History of Hysteria

There is a little exhibition in the library today, and one of the images is the famous linotype depicting Charcot's lecture on hysteria. This picture almost requires no comments.

You could accuse me of imagining things, as in the famous anecdote. A psychiatrist shows some pictures to the patient, of simple geometric figures, and asks to interpret them. About a triangle the patient says: "It is a tent where they are having sex," and about a square: "It is a dark room where they are having sex". After a while the patient looks suspiciously at the doctor and asks: "Doctor, but where have you got such nasty pictures from?"

Risking to look like this patient, I nonetheless dare ask: Could you deny that this image of Charcot and colleagues treating a young hysteric woman is profoundly sexual? And sexual not in a natural way, but in a way that masks the natural urges behind the facade of scientific interest. Just think of all these bearded men scratching their chins and going: "Um... Hmm... This is a truly remarkable case! Very exotic and stimulating!", as they think about their future practice, in which they will be now scientifically approved to spend hours talking to young ladies about all the intricate details of their sexual lives.

In a society where sexuality was suppressed, and hard to practice especially by the men of education and social status, the discoveries of Charcot, and his student Freud, provided a very nice avenue for the sublimation of sexual desires - a process that Freud himself attributed to his hysteric patients. It created a way to practice "intellectual sex" - by talking about it - which was safer, and to some people more enjoyable, than the natural one. The diagnosis of hysteria, once coined, was destined to prosper.

From this does NOT follow that since the reality of hysteria is questioned, hence the modern biological views are more correct. Of course not. The binary logic "hysteria versus genetics," or "neurosis versus psychosis" is artificial and arbitrary. The defeat of the one does not mean the victory of the other; instead each one needs to be proved or disproved separately.

In fact, the two points of view are rather alike than different. The modern views are a continuation of the general direction of understanding the human issues by way of framing them into medical diagnoses. First there was hysteria, then schizophrenia, then depression, then homosexuality, then PTSD and so on. I am not saying with affirmation that each of the diagnoses was artificially invented - I don't know. The fact is, however, that each of them kept, and continues to keep, many influential people busy and satisfied.