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".

History

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 the Greek ὑστέρα 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

Emotions (list) Emotions Adoration Affection Agitation Agony Awe Amusement Anger Anguish Annoyance Anxiety Apathy Arousal Attraction Caring Compassion Contempt Contentment Defeat Depression Desire Disappointment Disgust Ecstasy Embarrassment Empathy Enthrallment Enthusiasm Envy Euphoria Excitement Fear Frustration Grief Guilt Happiness Hatred Homesickness Hope Horror Hostility Humiliation Hysteria Infatuation Insecurity Insult Interest Irritation Isolation Jealousy Loneliness Longing Love Lust Melancholy Mono no aware Neglect Nostalgia Panic Passion Pity Pleasure Pride Rage Regret Rejection Remorse Resentment Sadness Saudade Schadenfreude Sentimentality Shame Shock Sorrow Spite Suffering Surprise Sympathy Tenseness Wonder Worry World views Nihilism Optimism Pessimism Reclusion Weltschmerz

• Is Hysteria Real? Brain Images Say Yes at the New York Times.
• The H-Word, Guardian Unlimited, 2002-09-02

External links

• 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

Further reading

References

• Histrionic personality disorder
• Hysterical contagion
• Body-centred countertransference
• Somatization disorder
• Horror and terror

See also

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.

Mass hysteria

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]

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 Almodóvar film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, exemplify psychiatric phenomena that encompass both somatoform and dissociative symptoms and that have been linked to psychological 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.

Current theories and practices

"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]

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:

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).

^[4] 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.Josef Breuer and Pierre Janet To Freud, this discovery allowed subsequent investigators such as [4] A more modern understanding of hysteria as a psychological disorder was advanced by the work of

Professor Jean-Martin Charcot of Paris Salpêtrière demonstrates hypnosis on a "hysterical" patient.^[3]

[2]