Speaking Flesh

Speaker: Dr. Tanya Lecchi

As an introduction to the webinar series, Dr Tanya Lecchi will explore the often uneasy relationship between literature and psychoanalysis – two disciplines frequently assumed to share interpretive ground, yet whose encounters more often reveal disjunction than convergence. Rather than collapsing one into the service of the other, this session invites participants to consider how friction, rather than affinity, can become a generative site of inquiry – where the resistances, contradictions, and asymmetries between clinical thinking and literary form open up new ways of reading both text and psyche (Freer, 2019).

Psychoanalysis often seeks to restore meaning to symptoms by decoding the hidden logic behind them, treating the body as a site where unconscious conflict is made manifest and may be interpreted. By contrast, poetics celebrates the opacity and irreducibility of language, emphasising how meaning fractures and multiplies in the spaces between words. Rather than aiming for clarity and resolution, poetics embraces ambiguity, silence, and metaphor as forms of resistance to total interpretation.

The session will focus on how to cultivate a disruptive dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis, allowing their fundamental differences to illuminate how psychic pain is expressed when language fails. Here, the body is not simply a bearer of symptoms, but a poetic text – an enigmatic expression of desire, fear, and loss that resists full translation into discourse. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein powerfully exemplifies this intersection. Through Victor Frankenstein, Shelley dramatises the limits of language and explores how repression, guilt, and the constraints of gendered emotional expression produce a fractured self. Victor’s pain is articulated through hysterical symptoms, revealing the embodied nature of mental distress and the difficulties of emotional expression shaped by cultural and gendered norms.

Speaker: Helena C. Aeberli

The government of this mighty Prince, Hunger, is (as other Empires) liable to great and dangerous disorders, sometimes too remiss and dissolute, sometimes corrupt, and sometimes tyrannic.
Walter Charleton, 1680.

Despite their conventional depiction as a modern phenomenon, eating disorders were a significant source of concern in early modern England. But what did ‘disordered eating’ mean in a seventeenth-century context? How and why were these disorders significant? And with what cultural meanings and anxieties did they become entangled? This paper will explore two aspects of premodern eating disorders: their rich metaphoric potential and their material presence in medical practice. Physicians across the century recognised and debated three distinct disorders: diminished, excessive, and depraved appetites. Meanwhile, an extensive print literature presented disordered appetites to a popular audience, often drawing on ideas about gender, morality, monstrosity, and the preservation of social order within the body politic.

Following Susan Bordo’s reassessment of anorexia nervosa as ‘the crystallisation of culture’, this paper will suggest that eating disorders are at least partially culturally-constructed, and thus revealing about the wider psychosocial tensions of a particular time and place. Moreover, in drawing attention to what Susan Sontag famously termed ‘illness as metaphor’, it will argue that contemporary discourses of food, appetite, and eating disorders remain enmeshed in imagistic, moralistic, and often stigmatising language. Paying particular attention to concepts of gender and monstrosity, it will suggest the relevance for clinicians of examining the historical roots and cultural associations of disease concepts still in use today.

Speaker: Madhurima Sen

Speaker: Orestis Tzirtzilakis

In this live webinar, Orestis Tzirtzilakis explores how the 19th century neurological reading of hysteria was reappropriated by writers and artists. In focusing on the early work of Sigmund Freud, this session will trace the disorder in comparison with its later literary and visual manifestations.

In 1886, Sigmund Freud submitted a report on his studies in Paris, expressing admiration for the work on hysteria conducted by his mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot’s work at the Salpêtrière Hospital became famous for turning hysteria into a public (and sexualized) spectacle: from his Tuesday lectures and media debates on hypnotic suggestion to its later reappropriation by Surrealists artist and early 20th century writers. However, following Charcot’s neurological work, Freud sought to demystify the condition by dissociating it from genital pathology—its name deriving from the ancient Greek word for the uterus (hystera)—and to reject its long-standing association with simulation and malingering.

In the first part of this live webinar, Orestis will examine Freud’s early thinking on hysteria, culminating in Studies on Hysteria (1895), co-authored with Josef Breuer. He will trace Freud’s references to the neurological history of the disorder and its subsequent translation into literature and visual culture of the 19th century and early 20th century.

In the second part, the discussion will broaden to explore the disorder’s afterlife in culture. Participants will reflect on their own gendered readings of hysteria and consider how artistic practices challenge the medical canon’s erasure of the condition, asking: does hysteria still haunt us today?