This suite of short films, made around the streets of Vienna, enact the imagined footsteps of hysterical patients that visited Sigmund Freud during his time practicing psychoanalysis at Berggasse 19. The sound piece is produced using texts from Sharon Young’s book Ms. B; The Hysterical Episodes in which excerpts from Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1896) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), which focus on the protagonists’ symptoms of hysteria, are vocalised by the artist and layered as a chorus. Echoing around Vienna this work conjures a choral haunting of all the hysterics that visited this place. Alongside the ambient noise, which situates this historical research in the present day, these fragmented films facilitate a connection with voices of today with those of ‘yesteryear’ and seek an acknowledgment of the hysterical voice that was, and is still, so often dismissed.
This art work evolved from Sharon Young’s PhD research Once More with feeling; A Reinvention of Hysteria using photography, performance and autofiction.
With thanks to Joseph Costi for the collaborative sound production and Karen Bosy for help with filming.