Approaching Hysteria Micale, Mark S
2019, 20190115, 1994, 2019-10-04, Volume:
5248
eBook
Few diseases have exercised the Western imagination as chronically as hysteria--from the wandering womb of ancient Greek medicine, to the demonically possessed witch of the Renaissance; from the ..."vaporous" salong women of Enlightenment Paris, through to the celebrated patients of Sigmund Freud, with their extravagant, erotically charged symptoms. In this fascnating and authoritative book, Mark Micale surveys the range of past and present readings of hysteria by intellectual historians; historians of science and medicine; scholars in gender studies, art history, and literature; and psychoanalysts, psychiatriasts, clinical psychologists, and neurologists. In so doing, he explores numerous questions raised by this evergrowing body of literature: Why, in recent years, has the history of hysterical disorders carried such resonance for commentators in the sciences and humanities? What can we learn form the textual traditions of hysteria about writing the history of disease in general? What is the broader cultural meaning of the new hysteria studies? In the second half of the book, Micale discusses the many historical "cultures of hysteria." He reconstructs in detail the past usages of the hysteria concept as a powerful, descriptive trope in various nonmedical domains, including poetry, fiction, theater, social thought, political criticism, and the arts His book is a pioneering attempt to write the historical phenomenology of disease in an age preoccupied with health, and a prescriptive remedy for writing histories of disease in the future. Mark S. Micale is Assistant Professor of History at Yale. He is the editor of Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger (Princeton).
Originally published in 1994.
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3.
A Bayesian account of 'hysteria' Edwards, Mark J; Adams, Rick A; Brown, Harriet ...
Brain (London, England : 1878),
11/2012, Volume:
135, Issue:
Pt 11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article provides a neurobiological account of symptoms that have been called 'hysterical', 'psychogenic' or 'medically unexplained', which we will call functional motor and sensory symptoms. We ...use a neurobiologically informed model of hierarchical Bayesian inference in the brain to explain functional motor and sensory symptoms in terms of perception and action arising from inference based on prior beliefs and sensory information. This explanation exploits the key balance between prior beliefs and sensory evidence that is mediated by (body focused) attention, symptom expectations, physical and emotional experiences and beliefs about illness. Crucially, this furnishes an explanation at three different levels: (i) underlying neuromodulatory (synaptic) mechanisms; (ii) cognitive and experiential processes (attention and attribution of agency); and (iii) formal computations that underlie perceptual inference (representation of uncertainty or precision). Our explanation involves primary and secondary failures of inference; the primary failure is the (autonomous) emergence of a percept or belief that is held with undue certainty (precision) following top-down attentional modulation of synaptic gain. This belief can constitute a sensory percept (or its absence) or induce movement (or its absence). The secondary failure of inference is when the ensuing percept (and any somatosensory consequences) is falsely inferred to be a symptom to explain why its content was not predicted by the source of attentional modulation. This account accommodates several fundamental observations about functional motor and sensory symptoms, including: (i) their induction and maintenance by attention; (ii) their modification by expectation, prior experience and cultural beliefs and (iii) their involuntary and symptomatic nature.
Cross-disciplinary analysis of contemporary images and representations of hysteria
We seem to be living in hysterical times. A simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of “hysterical” ...discussions on diverse topics such as the #metoo movement, Trumpianism, border wars, Brexit, transgender liberation, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and climate change, to name only a few. Against the backdrop of such recent deployments of hysteria in popular discourse––particularly as they emerge in times of material and hermeneutic crisis––Performing Hysteria re-engages the notion of “hysteria”.
Performing Hysteria rigorously mines late 20th- and early 21st-century (primarily visual) culture for signs of hysteria. The various essays in this volume contribute to the multilayered and complex discussions that surround and foster this resurgent interest in hysteria––covering such areas as art, literature, theatre, film, television, dance; crossing such disciplines as cultural studies, political science, philosophy, history, media, disability, race and ethnicity, and gender studies; and analysing stereotypical images and representations of the hysteric in relation to cultural sciences and media studies. Of particular importance is the volume's insistence on taking the intersection of hysteria and performance seriously.
Contributors: Johanna Braun (University of Vienna), Vivian Delchamps (University of California), Cecily Devereux (University of Alberta), Sander L. Gilman (Emory University), Elke Krasny (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), Jonathan W. Marshall (Edith Cowan University, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts), Sean Metzger (University of California), Tim Posada (Saddleback College), Elaine Showalter (Princeton University), Dominik Zechner (Brown University / Rutgers University)
Background
Functional neurological disorders (FND), a subtype of functional disorders (FD), are a frequent motive for neurology referrals. The various presentations and the unknown physiopathology of ...FD have led to the multiplication of terms describing these disorders over the years.
Methods
We examined the FD-related articles published from 1960 to 2020 in PubMed and PsycINFO databases. We searched for:
psychogenic, somatization, somatoform, medically unexplained symptoms, hysteria, conversion disorder, dissociative, functional neurological disorder,
and
functional disorder
. Use rates in the title, abstract, keyword, or MeSH fields were collected over successive 5-year periods. After correcting for off-topic results, we examined proportional distribution over time, term associations, and disciplinary fields (neurology and psychiatry). Term impact was estimated via H-index and number of citations.
Results
We found that none of the terms is prevailing in the recent medical literature. We observed three trends in the use rates: stability, increase, and decrease of use over time. While most of the terms were present in a stable proportion of the publications,
hysteria
and
psychogenic
lost popularity over time. We found a differential preference for terminology between disciplines.
Functional neurological disorder
showed the highest citation impact, yielding 10% of highly cited publications.
Conclusion
We found a dynamic and evolving use of the different terms describing FD in the last 60 years. Despite the tendency to use the term
functional
in the recent highly cited publications, its low prevalence and coexistence with several other terms suggest that a precise, explanatory and non-offensive term remains yet to be found.
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In From Hysteria to Hormones , Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert ...understandings of women’s health.
Shortly after Ernest Henry Starling coined the term “hormone” in 1905, hormones began to provide a chemical explanation for bodily phenomena that were previously understood in terms of “wandering wombs,” humors, energies, and balance. In this study, Koerber posits that the discovery of hormones was not so much a revolution as an exigency that required old ways of thinking to be twisted, reshaped, and transformed to fit more scientific turn-of-the-century expectations of medical practices. She engages with texts from a wide array of medical and social scientific subdisciplines; with material from medical archives, including patient charts, handwritten notes, and photographs from the Salpêtrière Hospital, where Dr. Jean Charcot treated hundreds of hysteria patients in the late nineteenth century; and with current rhetorical theoretical approaches to the study of health and medicine. In doing so, Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women’s bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect.
A clarifying examination of how the term “hormones” preserves key concepts that have framed our understanding of women’s bodies from ancient times to the present, this innovative book illuminates the ways in which the words we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren’t nearly as scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, and women’s health will find Koerber’s work provocative and valuable.
The nineteenth-century study of hysteria at the Salpêtrière
hospital was a medical project, but also a theatrical one. The
hysteric's public appearance was a continual ethical provocation,
pointing ...not only to the vulnerability of her person but to the
unstable position of her spectator. Hysteria in
Performance sets out to uncover what kind of performance the
hysterical attack is, as well as the nature of hysteria in and as
performance as it occurred at Salpêtrière. The Salpêtrière
documents undeniably show the gravity of the institutional violence
committed against its female patients. Using the lenses of
performance studies and performance theory, Jenn Cole expresses the
overt and subtle damages done to hysterical women in Jean-Martin
Charcot's hospital, drawing attention to the hysteric's resistance
to these experiences: it is often simply by being herself that the
hysteric points to the inherent weaknesses in these systemic modes
of violence. In Hysteria in Performance , the hysteric
becomes a figure who represents possibilities for ethical
encounters within performance and everyday living. Revealing the
fraught and exciting nature of theatrical representation, and
continually drawing out the dilemmas and unexpected dynamics of
witnessing the suffering of others, this groundbreaking study
explores how Charcot's findings on hysteria produced a unique
mixture of theatre and science that still has unexpected things to
teach us.
ABSTRACTAt the end of the 19th century, several authors became interested in the physical and psychological symptoms resulting from traumatic life events. Oppenheim presented 42 detailed clinical ...observations. He suggested the term “traumatic neurosis.” Charcot, who was interested in male hysteria, published over 20 cases of traumatic hysteria between 1878 and 1893. The symptoms were considered to have a dynamic or functional origin. The role of horror and terror during the trauma was emphasized. However, Charcot opposed the idea of traumatic neuroses as specific syndromes as he considered them to be only an etiological form of hystero-neurasthenia. In The Tuesday Lessons (Les Leçons du Mardi), he presents several observations. They are surprising when compared with the current criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although he had rejected this new entity, a hundred years before the appearance of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, Revised, Charcot described most of the symptoms mentioned for a diagnosis of PTSD such as intrusion (reliving the trauma, nightmares, and severe emotional distress), avoidance, negative changes in thinking and mood (negative thoughts, lack of interest, etc.), arousal, and reactivity (trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating, being easily startled or frightened, irritability, etc.).
Rabies Hysteria: Case series Nazanin Shabansalmani; Maryam Fazeli; Behzad Pourhossein ...
Novelty in biomedicine,
07/2024, Volume:
12, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Open access
Background: Rabies is an acute and fatal zoonotic viral disease that affects warm-blooded mammals. This disease is usually transmitted between humans and other animals through bites, scratches, or ...saliva from infected animals. Depending on the mortality rate of rabies, people sometimes experience mental stress after biting or contact. This condition is called mental stress toward rabies (Rabies Hysteria). Cases Report: In this study, we referred to seven cases of rabies hysteria, which were referred to the WHO Collaborating Center for Reference and Research on Rabies of Pasteur Institute of Iran. Conclusion: Studies have shown that the level of low awareness and the wrong attitude toward the disease aggravates medical hysteria. The health system should evaluate social knowledge and attitude.
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Phenomenological literature has recently given much attention to the concept of atmosphere, which is the pre-individual affective tonality of the intersubjective space. The importance of atmospheres ...in psychopathology has been described for various disorders, but little is known about the interaction with hysteria. The aim of the present paper was to describe the psychopathology of hysteria from the angle of the phenomenon of atmosphere, focussing on the hysterical person's peculiar "affective permeability".
Hysterical people have difficulty defining themselves autonomously. As compensation, they adopt models transposed from the external environment such as social gender stereotypes or are influenced by the gaze and desire of others. They also possess a special sensitivity in perceiving the affectivity present in a given social situation, by which they are easily impressed and influenced. Their sensibility to environmental affectivity may allow them to take centre stage, assuming the postures and behaviours that others desire and that they sense by "sniffing" the atmosphere in which the encounter is immersed. Thus, a paradox may take place: sensibility is not mere passivity in hysteria but may become a tool for "riding" the emotional atmosphere and manipulating it.
Affective permeability to environmental atmospheres and manipulation of the environment are the two sides of the same coin. This overlap of passive impressionability and active manoeuvring is necessary to be grasped in the clinical encounter with hysterical persons not to be submerged by their theatricality, that is, by the hyper-intensive expressivity of their feelings and behaviours.
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