5/11/2023 0 Comments Tells of histera![]() In essence, Freud believed that women experienced hysteria because they were unable to reconcile the loss of their (metaphoric) penis. ![]() (I don’t have the time to open that particular bag of worms, but feel free to click here to read about it) Specifically, this psychological damage was a result of removing male sexuality from females, an idea that stems from Freud’s famous ‘Oedipal moment of recognition’ in which a young female realizes she has no penis, and has been castrated. He believed that hysteria was a result, not of a physical injury in the body, but of a ‘ psychological scar produced through trauma or repression’. Freud, working with his partner Breuer in Austria, developed Charcot’s theories further, and wrote several studies on female hysteria from 1880-1915. One of these medical students was none other than Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. He lectured to his medical students, showing them photos and live subjects, on the hysteria symptoms he believed were caused by an unknown internal injury affecting the nervous system. It was Jean-Martin Charcot, in 1880 France, who first took a modern scientific sense to the female-only disease of hysteria. It’s obviously laughable to think that doctors believed everything wrong with women could be attributed to their liquid levels, but contrarily it is interesting how close doctors got to the truth, in their belief that extreme sexual desire was caused by a lack of regular orgasm. A 1637 text explains that when sexual fluids are not regularly released, ‘the heart and surrounding areas are enveloped in a morbid and moist exudation’, and that any ‘lascivious females, inclined to venery’ simply had a buildup of these fluids. For young or unmarried women, widows, nuns or married women unable to achieve orgasm via the strictly penetrative heterosexual sex that was common at the time, midwives were occasionally employed to manually stimulate the genitals, and release the offending liquids. Male semen was also believed to have healing properties, so sex served two purposes. Other writers and physicians at the time blamed the retention of menstrual blood for “female problems.” Either way, the obvious solution was to purge the offending fluid, so marriage (and its implied regular sexual intercourse) was the general recommendation. (Throughout these classical texts, pretty much any symptom could be attributed to the female sex organs, from fevers to kleptomania). The philosopher and physician Galen however disagreed with the roving uterus theory, believing instead that the retention of ‘female seed’ within the womb was to blame for the anxiety, insomnia, depression, irritability, fainting and other symptoms women experienced. This “roaming uteri” theory, supported by works from the philosopher Plato and the physician Aeataeus, was called ‘hysterical suffocation’, and the offending uterus was usually coaxed back into place by placing good smells near the vagina, bad smells near the mouth, and sneezing. ![]() In ancient Greece specifically, it was believed that a uterus could migrate around the female body, placing pressure on other organs and causing any number of ill effects. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks, for example, believed wombs capable of affecting the rest of the body’s health. ![]() These uteri were often thought to be the basis of a variety of health problems. Throughout history hysteria has been a sex-selective disorder, affecting only those of us with a uterus. So what was hysteria? How did it just go away? Why was it a major point of contention for second wave feminists, and how was it treated? Even before this, hysteria was thoroughly described in ancient Egyptian and Greek societies. Before its classification as a mental disorder, hysteria was considered a physical ailment, first described medically in 1880 by Jean-Martin Charcot. Until 1980, however, hysteria was a formally studied psychological disorder that could be found in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Today, when we say someone is hysterical, we mean that they are frenzied, frantic, or out of control.
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