“So you construe the Y2K crisis as some sort of success story!” said Eyre in astonishment.
So we overestimated the crisis, I said.
Steppenwolf Strikes a Nerve
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Grace, a Steppenwolf subscriber, settled into her seat for Hysteria expecting a “comic farce.” There were reasons for her to think so. Playwright Terry Johnson and artistic director Martha Lavey had called the play a farce in Backstage, the company’s quarterly magazine. The program notes explained that Hysteria reimagined a 1938 encounter between Freud and a “buoyant” Salvador Dali while compressing the last month of Freud’s life into a single “outlandish” night. Steppenwolf was headlining its advertising, “A madcap comedy about Freud, Dali and a naked woman!”
She wrote letters describing her experience to director John Malkovich and to the Reader. To Malkovich she said that the scene left her “frozen back in time to the brink of my own memory—one I have not yet been able to fully remember.” She described herself to him as a professional woman who works with other victims of childhood sexual abuse, “some of whom are fragile, fearful and sad human beings, whose lives are filled with guilt, pain, and utter confusion.” Grace pulled herself together and returned for the second act, but she wasn’t sure her clients could all be as strong. A warning to the public, she suggested, would be “most responsible.”
At any rate, Grace’s frantic retreat from Johnson’s play gives a glimpse of the volatile context it can be placed in. Johnson was by no means the first to wonder if Freud was wrong when he attributed sexual “hysteria” to women’s childhood fantasies of sleeping with their fathers. It was psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson who in the early 1980s championed the idea that Freud had got it right when he originally assumed the incest had actually happened. As projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, Masson studied Freud’s old papers and then wrote a book, The Assault on Truth, arguing that Freud capitulated to the establishment lions who wanted sexual abuse left in the closet.
