Hysteria

Hysteria, in its colloquial use, describes unmanageable emotional excesses. Generally, modern
medical professionals have given up the use of "hysteria" as a diagnostic category, replacing it
with more precisely defined categories such as somatization disorder. In 1980, the American
Psychiatric Association officially changed the diagnosis of "hysterical neurosis, conversion type"
, the most dangerous and effective type, to "conversion disorder".
Contents
[hide]

1 History

2 Current theories and practices

3 Mass hysteria

4 See also

5 References

6 Further reading

7 External links
History[edit]
See also: Female hysteria
For at least two thousand years of European history until the late nineteenth
century hysteria referred to a medical condition thought to be particular to women and caused by
disturbances of the uterus (from theGreek hystera "uterus"), such as when
a newborn child emerges from the birth canal. The origin of the term hysteria is commonly
attributed to Hippocrates, even though the term is not used in the writings that are collectively
known as the Hippocratic corpus.[1] The Hippocratic corpus refers to a variety of illness
symptoms, such as suffocation and Heracles' disease, that were supposedly caused by the
movement of a woman's uterus to various locations within her body as it became light and dry
due to a lack of bodily fluids.[1] One passage recommends pregnancy to cure such symptoms,
ostensibly because intercourse will "moisten" the womb and facilitate blood circulation within
the body.[1] The "wandering womb" theory persisted in European medicine for centuries.

By the mid to late 19th century, hysteria (or sometimes female hysteria) came to refer to what is
today generally considered to be sexual dysfunction.[2] Typical treatment was massage of the
patient's genitalia by the physician and, later, by vibrators or water sprays to cause orgasm.[2]

Professor Jean-Martin Charcot ofParis Salptrire demonstrates hypnosis on a "hysterical"

patient.[3]
A more modern understanding of hysteria as a psychological disorder was advanced by the work
of Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist. In his 1893 obituary of Charcot,Sigmund
Freud attributed the rehabilitation of hysteria as a topic for scientific study to the positive
attention generated by Charcots neuropathological investigations of hysteria during the last ten
years of his life.[4] Freud questioned Charcots claim that heredity is the unique cause of hysteria,
but he lauded his innovative clinical use of hypnosis to demonstrate how hysterical paralysis
could result from psychological factors produced by non-organic traumas (psychological factors
that Charcot believed could be simulated through hypnosis).[4] To Freud, this discovery allowed
subsequent investigators such as Pierre Janet and Josef Breuer to develop new theories of
hysteria that were essentially similar to the medieval conception of a split consciousness, but
with the non-scientific terminology of demonic possession replaced with modern psychological
concepts.[4][clarification needed]
In the early 1890s Freud published a series of articles on hysteria which popularized Charcot's
earlier work and began the development of his own views of hysteria. By the 1920s Freud's
theory was influential in the UK and the US. The Freudian psychoanalytic
school of psychology uses its own, somewhat controversial, ways to treat hysteria. Freudian
psychoanalytic theory attributed hysterical symptoms to the unconscious mind's attempt to
protect the patient from psychic stress. Unconscious motives include primary gain, in which the
symptom directly relieves the stress (as when a patient coughs to release energy pent up from
keeping a secret), and secondary gain, in which the symptom provides an independent advantage,
such as staying home from a hated job. More recent critics have noted the possibility of tertiary
gain, when a patient is induced unconsciously to display a symptom because of the desires of
others (as when a controlling spouse enjoys the docility of his or her sick partner).
Judith Herman suggests, in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic
Abuse to Political Terror,[5] that hysteria was a label given a form of PTSD arising from
routine domestic abuse of women, including physical abuse, rape, and emotional abuse. She
describes the work of Charcot and Freud resulting in Freud's finding in "The Aetiology of
Hysteria," in 1896, which he later repudiated:
"I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there
are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience..."[6]
Current theories and practices[edit]

Current psychiatric terminology distinguishes two types of disorder that were previously
labelled 'hysteria': somatoform and dissociative. There are many rare cases of this disorder in
the present when nothing else can be diagnosed to the patients. The dissociative
disorders in DSM-IV-TR include dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, dissociative
identity disorder, depersonalization disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise
specified. Somatoform disorders include conversion disorder, somatization disorder, pain
disorder, hypochondriasis, and body dysmorphic disorder. In somatoform disorders, the
patient exhibits physical symptoms such as low back pain or limb paralysis, without apparent
physical cause. Additionally, certain culture-bound syndromes such as "ataques de nervios"
("attacks of nerves") identified in Hispanic populations, and popularized by
the Almodvar film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, exemplify psychiatric
phenomena that encompass both somatoform and dissociative symptoms and that have been
linked topsychological trauma.[7] Recent neuroscientific research, however, is starting to
show that there are characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with these states.[8] All
these disorders are thought to be unconscious, not feigned or intentional malingering.
Jungian psychologist Laurie Layton Schapira explored what she labels a "Cassandra
Complex" suffered by those traditionally diagnosed with hysteria, denoting a tendency for
those with hysteria to be disbelieved or dismissed when relating the facts of their experiences
to others.[9] Based on clinical experience, she delineates three factors which constitute the
Cassandra complex in hysterics: (a) dysfunctional relationships with social manifestations of
rationality, order, and reason, leading to; (b) emotional or physical suffering, particularly in
the form of somatic, often gynaecological complaints, and (c) being disbelieved or dismissed
when attempting to relate the facticity of these experiences to others.[9]
Mass hysteria[edit]
Main article: Mass hysteria
The term also occurs in the phrase "mass hysteria" to describe mass public near-panic
reactions. Hysteria was often associated with events like the Salem witch trials, or slave
revolt conspiracies, where it is better understood through the related sociological term
of moral panic.
See also[edit]
Histrionic personality disorder
Hysterical contagion
Body-centred countertransference
Somatization disorder
Horror and terror
References[edit]

1.

^ Jump up to:a b c King, Helen (1993). "Once upon a text: Hysteria from
Hippocrates". In Gilman, Sander; King; Porter, Helen; Rousseau, G.S.; Showalter,
Elaine. Hysteria beyond Freud. University of California Press. pp. 390. ISBN 0520-08064-5.

2.

^ Jump up to:a b Rachel P. Maines (1999). The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria",

the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press. ISBN 0-8018-6646-4.

3.

Jump up^ See: A Clinical Lesson at the Salptrire.

4.

^ Jump up to:a b c Freud, Sigmund (1962). The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume III (1893-1899). London: Hogarth
Press. pp. 1123. ISBN 0-7012-0067-7., first published in Sigmund Freud (1893).
"Charcot". Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 37.

5.

Jump up^ Herman, Judith (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of
Violence: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books. pp. 10
16. ISBN 0-465-08765-5.

6.

Jump up^ Freud, Sigmund (1962). Standard Edition, vol. 3. "The Aetiology of
Hysteria": Hogarth Press. p. 203.

7.

Jump up^ Schechter DS, Marshall RD, Salman E, Goetz D, Davies SO,
Liebowitz MR (2000). Ataque de nervios and childhood trauma history: An
association? Journal of Traumatic Stress, 13:3, 529534.

8.

Jump up^ M Sierra & G E Berrios (1999) Towards a Neuropsychiatry of

Conversive Hysteria. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 4: 267287.

9.

^ Jump up to:a b Laurie Layton Schapira, The Cassandra Complex: Living With
Disbelief: A Modern Perspective on Hysteria (1988)

Further reading[edit]
Chodoff, P. et al. (1982). Hysteria. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
Halligan, P.W., Bass, C., & Marshall, J.C. (Eds.) (2001) Contemporary Approach to the
Study of Hysteria: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives. Oxford University Press, UK.
Sander Gilman, Roy Porter, George Rousseau, Elaine Showalter, and Helen King
(1993). Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of
California Press).
Andrew T. Scull, Hysteria. The Biography. Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2009