breuer in his case study of Anna O, the first lady of psychoanalysis.

As our study begins, the daughter is remembering the intimacies of care, for which she discovers an excessive predisposition as soon as care is needed. Searching for an account of her discovery, she finds that, according to Breuer, an over propensity to care can be considered a symptom of hysteria (Freud & Breuer, 1893/1974; Verhaeghe, 1999). Moreover, traditional case studies, such as that of Anna O, reveal that exhaustion from caregiving is a common trigger for bouts of hysteria that culminate in hallucination. The hysterical character of the daughter’s inquiry, given the hallucinatory symptoms invoked through the hysterical pursuit of caregiving, places her case firmly within a framework of psychoanalysis.

Within contemporary critical psychology, psychoanalysis serves as a theory of discourse that articulates how language shapes an individual’s psyche and reality. Through employing psychoanalysis as theory for feminist inquiry, we can interrogate how discourse erects boundaries and categorisations, how it intrudes, colonises, and specularises women (Irigaray, 1985a). As Freud’s work linguistically creates an uneasy gap within the genealogy of psychology, somewhere around the theoretical underpinnings of scientific inquiry and behaviourism, and clings to developmental theory through mother–child relations, it offers terrain within which hysterical inquiries can begin.

Freud’s interest in hysteria plays a foundational role in the birth of psychoanalysis, emerging from his training as a neuroscientist and sparked by a notion that the many and varied symptoms of hysteria could not be traced to physical pathology, but were a condition of the psyche with no fixed location within the body. Arguably then, psychoanalysis evolved from fruitless avenues of scientific inquiry delving into the anatomical functions of the brain, seeking the psychic origins of hysteria. Its “treatment” was identified as abreaction, the talking away of the symptoms as a therapeutic practice, hence the first connection between discourse and the study of the psyche shaped by discourse within psychoanalysis. The “talking cure” was named by the object of one of the first recorded hysterical case studies, Anna O. It is with respect to her position as both object and voice of the discourse, that we have named our hysterical inquiry, a case study of emergent methodology. Hysterical treatment, then, involves clear articulation, a catharsis within available discourse.

Portrayed as dedicated, empathetic, and overly caring by Breuer, Anna O’s hysterical symptoms implicitly emphasise the importance of language, with her sufferings characterised by a range of linguistic symptoms that supplement physical symptoms and constitute hysteria as lack. Breuer eruditely and clinically describes her plight:

For alongside of the development of the contractures, there appeared a deep-going functional disorganisation of her speech… she was at a loss for words … Later she lost her command of grammar and syntax; she no longer conjugated verbs, and eventually used only infinitives, … In the process of time she became almost completely deprived of words … and became almost unintelligible. When she tried to write (until her contractures entirely prevented her doing so) she employed the same jargon. (Freud & Breuer, 1893/1974, p. 77)

From eavesdropping on Freud and Breuer (speaking for and about Anna O), a paradox emerges for the hysterical daughter: she lacks the language she needs to articulate her experience, and she must write her inquiry in and through her lack.

Before she is consciously aware of the multiplicity of positions available to her, she moves from eavesdropping on the boundaries of psychoanalysis to ask the literature on caregiving and feminist ethics of care: Where is my experience in this writing?

Although Verhaeghe (1999) traces the connection of hysteria and care to Breuer’s observations of Anna O’s over propensity to care, the daughter’s literature search reveals care as a new commodity, the word officially making a public appearance in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Forbat, 2005; Stalker, 2003). Before then, care was something that women just “did” within the private domain (Barnes, 2006). Now, care packages are produced to deliver a scary assortment of good, bad, substandard, and indifferent care; marketed and sold within a global neoliberal care industry (Brechin, Barton, & Stein, 2003). The daughter’s initial search for the language of her experience traces care to contemporary times through historical caring practices (e.g., Brazilton, 1987; Chapman, 2003), a feminist ethics of care (Gilligan, 1977, 1982), economic rationalism (e.g., Edwards, 2013; Hill, 2003), political moral practice (e.g., Kohlberg, 1981; Rawls, 1958/1972; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 2013), a philosophical conflict of ethical codes (e.g., Kerridge, Lowe, & McPhee, 2005; McIlwraith & Madden, 2010) and the mother’s work–life dilemma (e.g., Barnett, 2005; Hays, 1996; Kahu & Morgan, 2007).

The daughter frames an hysterical catch-cry as the catalyst for her continuing inquiry: Where is care? She recognises that her experience is not written in the discourses of contemporary care. She is alerted to the possibility of memorable encounter with her mother by an uneasy moment, if only she could access it. Her unease is further compounded by the discovery that there are anomalies in relation to speaking positions of the daughter caregiver she recalls and the daughter/mother relations she wishes to remember. The most explicit anomaly concerns the mother–daughter relationship framed as “caregiver–patient” within the discourses of commodified care (Barnes, 2006; O’Connor, 2007). O’Connor found that caregiver daughters take up more authoritative speaking positions and are more likely to make decisions against their mother’s wishes than mothers’ daughters. A linguistic splitting of the daughter’s caregiving becomes explicit. The hysterical daughter now recognises that the unease of a maternal encounter that precedes language opens up a pathway for her question and linguistic splitting suggests that this pathway is unique to hysterical discourse.

Positioning: The daughters

Following the hysterical daughter’s trajectory from psychoanalysis prompts us to draw on Lacan’s (1999, 2007) four discourses, the master, the hysteric, the academic, and the analyst to conceptualise the daughter’s speaking positions as another starting place within the study. Through Lacan’s four discourses, multiple positions enable alternative pathways for the scope of the daughters’ inquiries.

Each of the four positions introduced by Lacan takes a particular discursive pathway from specific speaking positions in response to the hysteric’s question. For example, the daughter as caregiver speaks from the position of master in the discourse of medical expertise, as does the daughter who fears and shuns her hysterical symptoms. The daughter recalling her exhaustion uneasily and repeatedly asking the way to remember her unmemorable encounter speaks from the position of the hysteric. The daughter who undertakes a genealogy of care as an academic inquiry speaks and writes in the discourse of the university. The daughter who listens and attends to the gaps is the analytic daughter. From these initial positions taken up by splitting the daughters explicitly within this study, movement between discourses in our inquiry becomes traceable, even if pathways converge and positions shift rapidly at times. Distinctions between shifting discourses may be read differently as the shifts between the academy, the master’s knowledge, and the hysteric’s questions open multiple pathways to hysterical inquiry as an emergent methodology. For example, the master/hysteric shift between caregiver/daughter opens one pathway to pursue the hysteric’s question through psychoanalytic theories of normative development and discourses of responsibility, ambivalence, and burden. It is along this historical trajectory that the daughter then pursues her question.

Historicising: Theories of maternal subjectivity through psychoanalytic pathways

Freud (1905/1977) describes the normative development of the girl-child as a process that involves separating the symbiosis of mother/child and then rejecting the mother. In one variation, Object Relations Theory’s “long suffering mother” (Winnicott, 1987) is followed through a genealogy of feminist developmental theory that hears and critiques the mother’s full responsibility for the child’s normative development (Doane & Hodges, 1995). Following the feminist pathway, the daughter traces critical and normative influences on subsequent feminist developmental theory like the work of Chodorow (1978), Hollway (2006), and Benjamin (1998, 2007). This in turn theoretically impacts Gilligan’s feminist care ethics (Gilligan, 1977, 1982; Held, 1998, 2008), subsequently taken up politically as a guide for the ethical administration of contemporary care (Sevenhuijsen, 1998, 2002, 2003; Tronto, 2013). As an act of questioning, therefore, hysterical inquiry returns the daughter to her theoretical and historical roots. As she investigates/traverses the pathways that have articulated her development, her alienation from her mother, her hysterical condition, and subsequent theories of mother–daughter bonds through complex threads of care genealogy and care ethics that take multiple pathways, we begin to recognise a genre emerging through her hysterical inquiry.

Surfacing genre… rhythm… emergent traces…

As the daughter explores theories of maternal subjectivity, the cyclical character of discourse and the iterative traces this generates become apparent (Butler, 2000, 1987/2004). The manifest form of cycle and iteration is given narrative substance by Rank’s (1914/1959) thesis that discusses the repetitive genre of the mythological stories underpinning psychoanalysis. Now the daughter becomes aware that she repetitively traverses theories of maternal intersubjectivity in search of her (un)remembered, ineffable encounter. So, with the rhythm of repetition and the genre of myth to accompany her, she sets off on a series of cyclical quests seeking ways to remember the (un)memorable. Each quest reiterates her hysterical question and generates a unique pathway through academic inquiry: a series of studies nested within a methodological case study, rhythmically returning to a lost encounter, lost language, and the puzzling paradox of the daughter’s felt/unremembered mother–daughter bond. None of the nestled case studies treads identical pathways with another. Each pathway is generated in unexpected ways as a possibility opened up by a previous inquiry. By way of example, theories of third space offer tantalising new openings that turn out to affirm the daughters’ sense that the rhythm of cycles and the genre of myths matter: though with a little difference made by feminist fissures in conceptualising completion.

Within the “third space” quest, the daughter engages with Butler’s (2000, 1987/2004) critique of Benjamin’s (1998, 2007) theories of intersubjective “thirdness.” Benjamin draws on both Hegel and Object Relations Theory to describe a cyclical process of mother–child intersubjectivity, where a unique recognition between mother and child, or subject and Other is possible, yet only through surviving a pattern that also involves destruction and negation. Access to the third space, which intertwines a mother’s and child’s separate perceptions of each as other is only possible through surviving destruction. For Benjamin (2000), individuation of mother and child becomes a gradual and necessary process for normative development yet the mother cyclically reverts to the same long-suffering passive maternal position that ultimately returns the status quo. Butler (2000) suggests that Benjamin’s third space becomes possible only through a misinterpretation of Hegel. Her reading of Hegel (Butler, 1987/2004) requires that after each battle for recognition, the subject irreversibly changes since each encounter enables/etches a trace. Each cycle ends in inevitable failure, compounding the marks/traces. Thus, according to Butler’s reading of Hegel, Benjamin’s suggested return to the status quo is never quite a return to the same position.

The daughter takes up Butler’s interpretation, since a third space may provide a possible site for her to remember her encounter: traces upon traces impact on the character and outcome of the next adventure. Each encounter leaves traces and therefore, each of the daughter’s quests leaves a mark, or trace, to be gathered along the way, shifting linguistic boundaries of unconsciousness and memory. Now the genre of the work has emerged, we quest for traces that alert the daughter to gaps enabling new journeys as she continues her pursuit of care and her encounter with her mother lost within the discourses of caregiving. Within the broadening of the scope of her hysterical inquiry, the daughter continues to (re)tell her story, and implicitly, we notice the shifts and begin to listen for the silences among responses to our hysterical question.

Scoping boundary maps

Just as the genre of inquiry emerges from mythological repetition as a quest accompanied by feminist interruptions of the status quo, so the scope of the daughter’s hysterical inquiry is repeated through Freudian (Freud & Fliess, 1985) and Lacanian (1997a) concepts of the unconscious. In effect, this is where the daughter’s search begins in earnest as a search for her maternal encounter, within contextualised metaphorically mapped boundaries, created from available discourses and mainstream theories of psychoanalysis.

In terms of this case study, psychoanalysis is doubly critical: providing the theoretical underpinnings of hysterical inquiry and the genre through which pathways of pursuit are opened. With a gathering of other voices along the way, this doubling sets the borders within/through which the daughter initiates her hysterical questioning and limits the parameters of (un)memorable encounter.

To stretch the frontiers of Freud’s unconscious as described in letter 52 to Fliess (Freud & Fliess, 1985), the daughter returns to Lacan’s (1997a) rereading of Freud’s work as a theory of discourse. From here, it seems that each realm Freud describes is transformed into an interactive layer of language structure, including an intractable transitional gap between unconscious–pre-conscious. The gap is not an empty space, however. Translated through Lacan (1988), it appears as a “wall of language.” This is the place where pure perception meets with sound and thought to create meaning; the very preconditions for how an encounter can begin to be said. Freud describes a process where sensory moments are etched physically into neurons and some of these are lost, never to be translated through the transition and beyond the wall. Here, the hysterical daughter hears a resonance of Butler’s (2000) suggestion that after each encounter, there is an irrevocable alteration: each failure (to be recognised, to transition sense into language) leaves (un)memorable traces. Meanwhile, encounters that transition into language are inscribed through available discourses and organised into its structure. As a well-worn example: if a baby cries, her sound in “symbolic” consciousness must be transformed into meaning, so we can surmise that the baby is hungry, frightened, or happy: we cannot conceive that the baby may cry for no reason or for a “reason” that may be ineffable. A wall of language therefore operates between pure perception and the dawning of thought and interpretation.

Metaphors are crucial for hysterical inquiry and the wall metaphor features prominently in relation to various barriers: those between intensive and stay-at-home mothering and the conflicting discourses that rationalise how these “choices” impact on the child/daughter (Hays, 1996; Kahu & Morgan, 2007); those between the private and public (Barnes, 2006); the tricky difficulties of transition, transcendence, traversing borders, and their effects; the margins, abjection, and confinement (Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b, 2004; Kristeva, 1982; Spivak, 1988). Within our study, the hysterical daughter sees the wall forming before her in the image of a hatchery breeding hysteria. She turns to trace her encounter back to a difficult transition and hopefully through the wall of language, to make her way towards sense. She writes:

I have vivid memories of those last days with my mother, along with a strange mix of grief and anger, spoken as grief that she was no longer here, anger that she had left. I ponder now at where the daughter was at her mother’s passing, the flesh and blood of the mother discursively lost somewhere between caregiving and responsibilities, calmly and reassuringly tending to her mother; fitting impeccably into her designated place. Yet a daughter screams silently… devastatingly… at an impending, unthinkable, and unspeakable loss that tears at her flesh and spills through the gaps opening and closing as discourse shifts and hysteria hatches in the spaces.

Fabricating texture and depth

At this step through our methodological case study, the metaphor of a wall of language and its tracing across multiple boundaries has guided the hysterical daughter’s quest toward realms of psychic fleshiness at the borders of consciousness. A psychoanalytic theory involving discourse reveals a depth of language structure beyond consciousness and a confined yet vast area of inquiry opens up for pursuing the daughter’s experience of a current, fleeting moment of perception. Facing the wall, our hysterical inquiry now sets off to traverse Freud’s (Freud & Fliess, 1985) unconscious layers as decoded by Lacan. Through Lacan’s (1997a, 1997b) interpretation, Freud’s unconscious is restructured, directionally expanding on the three realms of wahrnehmungszeichen, unbewusstsein, and vorbewusstsein. The daughter translates these three as the inextricably connected psychic fleshiness of the first imprint of traces etched in fleeting moments of encounter; the register of their unconscious storage, should the traces be stored; and the register of their initial connections with language. They transform through Lacan’s decoding into a rich integrated web of pathways interacting with the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real. The Symbolic is a finite, synchronic language structure inclusive of metaphor and tidily ordering the chronology of events. The Imaginary contains diachronic, metonymic, or detached words etched with meanings that are lost through Symbolic structure. The Real is unreachable and must lie in the realms of pure perception without thought. It feels to us like an etched embodiedness, perhaps, lost forever. Yet it generates hysterically creative pathways through which, paradoxically, it can be found. The daughter suspects that the Real could be associated with anachrony that we would interpret as a chaotic linguistic nothingness; perhaps a silence that tantalisingly, paradoxically, articulates, and opens another possibility for pathways a hysterical daughter might pursue.

As the daughter translates Lacan’s decoding of Freud’s psychic structures, the double movement of her quest produces depth and texture within the available psycho-linguistic realms. Their boundaries expand as each movement is articulated. Within the newly opening territories of her quest, on one of her wanderings, she accompanies Baraitser (2009) who is looking for her mother–son encounter through Levinas’ theories of alterity. On this trajectory, our hysterical daughter finds another triple set of language realms: the Saying, the Said, and the There Is. For Levinas, it seems the Saying is where face-to-face encounter takes place in innocence and wonder, initiating sensuous, embodied experience occurring in a fleeting moment of “now” that is paradoxically, simultaneously past and present. Memories incompletely drawn through to the Said immediately become present, finite, and therefore chronologically ordered. According to Brody (1998), the Saying leaves traces in all modes of the Said and they are not two alternative modes of discourse, “the one is undeclinably punctured by the Other” (p. 61). Therefore, a gap, or There Is, is created by an absolute disjunction between the two linguistic spheres which turns out to be a particularly nasty stretch of nothingness that separates the Same and the Other (Brody, 1998).

While keeping company with Baraitser (2009), our hysterical daughter meets with Walsh’s (2001) critique of Levinas’ paternal transcendence, and finds that transcendence in the Said includes discourses of genealogical paternity and excludes feminine corporeality. This particular journey therefore, affirms that, as the hysteric suspected, the wall of language is exclusive of feminine embodied (un)memory, cast adrift in a dark and evil primal space that Levinas calls “beyond the face.” The mother–son encounter, sought through a feminist interruption of Levinas’ theory textures the territory of encounter with affirmations of loss more than insights for her maternal encounter.

As the daughter traverses her expanding terrain, we become more practised at sensing gaps through uneasiness, a feeling that perhaps we have been here before, yet can’t remember. Grammar and syntax create a Symbolic structural conscious connectedness to be negotiated, through which traces, as uneasy moments of (un)memorable encounter can emerge/submerge/merge through gaps of reality created through inquiry. As we sense the gaps, the daughter takes her opportunities to search the expanding, contracting, opening, closing pathways they disclose.

The refuge of masquerade: Re-membering gaps in the weave

After re-marking the boundaries and thickening the textures of encounter and language through feminist interruptions of Levinas’ theory, our hysterical inquiry takes a turn towards psychoanalytic theories of the masquerade of femininity with a revitalised sense of unease. Joan Riviere (1929/2008) initiated the concept of masquerade as a metaphor of women’s sexuality in 1929, so it makes an appealing place to return to since it is an early, arguably feminist, interruption of psychoanalytic theory, interrupted in turn by Lacan’s re-interpretation: an uneasy twist indeed.

In Riviere’s (1929/2008) “Womanliness as Masquerade,” she reveals that her client resented assumptions of women’s inequality and suffered anxiety in the masculine-dominated realm of public performance. From the title of Riviere’s paper, we might get the impression that the masquerade is a symptom yet this is not the case: Riviere reveals that the masquerade itself is normative. Femininity conceals the woman’s symptoms, which only leak through the gaps in the weave as performance anxiety when she risks being publicly revealed as one of those “homosexual women” who want to “be men themselves” (p. 27). So, the mask provides a sanctuary for women in which a normative, exemplary display of femininity serves to protect us from men’s “recognition” of our masculinity. According to Soler (2006), Lacan interprets Riviere’s masquerade and feminine mask as man’s ideal phallic projection, the Symbolic woman. With thanks to Mitchell (2000), the daughter notices that Lacan’s interpretation of her mask disenfranchises its sanctuary by turning it from femininity is masquerade, to femininity is phallic projection.

Through Lacan’s re-interpretation that reconstitutes the mask as a projection of phallocentric language rather than a protection against recognition of women’s masculinity, the daughter’s positions as hysteric and academic reach an impasse. The discourses available to the academic daughter bar her access to the gaps in the mask, leading her towards the contemporary post-Lacanian theoretical understanding that there is nothing behind the mask (Tauchert, 2007). The hysterical daughter, insistently questioning, asks why these restrictions? Why nothing? If no-thing behind, what is within? Is the weave of phallocratic language so tight she cannot feel her way? Even if, within the mask, Lacan’s Real and Levinas’ “beyond the face” are unavailable, isn’t it possible that since the scope of hysterical inquiry is mapped out within the boundaries of both Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of the unconscious, they are available to seek, even if they can’t be found?

In the discourse of the academic, feminist interruptions invite our academic daughter to listen otherwise to the hysteric’s questions. Through the tension of their positioning, the unease of interruptions, she returns from no-thing to Riviere’s classic masquerade metaphor and she sees herself as the normative feminine woman accepting her loss as a process of linguistic Symbolic designation. The anxious hysteric denies her loss and ends up leaking her corporeal (un)memory from her unconscious/preconscious and onto the page when the gap is open, from the very pathway hysterical inquiry seeks to explore, depending of course, whether the (un)memory she seeks has made it to the preconscious in the first place.

Together, they ask: has the original work of Riviere forged an hysterical pathway to something that is uniquely hers, a possession behind the mask that he cannot access? The hysterical inquirer considers this possibility highly relevant in light of Anna O’s discursive hysterical symptoms. The hysteric and the academic inquirer have now opened an intriguing terrain of metaphorical pathways that enable her quest to journey within textual layers, as she takes the plunge through the gaps created through the Lacanian “turn” to discourse. She can search within and through the language that denies her corporeal memory as the object of her desire, her bodily desire for her embodied encounters, in an effort to remember and write. And as she searches, she senses the gaps through rushes of anxiety and unease and perhaps a feeling that she has been here before, if only she could remember. So she is able to reflect on what appears at present as an hysterical symptom brought on by the trauma and exhaustion of caregiving and loss, like the symptoms of Anna O, as she continues to search at the limits of language, teetering like Anna O on the edge of linguistic disintegration:

… and within those last few days before she dies, I look at my hands and they are no longer mine. My mother’s hands are smaller and uniquely hers… now ours… there is a distinct curvature of her third finger. She is five foot, one and a half inches tall… I am four inches taller… yet I am shorter now… I am there/here… We… together and apart… as in an indescribable rush of soothing warmth that in truth frightens the hell out of me. I am so afraid I tell her that she can go, put an end to her suffering. She does: I no longer feel her presence. She dies early next morning, leaving me with an unrelenting pain of loss… a sense that part of me is missing and an unbearable guilt that I asked her to leave through fear, fear perhaps that we were in uncharted and untamed territory, not mapped… not yet colonised… ineffable place… full of whispering silences… undefinable evil.

… and we can’t help but surmise that if it was possible or profitable for Him to access our ineffable places, He would have done so already, fueled as he is by the cyclical story of killing His Father and desiring His Mother.

Threading through excess

Disintegrating syntax and whispering silences signpost some unexpected directions in the caring daughter’s hysterical quest. The daughter begins down tangential pathways, somewhere beyond the scope of her inquiry into care, seeking the sounds within whispers and the cohesion exceeding grammar. She follows inklings in the facades of neurosis, psychosis, and hallucination.

Down one of these tangents, the daughter seeks out the madness of Schreber’s (1903/2000) memoirs in search of sounds for saying her hallucinations in ways that do not translate her caregiving exhaustion into hysteria. According to Lacan (1997a), the value of Schreber’s account of his delusions lies in the very fact that he writes within such an advanced state of psychosis, as he is dissolving into what “appears” to be a primary femininity. She reads Schreber’s memoirs; his divine rays, voluptuousness, miracle/soul-birds tirelessly working on a continuous mission of excruciatingly painful splitting that we see taking place at the wall of language. In Schreber’s world, all birds are feminine and their miracle takes the form of a blissful transcendence, an ecstatic state of jouissance. Through the process of her reading, the daughter is left with an uneasy feeling that there is just as much of interest within the writings of Schreber as for any legitimised theorist of “being” or “becoming.” Here too, language structure holds the key to rationality, and serves as the pivotal point of connectedness between theories considered unable to be thought of together. Her reading of Schreber questions the other jouissance; Lacan’s (1999) concept for that of woman which inevitably exceeds discourse, the exclusively feminine, like the mother, present and absent, unspoken in (un)memory, inaccessible. Contentiously, the other jouissance may be situated within/or beyond the realms of consciousness. Theorised through masculine speaking positions of consciousness, it is beyond rationality structured by language, beyond the ecstatic sexual bliss of the phallic. Or perhaps, the daughter wonders, this untranslatable, exclusively feminine form of unbridled bliss exceeds rationality within Riviere’s (1929/2008) mask: the space that, within the scope of our inquiry, now marks the concealed and uniquely hers. Hence, we find new ways to write simultaneous possibilities, such as the slashed “within/beyond,” so we can accommodate multiple speaking positions as our hysterical inquiry threads through literatures of excess. Like the Real, anachrony, behind the mask and beyond the face, she seeks out leaky containers concealing the corporeality and fleshy connections of fleeting mother–daughter moments of encounter before they are Said, before they cross through the wall of language, disconnected, and transcend to the rationality of discourses that commodify care.

Following another tangent, having noticed that the portrayal of women as birds is not unusual in mythology (even the sphinx, is often portrayed as half bird), the daughter threads her way through writing a critique of Freud’s (1913/1958) “The Theme of the Three Caskets.” Now, she finds herself within antiquity, where the women of ancient Greece are spoken within middle voice, a form no longer available within contemporary language structure (Roland, 1994). Mothers, daughters, muses, fates, graces, and nymphs may be integrated and spoken interchangeably (Larson, 2001; Lyons, 1997). Of course, there is an ongoing debate within linguistics concerning the grammatical structure of ancient Greek. Ancient Greek contains seven forms of tense as well as the three “voices”: passive, middle, and active. Within middle voice it is possible to talk of the plural self (Barber, 1975). The integrated, interchangeable women of middle voice exceed the borders and boundaries of contemporary language structure; the speaking of I and the dichotomies of phallic language, such as virgin/whore; victim/survivor; mother/daughter. Irigaray’s (1985b) metaphor of fluidity frames the daughter’s interpretation of how middle voice makes visible the viscous leaks of phallic containers. When she engages with Irigaray’s (1985a) critique of Plato’s Cave it becomes apparent that the misdirectional reflections of the Symbolic have appropriated and colonised the womb metaphor, driving the disconnection of corporeal relational mother–daughter.

Turning (back) to Irigaray (1985a) reconfigures the boundaries our hysterical inquiry mapped initially and reflects Woman, not as a Lacanian (1999) not-whole, but as non-existent commodified object within the realms phallic discourse. Here, through reading Irigaray, another daughter emerges: the mimetic daughter. We see that she has been here all along, yet her presence is now refracted though the enlightenment of Freud’s unconscious/consciousness, Lacan’s Symbolic/Imaginary/Real, Levinas’s Saying/Said as signifying containers, colonising, dissecting, labelling, and specularising. And we do not forget the hint of irony that emerges from the page:

and stirred by her uneasiness, and… the thought… of a sense… of a hint… of a smell… of burning flesh, the daughter ponders the dangers of her quest to discover her lost encounter with her mother on the Eve of her mother’s death, lost amidst discourses of responsible caregiving… experiences lost from her consciousness… perceptions designated through limited avenues of mainstream discourse… yet the hysterical daughter must continue to ask, where is the embodied feminine, the corporeal mother–daughter? She stops… was that a faint whispering unseen… or just a piece of dust unheard? She shudders, and presses onwards, metaphorically treading the pathways and following embodied traces of primordial memories theorised by Freud, tramping through the philosophical works of Levinas and travelling to Lacan’s wall of language. She stands beside the wall, metaphorically observing selective encounters transferring from the Saying into the Said, progressing through thought… sound… speech. She watches Her fall naked with Him into the abyss and watches part of her resurrected as the mainstream mask/mother through discourses of masculine genealogical connectedness. She senses an encounter of morphological mother/daughter, though she cannot yet remember… until the fear is thought… and spoken… the severing of that primordial embodiedness… and then… an anxious sensation of falling… a (re)occurring nightmare… into the hole in the centre of language… though no awakening given the infiniteness of Her fall into the home of the catalyst of His desire and hysterical fall into darkness as the structure of her speech unravels? So she continues to fall into the evil and whispering ghastly nothingness, as mapped within the scope of Her inquiry as her physical boundaries merge… engulfed, etched once again with primary (un)memory… and then… nothing… until she is once again moving along a different pathway… a different journey… yet there is a shift… a trace… and a strange sense of the uncanny… she has been here before… but differently.

Tricks of light and shade

As it turns out, by now, the cycles of repetition and interruption, the emergence of tangents that transform borders, sensing gaps in the weave of masquerades, histories, rationalities, and tracing the leaky permeability of memory’s and women’s containment, disconnection, are becoming artful. The appearance of a mimetic daughter, multiplying positions, tenses, and voices moves our hysterical inquiry again. Now challenging the borders themselves becomes a possible pathway toward remembering, and the hysterical daughter asks, can corporeality, the mother–daughter lost connection, be represented through a timely return to her shadows?

From here, the daughter continues her search for a feminine unconsciousness/consciousness, away from the masculine transcendental light, principally through the gaps created through reading the work of Ettinger (1997, 2006a, 2006b). She discovers two layers to Ettinger’s work: her art, which is primary and her theory developed to verbalise the space she has created on the canvas. Her artwork is surveyed as a layered building of texture, shade, and light, from which a uniquely feminine borderspace can emerge.

As an artist, Ettinger employs a complicated procedure to suspend time, through a prolonged labour of multiply overlaid oil paint and copy toner that gives textural depth and a hint of translucency to her images. As blurred, laboured part-copies, her images are no longer representing what/when/who they were nor what they would have been if the copying process had been completed (Massumi, 2006). The images become suspended somewhere in-between. Their textures are a feature of Ettinger’s work that emerges/fades, confusing the phallic gaze, allowing for a unique feminine gaze that accesses lost corporeality. As a theorist, Ettinger calls the process revealed through the grainy texture of her images metramorphosis:

Through metramorphosis, grains are entwined in severality with no central control. The artwork is created during a process that is passive in part and active in part, so no particular separate grain has control over the gaze, nor suffers its absolute loss either. (2006b, p. 116)

We frame Ettinger’s matrix, as symbolic of the womb metaphor and the colonisation of our commodified bodies as they have been inscribed within mainstream discourse, within Irigaray’s fluidity, an ebbing and flowing of her life force; not the psychoanalytic linguistic drive to map, colonise, (mis)appropriate, label, and commodify:

and the daughter dreams of the washing ebbing flowing emerging/submerging water/colours/inks of Ettinger’s artworks that draw a feminine gaze uniquely and she dreams of a care that recognises the fluid connections and the integrated existences with her mother/self.

Within the broadening of the scope of hysterical inquiry, the daughter continues to (re)-tell her story, writing and rewriting shifts, beginning to remember.

Yet, as she journeys into Ettinger’s theoretical borderspace, the daughter’s memories fade, the gap closes. The matrix offers a uniquely feminine unconscious space that harbours, amongst other theories, Winnicott’s (1953) me/not me?, Lacan’s (1999) other jouissance, and Levinas’ (1978/1995) compassion. Having trodden these paths as we have journeyed through Freud’s unconscious and beyond/within the difficulties of transforming a matrixial artwork into the structures of language is apparent to the academic daughter. Having been alerted to the problematics of (mis)direction, we consider the possibilities of reversing this process, turning Western language structure into artwork. At this place, we become aware that if we read words as shape, shade, and colour we perceive texture developing from journey to journey, pathway to pathway, trace to trace as layer after layer is traversed. Our textural, artful gaze blurs the linear trajectories of conventional academic writing. As the academic daughter encounters and engages with hysterical interludes, she opens non-directional pathways through which to record her genealogy of care. From this perspective, it seems to us that hysterical inquiry not only unearths and follows traces of care, jouissance, and (un)memory, but emerges a shifting consciousness of a previously unconscious methodological strategy. Through Irigaray’s (1985a) reading of Plato’s Cave, we think of this strategy as a trick of the light that journeys towards paternal transcendence when written through available discourse, and simultaneously opens us to the shadowy subversive possibilities of fluidity as an alternative life force to the matrix. As we think through the shadowy light that borderspace requires we imagine that as we have been texturing our scope of inquiry, adding pathways, speaking positions, voices, mimesis, water, and light, we have been doing something like making art:

building the layers… journey by journey… suspending time and confusing direction, a written artwork, where language structure is not the primary concern. We create texture, adding and weaving the threads to build from the texture of the paper, words as pliable mediums of artistry, painting upon painting that in turn becomes the mask, light, and depth, gathering voices, creating shadows, from which an eloquent silence can emerge. Watercolour words merge and emerge, ebb and flow through the walls of his unconscious structure. This artwork, we now see as a conscious, subjective, hysterical, academic, analytical, and ironical revolt against phallic discourse.

As we (can only) conform to the cyclical patterns of language as we write, though now textured with multiple voices and traces, the daughter’s hysterical inquiry revolves back, at the end of her journeying so far, to her question: where is care? Now, in the closing phase(s) of our study, we revisit contemporary care within a global age. We read Braidotti (2006) arguing that a feminist ethics of care is no longer relevant within a state of advanced capitalism and Tronto (2013) discussing why it is, when framed as a democratic ethics. No longer enthralled by, or consciously bonded to, the walls between our positions as speaking women/mothers/daughters, we undertake one last re-reading of extracts from Tronto’s discussions. Conscious now of the possibilities of diffusion through a medium of Irigaray’s fluidity and the hum of middle voices, we arrive, again, to collect Braidotti’s feminist nomadic ethics into a theoretic framework for permeating the wall of language. Between/within/among us we are becoming conscious of that which bars us from each other; opening a gateway to transformation and remembering a once missing encounter(s) as daughter/mother:

care reread, care transformed… read/written within/through the permeable borders of Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace… care… an ethical state of being/becoming that defies doctrines of individuality… commodification… and indeed the linear finiteness of Symbolic paternity… (Re)written… (re)read… can we allow for our unique feminine consciousness… our lost encounter… our new voice(s)… fading and emerging/merging/submerging/ebbing/flowing from/within the page… through the hues, the fluid brush strokes and the depth and textures they create…

Writing the process of enabling

Within a continuous emergent feminist writing practice, we built a genealogy of care that becomes increasingly non-directional, and disrupted when recorded within the Symbolic structure. Within our study, the daughter(s) discover that care is not necessarily drawn through to the Said and chronologically ordered, given that we are made aware of unconscious and ineffable care within the gaps. Hence, the non-linear presentation of care genealogy reads as a disruptive strategy to destabilise the chronological order of historical “fact.” Our writing practice is an integral part of our emergent methodology that repetitively retells stories and works the shifts, the borders, the wall, gaps, and traces to enable each narrative to be told differently, edging closer to explicitly enable the hysterical daughter to remember, within different speaking positions and writing styles.

Connectedness weaves and dances through the realms, threads, and texture of the work. As each journey unfolds and each methodological strategy emerges, a connectedness that no longer solely depends on Symbolic structure thickens. Encounters are pulled into the Said as they become available and with their constrictions showing, so gaps and diversions disrupt chronology, emphasising what cannot be remembered and said as eloquent silences. Interconnected musings between journeys playfully and ironically engage with encounters/journeys that have come before or sometimes after.

Within the problematics of the journeys’ confusing directions, with method gradually unfolding as the study shifts, a (non)cohesion of the inquiry emerges. (Non)cohesion is supported by disruption and gradual, repetitive re-positioning of feminist interruptions, with respect for hysterical insistent questioning. Disruption is textured by sometimes writing a chorus, an ancient form of creative theatre of which little is known, except that they articulate themselves collectively, enabling voices differently and emphasising the difficulty of writing inclusion within a language that isolates speaking positions. As the multiplicity of voices becomes louder throughout the work, producing eloquent silences too, we introduce writing strategies to gather multiplicities and emphasise the differences of speaking positions. For example, sometimes we write of a mother and her daughter, sometimes of mother–daughter, sometimes of mother, not as a singular, relational, unremembered encounter but as multiple and fluid genealogical connectedness. We incorporate bracketed (un)memories, to acknowledge the legitimacy of the hysteric’s lost encounter, that which she can only sense through moments of unease or hysterical symptom or slash/bracket our several writing positions: where we/I/the daughter(s), or all of us integratedly/separately are/is entertaining possibilit(y)ies. At times, we dabble with synaesthesia as the hysteric writes to enable her encounter differently:

The sun emerges… enabled as she adds a subtle splash of sky blue to allow the diffusion of breath, sounds of rich soil, and scents of water leaking through the thin, dusty, orange curtains… it is warm, relaxing…

As the work shifts and transforms, it becomes increasingly difficult to write a feminine conscious “becoming” within the bars/borders/bounds of language structure. We have employed several writing strategies and phrases to help with this. Some of the methodological strategies we have explained as part of an emergent and transformative methodology are collective feminist strategies we have awoken to enact shifts that are not easily written, like mimesis. Some, like our intentional confusion of I, we, the daughter, the daughters (singularly or collectively hysterical, academic, analytic, mimetic), the eloquent silences and the chorus, are reminders of increasingly multiple voices within the text. These/our voices, become increasingly dis-eased of specificity/containment, as we work/write to emerge a methodology of conscious quest to enact a shift of consciousness within itself, transforming stories.

and I once again revisit the night before my mother’s death. I sit… having been sent from my mother’s side for some rest. How odd that seems to be to me now, replaced by someone who “knows” to rest from the responsibilities of caring for the hysteric hiding behind the mask as designated carer, from the death of part of me… my mother/other/Other running through my veins in an ebbing river of blood red embodied (un)memories/traces? Yet my mother physically lies dying in a place where I, within phallic discourse, physically am not: she has lost consciousness… His consciousness… through ever increasing doses of morphine administered by visiting compassionate caregivers (masquerading or hysterical?) and her breathing comes in rasps, inscribed as a death rattle… a gasp for air, not a resonant ebbing of a life force. As I sit (un)memories return, conscious memories, revealed in what, until now, I can only write as hallucination, yet they become a merging within her (un)conscious silence and my deafening silence until encounter. A silence screaming unbearable pain of a phallic (mother) severance becomes enveloped in a warmth, a flowing of life force, a fluidity… permeation… a mingling of mother and daughter/I (middle voice) who become(s) uncountable/non-nominal. Until I (active–passive assimilation) think. Thoughts propel me back to the Symbolic and fear of the (un)known and the (un)thought…

Moving on to new adventures… and acknowledging the traces

In this paper, we have outlined our case study of an emergent feminist methodology for writing a genealogy of care. Our methodology is set within theories of psychoanalysis interpreted as a theory of discourse to interrogate our genealogy with respect for hysterical inquiry. Our case study exemplifies how hysterical inquiry echoes feminist questions of silence, deficit, and ineffability and how each terrain of the hysteric’s quest emerges in response to each question, each (re)searcher, and each unique set of hysterical pursuits. In this particular study, we question mainstream pathways that direct a daughter’s responsibility to care and constitute contemporary care as commodification of women’s embodied labour. As each search unfolds, the texture of terrain thickens, changes, and shifts differently, opening up unexpected textual quests for the hysteric’s lost encounters. We also suggest hysterical inquiry as generating and constantly expanding/changing feminist writing practice to test the boundaries of his unconscious discursive structure. Hysterical inquiry emerges through layering his discursive terrain with her marks and traces, shifting or dissolving boundaries and enabling us to remember: perhaps even to speak of or write our perceptions, our silences, and our subjugation, as something other than deficits forged within mainstream articulations of impeccable feminine masquerade.