ABSTRACT
In the inaugural text of classical psychoanalysis, Josef Breuer’s and Sigmund Freud’s 1895 Studies on Hysteria, a remarkable amount of attention is given to bodies, and to body parts, that will not or cannot move. The first of the five case histories collected in Studies, Breuer’s account of his treatment of Anna O., and the last, Freud’s account of his treatment of Elisabeth von R., contain especially fascinating and often overlooked notions of the relationship between the body and truth, the body and time, and the body and language. Here, I would like to recast the usual critical approach to Studies on Hysteria that accents the invention of the talking cure, and review another hope for a physical cure that these early case histories also express. This cure had as its foundation a deep faith in the “truth” of bodily performances.
