Gender Hysteria Research Paper
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.
The term hysteria was once used to define a medical condition that was assumed only to be caught only by women. Characteristics of this disease were partial paralysis, hallucinations and nervousness. The term is thought to have an origin of ancient Greek period. Many doctors (physicians) linked these characteristics with the movement of a woman 's uterus throughout various …show more content…
positions in their temples (body). The term hysteria is from the Greek hystera, which means uterus.
In the late 1800s, hysteria started to be referred as to a psychological disorder. Freud 's collaboration with colleague Josef Breuer on the case of Anna O., a young woman experiencing the symptoms of hysteria, catalyze the development of psychoanalytic therapy.
In modern days, psychology identifies two different types of conditions that were historically known as hysteria: dissociative disorders and somatoform disorders.
“Dissociative disorders are psychological disorders that involve a dissociation or interruption in aspects of consciousness, including identity and memory. These types of disorders include dissociative fugue, dissociative identity disorder and dissociative amnesia”. (Freud, Sigmund. "The aetiology of hysteria." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. …show more content…
187-221.)
“Somatoform disorder is a class of psychological disorder that involves physical symptoms that do not have a physical cause. These symptoms usually mimic real diseases or injuries. Such disorders include conversion disorder, body dysmporphic disorder and somatization disorder”. (Freud, Sigmund. "The aetiology of hysteria." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 187-221.)
Moreover, this is why hysteria has usually been conceived as a pathology to which women are solely prone. Freud believed that real events could serve as the “trigger tool” that releases the hysterical symptoms. Hysteria, can lay "dormant" in one until its indicators are roused by some real-life event. These events were often called "provoking agents" by Freud; they serve to portray the genetic potential for hysteria, to transform it from slight possibility to concrete reality.
Understand, up until this particular period in the history, hysteria nature is given precedence over nurture. In the "womb" theory as well as in Freud’s hereditary theory, hysteria is looked at as something inescapable, as predetermined because it is somehow programmed into one 's very physiological and genetic composition.
Freud adopts the concept of the "trigger" or the "provoking agent" that cause the hysterical symptoms to be awakened. The theory here is that the event that rouse the symptoms is not itself the main issue, but merely an orientation to a deeper root. The event serves as antagonist to invoke that cause. It is possible that Freud 's theory of the "provoking agent" of hysteria influenced Freud 's later idea of the "day residue" or "trigger" in dreams. For Freud, however, what this “trigger-tools” initiates are not a genetic predisposition, but rather: infantile experience.
Freud during his research and development of his theory did case/experiments, and wanted to discovered a single cause that all of his case studies have in common: this would be their uniform foundation and would hence point to the general etiology of hysteria. Freud had a hypothesis that the shared element was a traumatic experience in childhood that is uniformly of a SEXUAL nature.
Freud adopts and applies the practice of his friend and colleague Josef Breuer, to poke into his patients ' memories in order to expose the repressed traumatic childhood experience that is the cause of the hysterical symptoms.
Freud admits to the difficulty of penetrating through to the origin of these repressed memories, which are the primal cause of the hysteria. “Following the patients ' trains of association will often lead to other memories that are related to the cause of the hysteria or recount events that are manifestations of the disease itself, but are themselves not the underlying cause”. (Janet, Pierre. "The major symptoms of hysteria." (1907))
“Freud calls these peripheral but associatively related recollections screen memories: they "screen" the original causal event, but also point toward it by means of association. Screen memories have a structure that can be aligned with the "allusion/illusion" reflex the French Marxist Louis Althusser attributes to ideology: they "allude" to deeper causes by pointing to them through structural or other similarity, but they also hide these deeper causes (and hence are "illusions")”. (Ludwig, Arnold M. "Hysteria: a neurobiological theory." Archives of General Psychiatry 27.6 (1972): 771.).
We tend to overstate the "symbolic" nature of the psyche, the allusion to general and universal meanings, whereas Freud always comprehended the results he obtained in the perspective of other results received from that same patient. Challenges arise, by not being able to find a way to distinguish between genuinely causal remembered events and these related, but ultimately peripheral, screen memories.
To understand and distinguish true cause from screen memories, Freud developed two variables that must be at active for an event to give rise to hysteria
“Suitability (or appropriateness) of an event to serve as a cause of the symptoms. In other words, the symptom must fit the cause. If a patient suffers from hysterical vomiting, for example, the root cause would likely be something that is associated with disgust. Freud refers to a patient who was forced as a child to stimulate a woman with his foot and whose hysterical symptom was a disorder of the legs, ultimately leading to paralysis. The symptom and the cause must, in short be of the same kind.” (Ludwig, Arnold M. "Hysteria: a neurobiological theory." Archives of General Psychiatry 27.6 (1972): 771.)
The traumatic force: An event must be dominant enough for it to act as the cause of hysteria. For example, vomiting or having a severe cannot be a cause, for example, by the experience of eating a decaying piece of chicken in a restaurant during one 's childhood; this is simply not traumatic enough. Hence the reason why Freud associates hysteria with sexual events: only these, he believes, carry enough traumatic force to brand us to the point of creating a hysterical response. As I have come to learn, sexual events experienced during your infancy or childhood is the primary source of hysterical symptoms. Therefore, the etiology of hysteria is situational, not physiological or genetic. Freud has gone so far as to generalize childhood sexual abuse as the main source of all neuropathology, which I somewhat agree with. These sexual experiences can include innocent things like stimulation of the genitals during wiping, diapering, hygiene, etc., or can be actual instances of coitus-like acts of seduction during childhood.
Furthermore, requirements for hysteria are more oblivious rather than conscious operation of the memories that cause the distress. In other words: Hysteria only occurs under the conditions of repression: only when the incidents of sexual abuse are denied and repressed can they recur, by that I mean, you have to experience the situation denied those acts, which will cause you to repress the memory; therefore cause you to act out with forms of hysterical symptoms.
Hysterical symptoms as a distorted form of expression: if one removes the causes of the distortion (repression) and opens up avenues for understanding the causes, the symptoms disappear. This explains why Freud 's therapy is based, like Breuer 's "talking cure," on re-introducing the original traumatic memory back into patient 's consciousness: once it is freed from repression, the trauma ceases to cause hysterical symptoms and the patient is "cured."
Freud shows 3 groups of hysterics based on the source of this sexual stimulation: “Assaults by adults: mostly practiced on women by men (fathers, uncles, brothers, etc.) where there is no consent. That is, rape or other forced sexual activities.” (Flor-Henry, P., et al. "A neuropsychological study of the stable syndrome of hysteria." Biological psychiatry 16.7 (1981): 601.)
“Love relationships between an adult and a child; these are usually of a longer duration and are the manifestation of deeper emotional and affective bonds. Here genuine feelings of "love" are at work.” (Flor-Henry, P., et al. "A neuropsychological study of the stable syndrome of hysteria." Biological psychiatry 16.7 (1981): 601.)
“Relationships between two children, usually brother and sister, whereby this situation presumes that one of the children has already been initiated into sexual activities by an adult (presumes "seduction" of one of the children previously).” (Flor-Henry, P., et al. "A neuropsychological study of the stable syndrome of hysteria." Biological psychiatry 16.7 (1981): 601.)
Freud is persuaded that severity of hysterical symptoms is directly proportional to the number of such sexual encounters or acts of sexual abuse that one experiences as a child. “Trigger-tools" that initiates the latent hysterical symptoms for Freud is usually the sexual encounters right after one has experienced puberty. These "permissible" sexual acts recall or re-invoke the "inacceptable" acts, associated with childhood sexual abuse and activate the hysteria symptoms. The hysterical symptoms, in other words, usually don 't occur until long after the initial traumatic experience, and invoke by “trigger-tools”.
To conclude, Freud explains the intricacies of the psyche and how the mind can build wall to repress memories.
Moreover, when faced with memories; Freud illustrates how the mind denies the acts of the situation causing one to fall in to the repression of those horrifying experiences. Finally, hysteria symptoms are caused by situational triggers and not hereditary ones.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. "The aetiology of hysteria." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 187-221.
Janet, Pierre. "The major symptoms of hysteria." (1907).
Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on hysteria. Basic Books, 2009.
Trimble, Michael R. "Serum prolactin in epilepsy and hysteria." British Medical Journal 2.6153 (1978): 1682.
Slater, Eliot. "Diagnosis of “hysteria”." British Medical Journal 1.5447 (1965): 1395.
Merskey, Harold. The analysis of hysteria: Understanding conversion and dissociation. London: Gaskell, 1995.
Chodoff, Paul, and Henry Lyons. "Hysteria, the hysterical personality and “hysterical” conversion." Am J Psychiatry 114.8 (1958):
734-740.
Bollas, Christopher. Hysteria. Taylor & Frances/Routledge, 2000.
Flor-Henry, P., et al. "A neuropsychological study of the stable syndrome of hysteria." Biological psychiatry 16.7 (1981): 601.
Stone, Jon, et al. "Systematic review of misdiagnosis of conversion symptoms and “hysteria”." BMJ: British Medical Journal 331.7523 (2005): 989.
David-Ménard, Monique, and Ned Lukacher. Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and language in psychoanalysis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Ludwig, Arnold M. "Hysteria: a neurobiological theory." Archives of General Psychiatry 27.6 (1972): 771.
Lewis, Aubrey. "The survival of hysteria." Psychological medicine 5.01 (1975): 9-12.
The term hysteria was once used to define a medical condition that was assumed only to be caught only by women. Characteristics of this disease were partial paralysis, hallucinations and nervousness. The term is thought to have an origin of ancient Greek period. Many doctors (physicians) linked these characteristics with the movement of a woman 's uterus throughout various …show more content…
positions in their temples (body). The term hysteria is from the Greek hystera, which means uterus.
In the late 1800s, hysteria started to be referred as to a psychological disorder. Freud 's collaboration with colleague Josef Breuer on the case of Anna O., a young woman experiencing the symptoms of hysteria, catalyze the development of psychoanalytic therapy.
In modern days, psychology identifies two different types of conditions that were historically known as hysteria: dissociative disorders and somatoform disorders.
“Dissociative disorders are psychological disorders that involve a dissociation or interruption in aspects of consciousness, including identity and memory. These types of disorders include dissociative fugue, dissociative identity disorder and dissociative amnesia”. (Freud, Sigmund. "The aetiology of hysteria." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. …show more content…
187-221.)
“Somatoform disorder is a class of psychological disorder that involves physical symptoms that do not have a physical cause. These symptoms usually mimic real diseases or injuries. Such disorders include conversion disorder, body dysmporphic disorder and somatization disorder”. (Freud, Sigmund. "The aetiology of hysteria." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 187-221.)
Moreover, this is why hysteria has usually been conceived as a pathology to which women are solely prone. Freud believed that real events could serve as the “trigger tool” that releases the hysterical symptoms. Hysteria, can lay "dormant" in one until its indicators are roused by some real-life event. These events were often called "provoking agents" by Freud; they serve to portray the genetic potential for hysteria, to transform it from slight possibility to concrete reality.
Understand, up until this particular period in the history, hysteria nature is given precedence over nurture. In the "womb" theory as well as in Freud’s hereditary theory, hysteria is looked at as something inescapable, as predetermined because it is somehow programmed into one 's very physiological and genetic composition.
Freud adopts the concept of the "trigger" or the "provoking agent" that cause the hysterical symptoms to be awakened. The theory here is that the event that rouse the symptoms is not itself the main issue, but merely an orientation to a deeper root. The event serves as antagonist to invoke that cause. It is possible that Freud 's theory of the "provoking agent" of hysteria influenced Freud 's later idea of the "day residue" or "trigger" in dreams. For Freud, however, what this “trigger-tools” initiates are not a genetic predisposition, but rather: infantile experience.
Freud during his research and development of his theory did case/experiments, and wanted to discovered a single cause that all of his case studies have in common: this would be their uniform foundation and would hence point to the general etiology of hysteria. Freud had a hypothesis that the shared element was a traumatic experience in childhood that is uniformly of a SEXUAL nature.
Freud adopts and applies the practice of his friend and colleague Josef Breuer, to poke into his patients ' memories in order to expose the repressed traumatic childhood experience that is the cause of the hysterical symptoms.
Freud admits to the difficulty of penetrating through to the origin of these repressed memories, which are the primal cause of the hysteria. “Following the patients ' trains of association will often lead to other memories that are related to the cause of the hysteria or recount events that are manifestations of the disease itself, but are themselves not the underlying cause”. (Janet, Pierre. "The major symptoms of hysteria." (1907))
“Freud calls these peripheral but associatively related recollections screen memories: they "screen" the original causal event, but also point toward it by means of association. Screen memories have a structure that can be aligned with the "allusion/illusion" reflex the French Marxist Louis Althusser attributes to ideology: they "allude" to deeper causes by pointing to them through structural or other similarity, but they also hide these deeper causes (and hence are "illusions")”. (Ludwig, Arnold M. "Hysteria: a neurobiological theory." Archives of General Psychiatry 27.6 (1972): 771.).
We tend to overstate the "symbolic" nature of the psyche, the allusion to general and universal meanings, whereas Freud always comprehended the results he obtained in the perspective of other results received from that same patient. Challenges arise, by not being able to find a way to distinguish between genuinely causal remembered events and these related, but ultimately peripheral, screen memories.
To understand and distinguish true cause from screen memories, Freud developed two variables that must be at active for an event to give rise to hysteria
“Suitability (or appropriateness) of an event to serve as a cause of the symptoms. In other words, the symptom must fit the cause. If a patient suffers from hysterical vomiting, for example, the root cause would likely be something that is associated with disgust. Freud refers to a patient who was forced as a child to stimulate a woman with his foot and whose hysterical symptom was a disorder of the legs, ultimately leading to paralysis. The symptom and the cause must, in short be of the same kind.” (Ludwig, Arnold M. "Hysteria: a neurobiological theory." Archives of General Psychiatry 27.6 (1972): 771.)
The traumatic force: An event must be dominant enough for it to act as the cause of hysteria. For example, vomiting or having a severe cannot be a cause, for example, by the experience of eating a decaying piece of chicken in a restaurant during one 's childhood; this is simply not traumatic enough. Hence the reason why Freud associates hysteria with sexual events: only these, he believes, carry enough traumatic force to brand us to the point of creating a hysterical response. As I have come to learn, sexual events experienced during your infancy or childhood is the primary source of hysterical symptoms. Therefore, the etiology of hysteria is situational, not physiological or genetic. Freud has gone so far as to generalize childhood sexual abuse as the main source of all neuropathology, which I somewhat agree with. These sexual experiences can include innocent things like stimulation of the genitals during wiping, diapering, hygiene, etc., or can be actual instances of coitus-like acts of seduction during childhood.
Furthermore, requirements for hysteria are more oblivious rather than conscious operation of the memories that cause the distress. In other words: Hysteria only occurs under the conditions of repression: only when the incidents of sexual abuse are denied and repressed can they recur, by that I mean, you have to experience the situation denied those acts, which will cause you to repress the memory; therefore cause you to act out with forms of hysterical symptoms.
Hysterical symptoms as a distorted form of expression: if one removes the causes of the distortion (repression) and opens up avenues for understanding the causes, the symptoms disappear. This explains why Freud 's therapy is based, like Breuer 's "talking cure," on re-introducing the original traumatic memory back into patient 's consciousness: once it is freed from repression, the trauma ceases to cause hysterical symptoms and the patient is "cured."
Freud shows 3 groups of hysterics based on the source of this sexual stimulation: “Assaults by adults: mostly practiced on women by men (fathers, uncles, brothers, etc.) where there is no consent. That is, rape or other forced sexual activities.” (Flor-Henry, P., et al. "A neuropsychological study of the stable syndrome of hysteria." Biological psychiatry 16.7 (1981): 601.)
“Love relationships between an adult and a child; these are usually of a longer duration and are the manifestation of deeper emotional and affective bonds. Here genuine feelings of "love" are at work.” (Flor-Henry, P., et al. "A neuropsychological study of the stable syndrome of hysteria." Biological psychiatry 16.7 (1981): 601.)
“Relationships between two children, usually brother and sister, whereby this situation presumes that one of the children has already been initiated into sexual activities by an adult (presumes "seduction" of one of the children previously).” (Flor-Henry, P., et al. "A neuropsychological study of the stable syndrome of hysteria." Biological psychiatry 16.7 (1981): 601.)
Freud is persuaded that severity of hysterical symptoms is directly proportional to the number of such sexual encounters or acts of sexual abuse that one experiences as a child. “Trigger-tools" that initiates the latent hysterical symptoms for Freud is usually the sexual encounters right after one has experienced puberty. These "permissible" sexual acts recall or re-invoke the "inacceptable" acts, associated with childhood sexual abuse and activate the hysteria symptoms. The hysterical symptoms, in other words, usually don 't occur until long after the initial traumatic experience, and invoke by “trigger-tools”.
To conclude, Freud explains the intricacies of the psyche and how the mind can build wall to repress memories.
Moreover, when faced with memories; Freud illustrates how the mind denies the acts of the situation causing one to fall in to the repression of those horrifying experiences. Finally, hysteria symptoms are caused by situational triggers and not hereditary ones.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. "The aetiology of hysteria." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications. 1962. 187-221.
Janet, Pierre. "The major symptoms of hysteria." (1907).
Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on hysteria. Basic Books, 2009.
Trimble, Michael R. "Serum prolactin in epilepsy and hysteria." British Medical Journal 2.6153 (1978): 1682.
Slater, Eliot. "Diagnosis of “hysteria”." British Medical Journal 1.5447 (1965): 1395.
Merskey, Harold. The analysis of hysteria: Understanding conversion and dissociation. London: Gaskell, 1995.
Chodoff, Paul, and Henry Lyons. "Hysteria, the hysterical personality and “hysterical” conversion." Am J Psychiatry 114.8 (1958):
734-740.
Bollas, Christopher. Hysteria. Taylor & Frances/Routledge, 2000.
Flor-Henry, P., et al. "A neuropsychological study of the stable syndrome of hysteria." Biological psychiatry 16.7 (1981): 601.
Stone, Jon, et al. "Systematic review of misdiagnosis of conversion symptoms and “hysteria”." BMJ: British Medical Journal 331.7523 (2005): 989.
David-Ménard, Monique, and Ned Lukacher. Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and language in psychoanalysis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Ludwig, Arnold M. "Hysteria: a neurobiological theory." Archives of General Psychiatry 27.6 (1972): 771.
Lewis, Aubrey. "The survival of hysteria." Psychological medicine 5.01 (1975): 9-12.