Freud went to study in Paris with a famous neurologist who was now well into his quack years.
Jean-Martin Charcot specialized in a very voguish malady that eventually served as the ersatz foundation of Freud's entire career.
'Hysteria' was a catch-all affliction attributed to women (and a few men) who suffered from complaints ranging from anything as minor as a nervous cough to convulsions, partial paralysis, wild gesticulations known as 'clownism,' and, in female patients, the sensation of being suffocated by their wombs rising into their throats.
 |
| One of Charcot's 'hysterical' women |
In fact, the definition was so broad that a skeptical American dubbed it 'mysteria.'
Charcot, in contrast, touted hysteria as 'the great neurosis' and argued that its main cause was emotional rather than physical trauma, claiming, in effect, that symptoms like paralysis were all in the mind.
So if a barrowboy was run over and subsequently suffered seizures and nosebleeds, Charcot would attribute his afflictions to the emotional impact of the accident rather than the obvious fact that the poor 'hysteric' probably had brain damage from being knocked stone cold by a carriage.
In fairness, neurologists at the time didn't have the technology to detect minor cerebral lesions.
But the truth is that hysteria was all but impossible to treat because it probably never existed in the first place—certainly not on the scale that Freud and his 'great teacher' diagnosed it.
In all likelihood, most of the unfortunate souls branded as 'hysterics' by Charcot and Freud were actually physically—rather than psychologically—ill.
Indeed, years later, Freud blamed a fourteen-year-old girl's 'noisy manifestations of hysteria' for causing him to overlook her genuine complaint: abdominal pains.
Having been 'cured' by Freud of hysteria, the girl later died of what had really been ailing her: stomach cancer.
No comments:
Post a Comment