Making Ghosts Heard

In order to investigate what the historical medical studies of Charcot’s diagnosis and categorization of hysteria and Freud’s dissemination strategy through case histories imply beyond their imagery and language, Gonzalez has developed a performance devising method which she calls “gHosting” (a play of words referring to the hosting of a ghost). The method is directly related to both the hysteric and the performing body. Following Jacques Lacan’s notion of ascribing knowledge to the discourse of the hysteric, Gonzalez makes a distinction between hysteria as a condition and the hysterization of discourse. This chapter outlines intersemiotic translation and gHosting as embodied methods for the creation of performance works about historical hysteric patients. Through studying classic clinical struggles around the hysteric, Gonzalez disentangles how the mimetic quality of hysteria—its ability to take on culturally permissible expressions of distress—is key to the fascination and the threat of the condition.