Art Criticism - The State University of New York

36 Freud and Breuer, 37.
37 Su'ch a psycho/soma relationship is a key link to the larger issue of this paper,
that is, decadence.
38 The Goncourt Brothers often stated that they were hysterical, they just did not
understand why.
39 Edmund continued to write the Journal after Jules' death in 1870. See Robert
Baldick, ed. Pagesfrom the Goncourt Journal (New York: Penguin Books,
1984.) .
40 David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1995), 46.
41 Robert Baldick, ed. Pages from the Goncourt Journal (New York: Penguin
Books, 1984) .'
42 Ibid. vi.
43 Edmund details his first sexual experience with a hideous creature "with a
rhomboidal torso fitted with two little arms and two little legs, which, in bed,
made her look like a crab on its back." In his initial sexual experience, Jules
contracted syphilis that eventually caused his death twenty years later .
. Throughout their
lives, both men displayed disgust for relations with women: "one week of love
disgusts us for three months." (Robert Haldick, ed~ Pages from the Goncourt
Journal, vi).
44 Weir, 46.
45 Weir, 48.
46 Ibid, 5i.
47 Elaine Showalter WI.
48 Elaine Showalter 83.
49 Veith, 274.
50 Christopher Bollas' Hysteria traces the history of hysteria through Freud and
recognizes hysteria under its new name, borderline personality disorder.
51 See Elaine Showalter Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
52 Quoted in Showalter, 17.
53 I am using the term "crowd" in an abstract sense, meaning the general masses as
influenced by various media-print, television, films, etc.
54 Robert E. Park, The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1972), II.
55 Park, 12.
56MPD was renamed "Dissociative Identity Disorder" in the DSM-IV, 1994.
However, much of the discourse about this disorder, which I want to focus on
here, was written before 1994, which is why I will use the older term MPD.
57 Showalter, 165.
58 Showalter 168. Originally in Mark Pendergrast, Victory of Memory: Incest
Accusations and Shattered Lives (Hinesburg, Vt.: Upper Access, 1995), 170-1.
59 Nordau, 36.
60 I do not mean here to dismiss CFS and MPD as "fictional maladies." I recognize
and respect their reality, but they have to be connected to the larger tradition of
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Art Criticism