Concept
Hysteria
Overview
Hysteria is a term used to mean ungovernable emotional excess and can refer to a temporary state of mind or emotion. In the 19th century, female hysteria was considered a diagnosable physical illness in women. It is assumed that the basis for diagnosis operated under the belief that women are predisposed to mental and behavioral conditions; an interpretation of sex-related differences in stress responses. In the 20th century, it shifted to being considered a mental illness. Influential physicians the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot had dedicated research to hysteria patients.
Currently, most physicians do not accept hysteria as a medical diagnosis. Today, psychiatrists may use the term to refer to behavior in which patients "imitate physical or psychological disorders of a kind that draws medical and nursing attention to them", usually as a self-deception rather than an attempt to defraud. The blanket diagnosis of hysteria has been fragmented into myriad medical categories such as epilepsy, histrionic personality disorder, conversion disorders, dissociative disorders, or other medical conditions. Furthermore, lifestyle choices, such as choosing not to wed, are no longer considered symptoms of psychological disorders such as hysteria.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Hysteria is discussed.
That the symptoms of hysteria become comprehensible only through a reduction to “traumatically” effective experiences, and that these psychic traumas refer to the sexual life has already been asserted by Breuer and me in former publications. What I have to add today as a uniform result of thirteen analyzed cases of hysteria concerns, on the one hand, the nature of these sexual traumas, and on the other, the period…
Sigmund Freud, Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; the book is about it; opens on it
For certain reasons, however, I shall draw my instances not from hysteria, but from another fundamentally related and very curious neurosis concerning which I wish to say a few introductory words to you. This so-called compulsion neurosis is not so popular as the widely known hysteria; it is, if I may use the expression, not so noisily ostentatious, behaves more as a private concern of the patient, renounces bodily…
Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
names the idea; states what it is
The characteristic disturbances of walking (astasia-abasia with trembling) are protective measures against the repetition of the anxiety, therefore phobias in Freud’s sense. The cases in which these symptoms predominate are called anxiety-hysteria. Those symptoms, on the contrary, which simply express the situation at the moment of the explosion (innervation, position of the body) are conversion-hysterias in the…
Sándor Ferenczi, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
states what it is; names the idea
But there is a difference as to the above intentions: for other animals perceive these intentions only by some natural instinct, while man perceives them by means of coalition of ideas. Therefore the power by which in other animals is called the natural estimative, in man is called the "cogitative," which by some sort of collation discovers these intentions. Wherefore it is also called the "particular reason," to…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
states what it is; author linked in the graph
As we have seen, dreams, reveries, emotional idealizations are roads which are taken to escape the strain of perplexity and conflict. According to modern psychology, many systematized delusions and mental disorders, probably hysteria itself, originate as devices for getting freedom from troublesome conflicting factors. Such considerations throw into relief some of the traits essential to thinking as a way of…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Hysteria
Related ideas
- Emotion
- Epilepsy
- Princeton University Press
- Hippocrates
- Hildegard of Bingen
- Stress (biology)
- Thomas Aquinas
- Patriarchy
- Sigmund Freud
- Summa Theologica
- Moral character
Place in the tradition
Part of Pandeism.