2019 Final Girls Berlin Film Festival Program 2019 Final Girls Berlin Film Festival Program | Page 6

1.2 FREITAG FRIDAY
talk: Hysteria
and Demonic Possession: A
16:30h Psychoanalytic Investigation - Mary Wild
In a letter to Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud described a hysteric patient as being “at a
loss to find words. With time, she became almost completely deprived of words, putting
them together laboriously out of four or five languages […] In spite of making great
efforts to speak, she was unintelligible, unable to say a single syllable.”
This talk focuses on cinematic representations of demonic possession as a manifestation
of unresolved unconscious conflict. Iconic depictions of possession are startlingly similar
to fits of hysteria, where language no longer functions normally. Sensorimotor
symptoms (e.g., nervous tics, fainting spells, hyperventilation, convulsions, violently
thrashing around, etc.) are psychoanalytically interpreted as revealing the origin of
trauma.
The premise is that certain words, memories, experiences and impulses over time
become ‘trapped’ in the interior psychic space, forced under house-arrest in the
hysteric’s body. The repressed content gains potency as it roams around, possessing
various parts of the subject. Instead of the wandering womb, it is the banished signifier
that wanders, seeking expression! The hysteric stores sensations in her body, fashioning
them into future symptoms. Her body stands in as a warped communicative device,
indicative of unconscious activity: her symptoms do all the talking for her.
Films mentioned: The Exorcist (1973), Possession (1981), The Entity (1982), Paranormal
Activity (2007), Satanic (2016) and Under the Shadow (2016)
Mary Wild is the creator of the PROJECTIONS lecture series at Freud Museum London,
applying psychoanalysis to film interpretation. Her interests include cinematic
representations of mental illness, identity and the unconscious in the genres of horror,
science fiction and documentary.