Hysteria: Etymological Meaning and Diagnosis

I have been feeling tired for some time now with a “weight” on my chest. I turn to a pulmonologist, who examines me, listens to me, and explains to me, instead of grinning words like emoticons, “Don’t worry: I’m very healthy,” certain things women in menopause feel. Normal”, which is not a better identity, regardless of his profession. OK, really bad: Three weeks later I’m admitted to the hospital with bilateral interstitial pneumonia, experts say, that if I’d seen it sooner, it wouldn’t have degenerated like this. Yeah exactly.

Pneumonia has passed, but it should not be felt a frenzythat is, at its most common location, a woman who emotionally imagines or simulates traits that exist “only in her head”, And we are in 2023! Let’s imagine what would happen if an ancestor from the early 1900s had visited that doctor: the community (already inclined) would have begun labeling him as visionary, delusional, unreliable or dangerous for being marginalized. I defy anyone in their right mind not to be hysterical before they die (of pneumonia).

So it is surprising to learn that a very popular diagnosis was studied and explained at the beginning of the last century by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer (in a famous essay). study in hysteria

written between 1893 and 1895), later removed from the cataloging manual in the 1970s and therefore, rendered unusable due to its unquestionably erroneous character, is still up to date. Pauline Chanu’s podcast also tells the same thing, pain matrix, in 4 episodes on Radio France (radiofrance.fr), where the author traces the history of the “devil’s disease”, although informally, “the diagnosis of hysteria is still used in practice in French public psychiatry”, as stated by sociologist Julia Legrand.

And not only in France. Women everywhere are still suspected of faking their pain even when these do not lead to already proven pathology and obvious symptoms: this is the case with endometriosis, for example, which is recognized by the WHO as a disabling disease. Before being recognized in the U.S. (affects 150 million people in the world), in short, the hysterical preferred to be thought of as having a psychological and humoral origin. Or “histrion”, as they say today. Last year, Chanu said, actress Amber Heard was taken to court for defamation after accusing ex-husband Johnny Depp of domestic violence (battery and rape), “her face was in a rage, her lips were quivering , hands were tied”, appeared as “a woman who always cries too much or laughs too much, sometimes too cold or too affected”, resulting in a verdict of “histrionic and borderline”, According to psychology expert. ,frenzy“, Johnny Depp’s lawyer later told.

If so far the use and misuse of the concept of hysteria and its synonyms has evoked reactions ranging from dismay to outrage, a movement against it is expected to be born. psycho shaming, this diagnosis also hides another lesser known but more psychoanalytic meaning, as explained by Professor Sarantis Thanapoulos, President of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. “First, in referring to the case of Amber Heard, it is always good to underline that the fact of having a histrionic or borderline personality does not exclude one’s partner from actually being raped. Quite the contrary: since they are vulnerable people are less able to defend themselves. Fragility does not end, but if anything aggravates the other’s position”, explains Thanopoulos. which confirms: “at diagnosis of hysteria

Prejudice is of an anti-feminist nature, because since the 1900s it represents the wound of femininity, the negation of eros, the conditioning that still forces women to seek the only apparent liberation”.

However, the psychoanalyst is keen to clarify, “This is still a current diagnosis, because hysteria is a physical dimension of the human being and concerns both women and men. It is based on our mental way of relating: we relate to others in diversity and, at the same time, we identify with him, we want to know him and ‘bring’ him into our inner world to capture what he has and what we do not have , but at the same time we want to be ourselves… the masculine side, men their feminine side. If this is not accepted or if this desire is hurtful, the other becomes problematic, aggressive, threatening, dangerous to us. presented as. And this is where the distortion arises. Slightly complex psychoanalytic concepts but which highlight how the impossibility of expressing feelings lies at the core of the problem: a non-verbal drive and subsequent removed because it is considered unacceptable and replaced by a physical symptom and distress “not hearing, the absence of space to speak”, wrote Freud.

“Certain symptoms such as epilepsy, aphonia and paralysis occur more frequently in women because they stage the lesion of desire which is more severe in them. In men, hysteria manifests itself mainly in the form of impotence., Premature ejaculation or difficulty achieving it. coldness, anorexia, but also histrionics and various functional physical pains are present in both women and men”, explains Thanopoulos, who adds: “Even gender issues, fluidity, can have a hysterical basis , such as the notion of the inadequacy of one’s sexual role “​even Don Juanism, a vice that could not be more masculine, is in fact an attitude perpetrated precisely by men who consider themselves Do not conform to the “official” model of virility and thus feel the need to conquer and cheat. Through repeated provocative behaviors, as if to say: We’re all a little hysterical today, or nobody is. .