Definition from Freud for Beginners by Richard Appignanesi (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
Hysteria: illness once considered as either (a) physical in origin, or (b) in which physical evidence of illness was absent. Since Charcot, and especially psychoanalysis, seen as neurotic forms of behavior in which the phsical symptoms (e.g. convulsions, paralysis, disturbances of sight, hearing, etc.) derive from spychological malfunctions. Hysteria was diagnosed as a purely female or 'uterine' disease. Freud rejected this but kept the idea that it was somehow connected to sexuality.
I. What is Hysteria?: History and Definition
A. Word "hysteria" = from Greek word hystera, meaning "womb."
1. Originally "hysteria" designated a link between certain nervous disorders and diseases of the female sexual and reproductive organs. It was thought that there was a direct connection between these physical pathologies localized in the female organs and certain nervous symptoms.
2. This explains why hysteria has commonly been conceived as a pathology to which women are exclusively susceptible. If it is based in a physiological source that is gender specific (the uterus), then the illness itself could only occur where this prerequisite physiology is present.
3. Hysteria defined (Webster's): "A psychiatric condition variously characterized by emotional excitability, excessive anxiety, sensory and motor disturbances, or the unconscious simulation of organic disorders." Freud will concentrate on what we today call "psychosomatic" illnesses, that is, seemingly organic symptoms that in fact have a purely psychological origin.
4. Freud's teacher, the famous French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893), spent a great deal of energy studying hysteria and concluded that it derives from a particularhereditary disposition. In other words, certain people are genetically pre-programmed, as it were, to develop hysteria, just as today we know that the predisposition to other diseases (e.g. cancer, alcoholism) can be genetically based.
a. Charcot believed that real events could serve as the trigger that released the hysterical symptoms. Hysteria, in short, can lie "dormant" in one until its symptoms are stimulated by some real-life event. Charcot called such events "provoking agents"; they serve to actualize the hereditary potential for hysteria, to transform it from latent possibility to concrete reality.
5. Note how up until this point in the history of hysteria nature is given precedence over nurture. In the "womb" theory as well as in Charcot's hereditary theory, hysteria is seen as something inescapable, as predetermined because it is somehow programmed into one's very physiological and genetic constitution.
B. Freud's Relation to the History of Hysteria
1. Freud will take issue with the emphasis on nature as the precondition for hysteria and will (try to) shift the focus to questions of nurture. We will see that he is only partially successful at this.
2. From Charcot Freud borrows the notion of the "trigger" or the "provoking agent" that unleashes the hysterical symptoms. The theory here is that the event that stimulates the symptoms is not itself the cause, but merely a reference to a deeper cause. It serves to invoke that cause. It is possible that Charcot's theory of the "provoking agent" of hysteria influenced Freud's later notion of the "day residue" or "trigger" in dreams. The structural mechanism, at any rate, is identical.
a. For Freud, however, what this "trigger" activates is not a hereditary predisposition, as for Charcot, but rather: infantile experience.
3. This has certain consequences for the theory of hysteria:
a. Hysteria no longer must be a pathology exclusively identified with women; it is de-coupled from physiology in the strict sense (it's association with the "womb") and from other forms of somatic or genetic predetermination. This means that, in principle, at least, men are also susceptible to hysteria. (Later in this essay Freud will work toward retracting, or at least limiting, this implication.)
b. Hysteria is a product of upbringing, education, of one's interaction as a child with the world of adults or of other children. In other words, Freud takes a first step toward broaching the possibility that hysteria is a social disease, rather than a physiological one.
c. Nurture is given precedence over nature. (But as was true in Civilization and Its Discontents when he proposes that a piece of nature underpins our social relations, here too Freud will ultimately discover a bit of nature lurking behind this nurture.) "Bad" nurturing seems to be the cause of hysteria.
Definition from Freud for Beginners by Richard Appignanesi (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
Hysteria: illness once considered as either (a) physical in origin, or (b) in which physical evidence of illness was absent. Since Charcot, and especially psychoanalysis, seen as neurotic forms of behavior in which the phsical symptoms (e.g. convulsions, paralysis, disturbances of sight, hearing, etc.) derive from spychological malfunctions. Hysteria was diagnosed as a purely female or 'uterine' disease. Freud rejected this but kept the idea that it was somehow connected to sexuality.
From lecture notes by Richard Gray, University of Washington
I. What is Hysteria?: History and Definition
A. Word "hysteria" = from Greek word hystera, meaning "womb."
- 1. Originally "hysteria" designated a link between certain nervous disorders and diseases of the female sexual and reproductive organs. It was thought that there was a direct connection between these physical pathologies localized in the female organs and certain nervous symptoms.
- 2. This explains why hysteria has commonly been conceived as a pathology to which women are exclusively susceptible. If it is based in a physiological source that is gender specific (the uterus), then the illness itself could only occur where this prerequisite physiology is present.
- 3. Hysteria defined (Webster's): "A psychiatric condition variously characterized by emotional excitability, excessive anxiety, sensory and motor disturbances, or the unconscious simulation of organic disorders." Freud will concentrate on what we today call "psychosomatic" illnesses, that is, seemingly organic symptoms that in fact have a purely psychological origin.
- 4. Freud's teacher, the famous French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893), spent a great deal of energy studying hysteria and concluded that it derives from a particularhereditary disposition. In other words, certain people are genetically pre-programmed, as it were, to develop hysteria, just as today we know that the predisposition to other diseases (e.g. cancer, alcoholism) can be genetically based.
- a. Charcot believed that real events could serve as the trigger that released the hysterical symptoms. Hysteria, in short, can lie "dormant" in one until its symptoms are stimulated by some real-life event. Charcot called such events "provoking agents"; they serve to actualize the hereditary potential for hysteria, to transform it from latent possibility to concrete reality.
5. Note how up until this point in the history of hysteria nature is given precedence over nurture. In the "womb" theory as well as in Charcot's hereditary theory, hysteria is seen as something inescapable, as predetermined because it is somehow programmed into one's very physiological and genetic constitution.B. Freud's Relation to the History of Hysteria