What the heck is Hysteria? ( Chapter 1 ) (original) (raw)
Related papers
HYSTERIA: A HISTORY IN TWO STAGES
History and Philosophy of Psychology Section & UK Critical Psychiatry Network Joint Conference, 2016
The observation of the narratives on the history of hysteria reveals that those who elaborated them did not always take into account the fundamentally historiographical aspect of the proposal, taking some inferences as historical facts. This slip gave rise to narratives that should not be classified as history, but rather as mythologies. The historical path of hysteria often begins in Egyptian medicine, follows a continuum through Hippocrates, the witches of the Middle Ages, the vapours of Illuminism, the Salpêtrière, Charcot and then Freud. However, from a historiographical point of view, (and avoiding anachronism), this path might not be so safe. This paper reviews that trajectory and proposes that the history of hysteria would unfolds in two stages, distinguishing hysteria, disease of the uterus, from hysteria, a neurosis. A bridge between the two conceptions would have been established by Thomas Sydenham, in 1682, in the Epistolary Discourse to the Learned Dr. William Cole.
Hysteria: rise and fall of a baffling disease. A review on history of ideas in medicine
Journal of Psychopathology, 2022
The article presents a synthesis of the main stages in the construction of the conceptual entity targeted as hysteria. Hysteria is here presented as a Renaissance product, virtually dismissed by neurologists in the early 1900 but definitively waned only in 1987 and 1993 after having moved from neurology to psychiatry. Its history represents a challenging subject in the theme of objective knowledge in science, drawing our attention to the burden of the political choices taken by an epistemic community within knowledge production, legitimation and validation aiming for a scientific understanding of the world.
Medical History
Sabine Arnaud's book is the translation of L'invention de l'hystérie au temps des Lumières (1670-1820), the product of a PhD dissertation that she published in French in 2014. As the title suggests, it is an attempt to trace the history of a medical category, but it is not written from the perspective of a historian, as what interests Arnaud is the role played by this category in western culture, especially in France in the modern period. Drawing on previous research that highlighted the closeness in eighteenth-century medical treatises of hysteria and vapours, which was a disease affecting men also, the book aims at understanding how hysteria became a women's disease in the nineteenth century. It also intends to fill a gap in the history of hysteria by focusing on the period between the end of the witch-hunting era and the rise of modern psychiatry with Charcot and Freud. Arnaud states firmly in the Preface that her interest resides in the language used to report and describe hysteria rather than in a history of the cures or an analysis of medical knowledge. A characteristic of the book is the author's constant attempt to diversify the sources she studies and her focus is not only on writing techniques but also on the collective imaginary of hysteria. Alongside well-known theoretical medical treatises, she is keen to draw the reader's attention to lesser known or forgotten theoretical texts, as well as brochures, letters and engravings. She thus gives great importance to the works of Pierre Pomme (1735-1812), less famous today than his contemporaries Barthez or Pinel, but a very respected physician of his time. 'Médecin-consultant' of King Louis XV, Pomme was the author of a bestseller , Traité des affections vaporeuses des deux sexes (1763), in which he highlighted the fact that vapours affected both sexes and he linked the disease to the activities (or lack of activity) of the idle classes. Arnaud gives great importance to this social theory of hysteria and cites many texts stressing the aristocratic dimension, so to speak, of the disease. The very fact that hysterical fits were still diagnosed during the Revolution and seemed to affect less privileged groups leads her to propose a double interpretation. First, she says, hysteria was instrumentalised to explain the violence of the Revolution and, secondly, the aristocracy having disappeared, it allowed the Republican doctors to attach the affliction to the female body and more specifically to the womb. This transition of hysteria from an 'unsexed' disease to a condition affecting only women is also what explains, according to Arnaud, the many changes that she identifies in the way hysteria was described. Working on a large corpus of medical texts and philosophical treatises, she was struck by the lack of proper definition and the difficulty for the physicians in associating the illness with an established set of symptoms. For Arnaud, the impossibility of diagnosing or identifying hysteria with any certainty led physicians to use and create metaphors expressing the constant transformation of the malady. In this 'catalog of images', the most successful ones were an ever-changing god, Proteus, a reptilian animal able to transform the colour of its skin, the chameleon and a mythological creature, the many-headed hydra. At the end of Chapter 2, where most of these metaphors are studied, it appears that although they expressed a lack of knowledge, these images
Hysteria, its Representation, and Misrepresentation in Literature
The Criterion, 2023
This paper examines the portrayal of hysteria in literature, tracing its representation from antiquity to the present day. Hysteria has been a topic of interest in both medical and literary fields for centuries, and the portrayal of hysteria in literature has been influenced by contemporary medical ideas and insights about the disorder. The history of hysteria is composed of a body of writing by men about women, but women writers have also made significant contributions to the understanding and representation of hysteria. The works of literature that explore hysteria reflect the prevailing cultural attitudes towards mental illness during their respective time periods and cultural contexts and continue to captivate readers and spark important discussions about mental health, gender, and the power of literature to shape our understanding of the world.
Conflicting Logics of the Passions: The Strange Career of Hysteria and Anxiety in the 19th Century
This study of the recent "history" of hysteria, from Charcot to Freud, shows how Freud took up Charcot's crucial distinction between epilepsy and epileptoid hysteria, effectively creating a disorder with a distinct symptomatology. The disorder, as Breuer and Freud would also acknowledge, had to do with the "inscription" of memories in the body over time; thus hysterics suffered from "des réminiscences"--in addition to a "congenital weakness." I show here that the evolution of the concept of hysteria, from a condition shared by women and men (and, in line with the racism of the time: Jewish men who escape pogroms in Eastern Europe, notably), to a largely abandoned category of "my neurotica" (writes Freud as he abandons publishing case studies of hysterics), to one that, finally, does not map on to traumatic war neuroses. I examine the evolution of Freud's appraisal of hysteria and anxiety, showing how it passes from a "woman's disorder" (wandering womb) to a disease of traumatic memories (Freud, *Studies on Hysteria*), to a (largely female, anew) phantasmatic and intractable malady that cannot coincide with traumatism, despite the resemblance between the two psychological disorders. From there, I examine gendered logics in 19th century thought.
Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health
Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health, 2012, 8, 110-119. ISSN: 1745-0179 (open access)
Hysteria is undoubtedly the first mental disorder attributable to women, accurately described in the second millennium BC, and until Freud considered an exclusively female disease. Over 4000 years of history, this disease was considered from two perspectives: scientific and demonological. It was cured with herbs, sex or sexual abstinence, punished and purified with fire for its association with sorcery and finally, clinically studied as a disease and treated with innovative therapies. However, even at the end of 19th century, scientific innovation had still not reached some places, where the only known therapies were those proposed by Galen. During the 20th century several studies postulated the decline of hysteria amongst occidental patients (both women and men) and the escalating of this disorder in non-Western countries. The concept of hysterical neurosis is deleted with the 1980 DSM-III. The evolution of these diseases seems to be a factor linked with social “westernization”, and examining under what conditions the symptoms first became common in different societies became a priority for recent studies over risk factor.