The question of hysteria in women has been around for well over two thousand years, with Hippocrates using the term which is Greek for the uterus. It has been a common enough topic in cinema during its 130 year history, and we will be looking at how film, for good and ill, has presented hysterical states in women on screen — from A Woman Under the Influence (1973) to Tar (2022), from Possession (1981) to The Piano Teacher (2001). We will also look at the different ways Jung and Freud approached the subject and how some films lean towards the extrovert claims of the former, others to the traumatic and unconscious pull of hysteria’s source in the latter. Both thinkers would have been inclined to acknowledge it as a disorder of the ‘noisy type’, as Freud proposed, and thus a very good subject for a medium that has often lent itself to the melodramatic and the overblown. Not all the characters we will discuss “lives out a chaos that is destroying her”, as David Thomson describes Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence. But whether it is Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher, or Lydia Tar in Tar, Nina in Black Swan (2010), or the titular character in Malina (1991), film often illustrates what Elfriede Jelinek has called the chaos of the organs, with no organ potentially deemed more chaotic than the uterus and the hysteria that is deemed to ensue. 

Initial onscreen depictions of female hysteria, melancholy and neuroses tended to be predicated on showing women as either victims of mental health breakdown (The Three Faces of Eve: Johnson, 1957), often triggered by childhood trauma, or caused by experiencing deliberate abuse at the hands of callous males (e.g. Gaslight, Cukor, 1944). It is the contention of this talk that contemporary cinematic representations of women’s mental health struggles have now evolved to demonstrate how female hysteria, melancholy and neuroses are, in part, natural and understandable reactions to oppressive gender ideologies and can be analysed and understood as such from a post-Jungian perspective. Further analysis of the chosen texts will demonstrate how both screwball comedy and slow cinema not only undermine these gender ideologies, but also reveal the deeper psychic resilience of the female protagonists within their contemporaneous settings.