A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind

  1. Patricia Rozee and Gretchen Van Boemel, “The Psychological Effects of War and Trauma and Abuse on Older Cambodian Women,” in Refugee Women and Their Mental Health: Shattered Societies, Shattered Lives, ed. E. Cole, O. M. Espin, and E. D. Rothblum (London: Routledge, 1992), 23–50.

  2. Lee Siegel, “Cambodians’ Vision Loss Linked to War Trauma,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1989.

  3. Sucheng Cahn, Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 249.

  4. Selim R. Benbadis, “Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures,” in The Treatment of Epilepsy: Principles and Practice, ed. E. Wylie (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams &Wilkens, 2004), 623–30.

  5. Thomas Sydenham, “Epistolary Dissertation to William Cole,” in The Works of Thomas Sydenham, vol. 2, ed. R. G. Latham (London: The Sydenham Society, 1848–50), 56–118.

  6. Christopher G. Goetz, Michel Bonduelle, and Toby Gelfand, Charcot: Constructing Neurology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 172–208.

  7. See Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Invention de l’Hysterie (Paris: Macula, 1982).

  8. Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses (New York: Norton, 2011), 5.

  9. Endel Tulving, “Memory and Consciousness,” Canadian Journal of Psychology 25 (1985): 1–12.

  10. Daniel L. Schacter, Donna Rose Addis, and Randy Buckner, “Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future: The Prospective Brain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8 (2007): 657–61.

  11. William R. Gowers, “Lecture XVIII,” in Lectures of the Diagnosis of Diseases of the Brain (London: J&A Churchill, 1885), 226.

  12. Pierre Janet, “Motor Agitations—Contractions,” in The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 336.

  13. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), 46.

  14. Ernest Hilgard, Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human Thought and Action (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977), 209.

  15. P. W. Halligan et al., “Imaging Hypnotic Paralysis: Implications for Conversion Hysteria,” Lancet 355 (2000): 986–7. See also J. C. Marshall et al., “The Functional Anatomy of Hysterical Paralysis,” Cognition 64 (1997): 1–8; D. A. Oakley, “Hypnosis as Tool in Research: Experimental Psychopathology,” Contemporary Hypnosis 23 (2006): 3–14. Further, see D. A. Oakley, N. S. Ward, P. W. Halligan, and R. S. Frankowiak, “Differential Brain Activations for Malingered and Subjectively ‘Real’ Paralysis,” in Malingering and Illness Deception, ed. P. W. Halligan, C. Bass, and D. A. Oakley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 267–84.

  16. Janet, “The Psychological Conception,” in The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 159–81.

  17. Pierre Janet, quoted in Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, 47.

  18. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 226.

  19. Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2006), 497.

  20. J. Lorenz, K. Kunze, and B. Bromm, “Differentiation of Conversion Sensory Loss and Malingering by P300 in a Modified Oddball Task,” NeuroReport 9 (1998): 187–91. See also S. A. Spense et al., “Discrete Neurophysiological Correlates in Prefrontal Cortex During Hysterical and Feigned Disorder of Movement,” Lancet 355 (2000): 1243–44; N. S. Ward et al., “Differential Brain Activations During Intentionally Simulated and Subjectively Experienced Paralysis,” Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 8 (2003): 295–312.

  21. Charles D. Fox, Psychopathology of Hysteria (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1913), 192.

  22. S. Harvey, B. Stanton, and A. David, “Conversion Disorder: Towards a Neurobiological Understanding,” Journal of Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 1 (2006): 14.

  23. Phillip Slavney, Perspectives on “Hysteria” (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 29.

  24. Fabrizio Benedetti et al., “Neurobiological Mechanisms of the Placebo Effect,” Journal of Neuroscience 25 (2005): 10390–402.

  25. A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, trans. Lynn Solataroff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 139–140.

  26. E. Brown and P. Barglow, “Pseudocyesis: A Paradigm for Psychophysiological Interactions,” Archives of General Psychiatry 24 (1971): 221–29; M. Starkman et al., “Pseudocyesis: Psychologic and Neuroendocrine Relationships,” Psychosomatic Medicine 47 (1985): 46–57; G. Devane et al., “Opioid Peptides in Pseudocyesis,” Obstetrics and Gynecology 65 (1985): 183–87. See also C. Whelan and D. Stewart, “Pseudocyesis: A Review and Report of Six Cases,” International Journal of Psychiatric Medicine 20 (1990): 97–108.

  27. J. Murray and G. Abraham, “Pseudocyesis: A Review,” Obstetrics and Gynecology 51 (1978): 627–31.

  28. David D. Gilmore, Misogyny: The Male Malady (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 191.

  29. V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakesee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 218.

  30. John Hughlings Jackson, “The Croonian Lectures on Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System,” Lancet 1 (1884): 591–93; 660–63; 703–7. See also G. York and D. Steinberg, “An Introduction to the Life and Work of John Hughlings Jackson,” Medical History suppl. 26 (2007): 3–34.

  31. Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology (year), Standard Edition, vol. 1, 287–392.

  32. Valerie Voon et al., “Emotional Stimuli and Motor Conversion Disorder,” Brain 133 (2010): 1526–36.

  33. Vittorio Gallese, “Mirror Neurons and Neural Exploitation Hypothesis: From Embodied Simulation to Social Cognition,” in Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition, ed. Jaime Pineda (New York: Humana Press, 2009), 163–90.

  34. Jaak Panksepp, “The Neural Nature of the Core SELF: Implications for Schizophrenia,” in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, 197–213.

  35. Henry Stapp, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2004), 268.

  36. Merleau-Ponty, 89.

  37. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Concerning Perception in General,” in Treatise on Physiological Optics, 3rd ed., vol. 3, trans. J. P. C. Southall (New York: Dover, 1962).

  38. John Kihlstrom, “The Cognitive Unconscious,” Science 237 (1987): 1445.

  39. See Stein Bråten, ed. Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  40. Stein Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen, “From Infant Intersubjectivity and Participant Movements to Simulation and Conversation in Cultural Common Sense,” in On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy, ed. Stein Bråten (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 21–34.

  41. Vittorio Gallese, “Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 23–48.

  42. Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses, 244–45.

  43. Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1908). See also Morton Prince, “Miss Beauchamp: The Theory of the Psychogenesis of Multiple Personality,” in Clinical and Experimental Studies in Personality (Cambridge, MA: Sci-Art, 1929), 130–208.

  44. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 18.

  45. M. L. Meevisse et al., “Cortisol and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” British Journal of Psychiatry 191 (2007): 387–92.

  46. Charles S. Myers, Shell Shock in France 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 28.

  47. Ibid., 70.

  48. Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self (New York: Penguin, 2002).

  49. Mark Solms and Karen Kaplan Solms, Clinical Studies in Neuropsychoanalysis (New York: Karnac, 2002), 157–59.

  50. Myers, 71.

  51. Aleksandr R. Luria, Higher Cortical Functions in Man, 2nd ed., trans. Basil Haigh (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 292.

  52. P. Haggard, “H
uman Volition: Towards a Neuroscience of Will,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (2008): 934–46.

  53. Itzhak Fried et al., “Functional Organization of Human Supplementary Motor Cortex Studied by Electrical Stimulation,” The Journal of Neuroscience 11 (1991): 3656–66.

  54. See Benjamin Libet, “Do We Have Free Will?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999): 47–57.

  55. Stanley Cobb, Borderlands of Psychiatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944), 14–21.

  56. Ibid., 18.

  57. Ibid., 120–21.

  58. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonse Lingis (Evanston, IL: Norwestern University Press, 1968), 262.

  59. Kenneth S. Bowers, “Hypnosis and Healing,” Australian Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 7 (1979): 261–77.

  60. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (New York: Dover, 2001), 335.

  Suicide and the Drama of Self-Consciousness

  1. G. M. Burrows, “Suicide,” in The History of Suicide in England, 1650–1850, vol. 7, ed. Paul Seaver (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 417.

  2. K. Hawton, J. Fagg, and P. Marsack, “Association Between Epilepsy and Attempted Suicide,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 43 (1980): 168–70. See also A. Verrotti, A. Ciconetti, and F. M. Ferro, “Epilepsy and Suicide: Pathogenesis, Risk Factors and Prevention,” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 4 (2008): 365–70.

  3. George Howe Colt, November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide (New York: Scribner, 1991), 356.

  4. John Mann, “Neurobiology of Suicide Behavior,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 819–28; John Mann, “The Role of the Serotonergic System in the Pathogenesis of Major Depression and Suicidal Behavior,” Neuropsychopharmacology 21 (1999): 99–105; Michael Stanley and John Mann, “Increased Serotonin-2 Binding Sites in Frontal Cortex of Suicide Victims,” The Lancet 321 (1983): 214–16.

  5. V. Arango et al., “Genetics of Serotonergic System in Suicidal Behavior,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 37 (2003): 375–86.

  6. See Jef Akst, “Suicide Gene Identified,” The Scientist, November 16, 2011; Ian Sample, “Gene That Raises Suicide Risk Identified,” The Guardian, November 14, 2011.

  7. Gustavo Turecki, “Dissecting the Suicide Phenotype: The Role of Impulsive Aggressive Behaviors,” Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 30 (2005): 398–408.

  8. P. O. McGowan et al., “Broad Epigenetic Signature of Maternal Care in the Brain of Adult Rats,” PLoS ONE 6 (2011), doi:1371/journal.pone.0014739.

  9. Michael J. Meaney, “Maternal Care, Gene Expression, and the Transmission of Individual Differences in Stress Reactivity Across Generations,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 24 (2001): 1161–92.

  10. B. Labonté and G. Turecki, “The Epigenetics of Depression and Suicide,” in Brain, Behavior and Epigenetics, ed. A. Petronis and J. Mills (Heidelberg: Springer, 2011), 49–70.

  11. P. O. McGowan et al., “Epigenetic Regulation of Glucocorticoid Receptor in Human Brain Associates with Childhood Abuse,” Nature Neuroscience 12 (2009): 342–48.

  12. Edwin Shneidman, “Suicide,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 21 (Chicago: William Benton, 1973), 383.

  13. Udo Grashoff, ed., Let Me Finish (London: Headline, 2006), 138.

  14. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 291.

  15. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind (New York: Pantheon, 2010).

  16. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (1849; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13.

  17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, 88.

  18. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 293–294.

  19. Jean Améry, On Suicide, trans. J. D. Barlow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 106–7.

  20. Sarah Kane, 4:48 Psychosis, in Complete Plays (London: Methuan Contemporary Dramatists, 2001), 226.

  21. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

  22. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood: Structures, Dynamics and Change (New York: Guilford Press, 2007), 392.

  23. K. Adam, A. E. Sheldon-Keller, and M. West, “Attachment Organization and History of Suicidal Behavior in Clinical Adolescents,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 64 (1996): 264–72.

  24. Kane, 240.

  25. S. Stepp, J. Q. Morse, and P. A. Pilkonis, “The Roles of Attachment Styles and Interpersonal Problems in Suicide Related Behaviors,” Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 38 (2008): 592–611.

  26. John G. Gundersen, “Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ontogeny of a Diagnosis,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 166 (2009): 531.

  27. Hans R. Agrawal et al., “Attachment Studies with Borderline Patients: A Review,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 12 (2004): 99.

  28. Sabine C. Herpertz and Katja Bertsch, “A New Perspective on the Pathophysiology of Borderline Personality Disorder: A Model of the Role of Oxytocin,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 172 (2015): 840.

  29. Michael Kosfeld et al., “Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans,” Nature 435 (2005): 673–76.

  30. Kenneth Levy et al., “An Attachment Theoretical Framework for Personality Disorders,” Canadian Psychology 56 (2015): 200.

  31. G. R. Hosey and L. J. Skyner, “Self-Injurious Behavior in Zoo Primates,” International Journal of Primatology 28 (2012): 1431–37; M. A. Novak, “Self-Injurious Behavior in Rhesus Monkeys: New Insights into Its Etiology, Physiology, and Treatment,” American Journal of Primatology 59 (2003): 3–19.

  32. K. A. Van Orden, T. E. Joiner, et al., “The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide,” Psychological Review 117 (2010): 580.

  33. Sylvia Plath, “Sheep in Fog,” in Ariel (New York: Harper Perennials, 1999), 3.

  34. P. A. Rosenthal et al., “Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors in Depressed Hospitalized Pre-Schoolers,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 40 (1986): 201–12.

  35. Michael Lewis, “Self Conscious Emotional Development,” in The Self-Conscious Emotions, ed. L. J. Tracy, R. W. Robins, and J. P. Tangney (New York: The Guilford Press, 2007), 134–52.

  36. Paul Ekman, “Basic Emotions,” in The Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. T. Dagleich and T. Power (Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 45–60.

  37. J. Li, L. Wang, and K. W. Fischer, “The Organization of Chinese Shame Concepts,” Cognition and Emotion 18 (2004): 767–97.

  38. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1991), 397.

  39. Siri Hustvedt, “Three Emotional Stories,” in Living, Thinking, Looking (New York: Picador, 2012), 175–95.

  40. Erwin Ringel, “The Pre-Suicidal Syndrome and Its Relation to Dynamic Psychiatry,” Dynamische Psychiatrie 12 (1979): 1–14.

  41. Al Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Norton, 1990), 105.

  42. Shneidman, “Suicide,” 384.

  43. Zdzislaw Ryn, “Suicides in the Nazi Concentration Camps,” Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 16 (1986): 419–33.

  44. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. S. Rosenfeld and S. P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 94.

  45. Antonin Artaud, “On Suicide,” Artaud Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), 56.

  46. Antonin Artaud, “The Umbilicus of Limbo,” Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1976), 65.

  47. Virginia Woolf, quoted in Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: The Life of Virginia Woolf (London: Routledge, 1986), 243.

  48. Thomas Joiner, Why People Die by Suicide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  49. Cesare Pavese, quoted in Davide Lajolo, An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese, trans. Mark Pietralunga (New York: New Directions, 1983), 69.

  50. Vir
ginia Woolf, Letters, ed. N. Nicholson and J. Trautman, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80), 374.

  51. Cesare Pavese, quoted in Erwin Shneidman, Suicide as Psychache: A Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 132.

  52. Ibid., 115.

  53. Ibid., 133.

  54. “What Is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy?” www.nacbt.org/whatiscbt.htm.

  55. Jesse Prinz, Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind (New York: Norton, 2012), 242.

  56. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, part 2, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 212.

  57. Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 64.

  58. Chris R. Brewin, “Understanding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Retrieval Competition Account,” Behavior Research and Therapy 44 (2006): 769.

  59. John Watkins, “Enquiry into Causes of Suicide, Particularly Among the English and Remedies of the Evil Suggested in ‘The Peeper: A Collection of Essays,’ ” in P. Seaver, The History of Suicide in England, vol. 5, (Routledge, 2012), 365.

  Subjunctive Flights: Thinking Through the Embodied Reality of Imaginary Worlds

  1. Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1: 1 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 56.

  2. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 171.

  3. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: A Norton Critical Edition, 4th ed., ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton, 2003), 20.

  4. Poulet, 56.

  5. Colin Radford, “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?,” in Arguing About Art, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 165–75.

  6. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), 285.

  7. Kendall Walton, “Fearing Fictions,” in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 307–19.