`Stendhal`s Syndrome`

STENDHAL'S SYNDROME*
Pauline O'Callaghan
The name 'Stendhal's Syndrome' was first given by the psychiatrist
Graziella Magherini in about 1988 to a strange illness which seems to
afflict a proportion of visitors to Florence. Tourists arrive at the psychiatric
unit of Santa Maria hospital in Florence suffering from symptoms ranging
from a strong sense of unease to an acute psychical breakdown. It would
appear that the sight of the artistic masterpieces of the city, as well as the
overwhelming sense of the passage of time in the buildings and streets,
provokes these disturbing symptoms, which may include dizziness, panic
attacks, paranoia, confusion, and often cause a profound shaking of the
patient's sense of personal identity. These episodes are usually of short
duration, and benign.
According to Magherini,1 the necessary conditions include being a
sensitive and impressionable personality who has undergone the stress of
travel and has arrived at a city like Florence, which is haunted by the
ghosts of famous people, and is imbued with a sense of art, death, and
history. Sufferers are most often single females, aged between twenty-six
and forty, usually travelling alone. All were well when they left home. Dr
Magherini, who is also a Freudian psychoanalyst, believes that the art trip
may be considered as a form of soul journey, an opportunity to gain in
self-knowledge, but that it may provoke an emotional crisis, which not
everyone is capable of coping with to the same degree. Her research into
the illness has shown her that these sufferers are in fact experiencing in an
extreme form something which ordinary travellers on art-trips experience
to a lesser extent.
There are three different types of disturbance, the mildest being
panic attacks and an anxiety which is somatized in the form of
* This paper was presented at the 10th annual congress of APPI, 15th November 2003.
G. Magherini. La sindrome di Stendhal (1989). Milano, Ponte alle Grazie srl, 2003.
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palpitations, breathing difficulties, dizziness and the development of a
vague sense of unreality. Those suffering feel a need to go home, to get
back to their own country and to speak their own language. The other
two varieties are more serious. The first involves emotional disturbances,
and manifests itself as depression, outbursts of crying, irrational guilt
feelings and deep anxiety, or else overexcitement, euphoria and loss of
inhibition; the second involves thought disturbance, with altered
perception of sound and colour and persecutory feelings.
Magherini has called this illness Stendhal's Syndrome, as it was
Stendhal, the great French novelist and art critic, who first described the
symptoms after his trip to Florence in January 1817, where, during his
visit to the church of Santa Croce, he was obliged to leave, overcome by
feelings of unease at the beauty of the church and the sense of mortality
provoked by the sight of the tombs and monuments of Machiavelli,
Galileo and Michelangelo.
In his book Rome, Naples and Florence, 1817, Stendhal describes his
reaction, which brings to mind Jones's notion of aphanisis: 'On leaving
Santa Croce, I had palpitations; all the life went out of me, as I walked I was afraid
I would fall/
An exaggerated emotional reponse to beauty and to art, whether
pleasurable or painful, is nothing new. Some of the symptoms associated
with Stendhal's syndrome are reminiscent of descriptions of the Sublime
in the eighteenth century. Edmund Burke distinguished between what
was beautiful and what was sublime by saying that pleasure is derived
from beauty, and pain from sublimity. He claimed that terror is in all
cases the ruling principle of the sublime.
Meanwhile, in France, sensibility was defined by Diderot as:
that disposition which accompanies weak bodily organs, and
which results from mobility of the diaphragm, liveliness of the
imagination and sensitivity of the nerves, inclining us to pity,
to shudder, to admire, to fear, to be disturbed, to weep, to lose
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our reason, to exaggerate, to be mad.2
Tourist illness has existed for the past 200 years. Magherini
suggests that the modern package tour has become too dissatisfying for
the average traveller. She wonders whether this lack of the possibility of
adventure has led to the longing for the possibility of an internal
adventure - just as Lucy Honeychurch feels in E.M Forster's Room With a
View, also, coincidentally, set in Florence.
A similar affliction to Stendhal's syndrome is the Jerusalem
syndrome, where tourists to Jerusalem are overcome by the mental weight
of its history and significance. Many feel a need to dress up as biblical
figures, often preaching at the 'Wailing Wall'. Normally only twenty
tourists a year require hospitalisation, but coming up to the Millennium
the figure rose to fifty a week. The main obvious difference between this
and Stendhal's syndrome seems to be the greater emphasis here on the
religious aspect. Looked at from the point of view of Lacan's matrix of the
co-ordinates of anxiety3 there is often an acting out in the Jerusalem
syndrome in a very public way, and then embarrassment a few days later
when they recover. In Stendhal's syndrome, by contrast, sufferers seem to
pass along the axis of movement through emotion and dismay.
What does travelling in itself signify? Freud addresses this question
in A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis4 and suggests that it is to do
with escaping from home and the restrictions imposed by the father.
Many of the symptoms of Stendhal's syndrome bring to mind the travels
of Freud, and his mysterious anxieties, from his phobia about travelling on
trains to what he called his 'neurotic desire' for many years to visit Rome.
This desire was tempered by his reluctance to do so, and of course the
disturbance of memory he experienced at the Acropolis, in Athens, which
he finally analysed as a form of guilt because he had gone further than his
2
Diderot. Paradoxe sur le comedien. Quoted in A. Brookner. The Genius of the Future:
Studies in French Art Criticism. London, Phaidon. 1971. p. 21.
3
J. Lacan. Seminar X, Anxiety. 1962-1963. Trans. C. Gallagher (unpublished).
4
S. Freud. A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis. S.E., XXH. pp. 238-248.
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father and because an overwhelmingly powerful wish of his had been
fulfilled. And it was too good to be true. He called the experience a
'derealisation', a sense of 'what I see here is not real/5
One of Magherini's patients, Franz, spent hours looking at the
paintings in the Uffizi 'with his heart and his head burning'.6 His eyes saw
colours he had never seen. Blinded with too much light he removed
himself to a secure distance, and felt exhausted and anxious. It seemed to
Franz that some of the paintings could see inside him. He felt torn
between a passionate admiration for the paintings and an aggressive
desire to vandalise them. He wanted to know what was behind, inside,
not at the front of the painting. The paintings appeared to move and to
invite him to possess them. They breathed like living beings. He felt a
capacity for love which was unusual for him.
There are obvious echoes of Melanie Klein's 'paranoid-schizoid
position' here as well as the struggle to move to the 'depressive position'.
The paintings evoked a strong maternal significance for Franz. He was
drawn in particular to Caravaggio's Bacchus whose ambiguous sexuality
has proved disturbing to many tourists. He had to leave the room but
could not resist returning, feeling a sexual excitement that was both
pleasurable and disturbing. He began to feel heart pains, he came out in a
cold sweat and he felt faint.
Another patient was Kamil, a young Czech artist, for whom the
visit to Italy was a long planned dream come true. He packed in as much
as possible into his few days in Florence, finally visiting the Brancacci
chapel where he was overcome by the frescoes of Masaccio, particularly
those showing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
He came out onto the steps and collapsed, losing all sense of reality,
feeling that his whole self was leaving his body like a liquid and
dissolving. The only thing that anchored him was the thought of his bed
in Prague which he longed for. Then, after what seemed a long time, he
began to come back to life, sensing beside him an apparition of a young
5
6
S. Freud. Letter to Romain Rolland. A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, op.cit.
G. Magherini. op.cit. p. 66. (my translation).
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beautiful woman whom he took to be a prostitute. Magherini interprets
the bed as a 'container' for Kamil in the Bion mode. 7
It would appear from Kamil's account that the encounter with the
work of art can in some way resemble the encounter with the therapist.
He felt his boundaries collapsing as he spilled out and was contained.
There was something 'authentic' for him in his encounter with Masaccio
and he trusted him. Kamil's story also illustrates the turning towards the
protective mother figure mediated through the art: he longed for home,
for his own bed, he visualised a prostitute offering him sensual comfort.
As with Freud on the Acropolis the most incredible discovery for him is
that 'these things exist! These things "are". You realise that everything they
taught you exists and is true1/8
Isabelle, a young French teacher with a party of schoolchildren, felt
a sudden aversion towards certain paintings and had a desire to slash
them. Terrified of committing this 'passage a Vacte', she fell ill with intense
agitation and phobic depression. The portraits seemed so real that she
could not tolerate that fact that the subjects of these paintings were dead.
It would seem that Franz's and Isabelle's experiences give us perhaps
some insight into the motives of those who attack great works of art,
where political and other motives have been ruled out.
Ariel, a Jewish painter, born in Jerusalem, was greatly affected by
an exhibition of Chagall paintings in Nice, particularly by the colours
which drew him into the painting and then appeared to squeeze him out
leaving him exhausted in a way very reminiscent of what Lacan describes
in his second seminar when he says that the T finds its unity in the image
of the other: 'And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the deceiving and
realised image, of the other, or equally by its own specular image. That is where it
finds its unity.'9
7
G. Magherini. op.cit. p. 74.
s ibid, p. 75.
9
J.Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J-A. Miller. Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory
and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli. Cambridge, C.U.P.,
1988. p. 54.
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%
Caravaggio is mentioned very frequently in relation to Stendhal's
Syndrome. The Narcissus of Caravaggio portrays the young Narcissus
bending over a pond to admire himself. His knee seems to protrude out of
the painting. A young American tourist found this greatly disturbing. For
him the knee was a phallic symbol, but what disturbed him most of all
was the fact that he, the viewer, could see the reflection of the knee in the
water but that this reflection would not be visible to the figure of
Narcissus in the painting because of the angle he was at. The idea of
Narcissus, falling in love with his own reflection, and then falling into the
abyss is obviously a very disturbing one. He is both the spectator of his
fall, reflected by the water, and he who falls.
Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality describes
scopophilia as a component instinct of sexuality.10 He associates
scopophilia with the taking of other people as objects, subjecting them to a
curious and controlling gaze. The body which sees is both visible and part
of the world it sees.
Lacan uses the word 'gaze' to indicate that individuals are caught
up in the scopic held of others. The gaze is fundamentally different from
the 'eye' or the 'look'. It suggests a network of relations while the latter is
from only one point, a point or scotoma, from which individuals are blind
to themselves. For Lacan the gaze is always the gaze of desire. For Lacan,
anxiety acts as a hinge between puissance and desire.11 It is an index of the
Other that is too close or too full. The interaction between the viewer and
the work of art can have an effect that may be both disturbing and
enriching. For Lacan, the real is something left over after the subject has
entered the Symbolic Order. This remainder /reminder can irrupt into the
domain of the symbolic in the guise of disturbing bodily images, as for
example in the case of the young American tourist described above.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan describes
the sudden ambush of the look as a moment when the voyeur, primed at
10
S. Freud. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., VH. pp. 125-243.
R. Harari. Lacan''s Seminar on Anxiety. Trans. Jane Lamb-Ruiz. Ed. Rico Franses. New
York, Other Press. 2001. p. 133.
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the keyhole, is surprised, disturbed, by a 'gaze that overwhelms him and
reduces him to a feeling of shame.'12
Some commentators see Stendhal's syndrome as simply a
manifestation of the 'uncanny'. In his essay on the subject Freud tells us
that people vary greatly in their sensitivity to the uncanny, that it is
related to that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known
of old, and long familiar, and that something has to be added to this to
make it uncanny, possibly intellectual uncertainty..13 The uncanny refers
to what ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.
Feelings of the uncanny are aroused in us when there is a doubt as to
whether something or someone is alive or dead.
The uncanny is associated with the eyes, the fear of losing them or
having damage caused to them and we may recall that Lacan locates
anxiety with 'seeing' and 'wanting to know' and coming too close to the
'Big Other'. Freud of course tells us that the fear of going blind is often
enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The Uncanny is
manifested in the phenomenon of the 'double' as investigated by Otto
Rank, and as explored in his theories with regard to reflections in mirrors,
shadows, fear of death, and guardian angels.14
Dismembered limbs and so on are uncanny because of their
associated proximity to the castration complex. For many men there is
something uncanny about the female genitals. Caravaggio's Head of the
Medusa in the Uffizi Gallery is particularly striking. Freud pointed out
that it represents the castrated female genitals.15 It seems clear that many
of the aspects of the uncanny which are listed by Freud occur several
times in the case histories of sufferers of Stendhal's Syndrome as described
by Magherini.
Lacan suggests that we should picture the instrument that carries
12
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. ED. J.A. Miller. Book XI. The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. A Sheridan. London, Penguin Books, 1994.
13
S. Freud. The Uncanny. S.E., XVH. pp. 219-256.
14 O. Rank. The Double. Trans. H. Tucker. Chapel Hill, UNCP. (1914) 1971.
is S. Freud. The Medusa's Head. S.E., XVuT. pp. 273-274.
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out our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or a
photographic apparatus or something of the kind. It is therefore perhaps
not surprising that art should be implicated in these mental disturbances.
What is a painting but a mirror held up to nature? We now know that
artists used lenses and mirrors and the science of optics, at least since the
early fifteenth century to help with their paintings and often actually
introduced them into the painting to make us even more aware of the gaze
of the artist and our position as a voyeur. This technique was used for
example in The Arnolfini Wedding, by Van Eyck and in Velasquez's las
Meninas, and it is indeed some of these very paintings, and others where
we are challenged by the look of the sitter, which seem to cause the most
unease in the mind of the viewer.
Perhaps it is not surprising that so many visitors to the famous
galleries of the world no longer look directly at the paintings but instead
record the whole tour on their camcorder with the, perhaps unconscious,
intention of viewing it safely in their own home. Even wandering around
a great art city such as Florence or Venice can provoke the most intense
feelings of mortality and the transience of time, as I experienced myself
when I wandered recently into the Hotel Metropole (formerly Casa Kirsch)
in Venice, where Freud himself had written to his wife in 1895 telling her
about the Venetian mirror he was sending her.16
Magherini says that the expressive force of great works of art can
awaken the deepest contents of the unconscious, causing to emerge some
aspects which are familiar but repressed, and therefore forgotten, from
one's own mental history. These ideas are very similar to Julia Kristeva's
theory of the pre-symbolic semiotic, which Kristeva would see as an
important component in the creative work of writers, musicians and
artists and which manifests itself through colour, form and composition in
art.17 It would appear that in viewing a painting there may be a
16
S. Freud. II nostro cuore volge al sud. Lettere di viaggio. Sopratutto dall'Italia. (1895-1923).
Ed. C. Togel. (2002). Trans. G. Rovagnati. Milano, RCS Libri S.p.A., 2003. p. 52.
17
J. Kristeva. 'Desire in Language' in The Portable Kristeva. Ed. K. Oliver . New York,
Columbia University Press, 1997. pp. 93-115.
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recognition of deeply emotional pre-symbolic affects, closely connected to
the maternal. It would also appear that the work of art may serve as a
mediator between the subject and the issue which is most painful and/or
repressed and unresolved for him or her, be it sexual orientation, fear of
mortality, envy of the mother, identity or desire. In that sense, it would
appear that the traveller who sets out to visit the art capitals of the world
may in fact experience his or her most intense discoveries in the deep
recesses of the mind.
Address for Correspondence:
24 Maxwell Road
Rathmines
Dublin 6
e-mail: pocall@iol.ie
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