House of Hysteria - Sharon Kivland, ONE OR TWO THINGS THEY KNOW ABOUT HER

About

In 1999 Book Works published A Case of Hysteria, in which Sharon Kivland followed Sigmund Freud’s analysis of a young woman, ‘Dora’ (Ida Bauer). The book merges many voices and confusions of identity arise. Indeed, it turns on a matter of voice. There is a long chapter that appears to be a play, with many characters. They are those who have written about the case (a ‘fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’), their words extracted as dialogue when they assert something – a speculation – about ‘Dora’ for there is no textual evidence in Freud’s account or ‘fragment’. To this impossible dramatisation the author added the stage directions of a twentieth-century play, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. One or two things they know about her has never been performed, though its performance has been imagined. Originally for seventy voices, including those of Jacques Lacan, Sarah Kofman, and Octave Mannoni, it has been adapted for twenty voices for Pressure Chamber: Nematodes hosted by House of Hysteria as a read-through or table work, with the author as dramaturge.