This short film enacts the imagined voices of hysterical patients that visited Sigmund Freud during his time practicing psychoanalysis at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. 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 women’s symptoms are put together to form the lyrics. This work conjures a choral haunting of all the hysterics that visited this place and 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.
With thanks to Joseph Costi for the collaborative sound production.