Psychology Essays Hysteria

psychoticlogy Essays HysteriaHysteria has been seen as twain a form of political protest and as the failure to negotiate and resolve the Oedipus complex. Discuss with reference to the Dora strip.In many ways, vehemence and the hysterical patient go right to the hearty heart of psycho abridgment. It was after each, as we shall see, the basis of Freud and Breuers assertions on the validity of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic treatment and has been used ever blunder outce by theorists and practitivirtuosors as a test case with which to continually asses those initial findings. In the late nineteenth century, as now, the hysteric patient exists in a kind of hinterland of diagnosis, being appropriated for the good, sometimes, of not themselves that the larger discourse of psychiatry or critical theory. The many case histories that litter the trickonical texts of psychoanalysis are testament to the wide variety of symptoms and manifestations of cult that are as numerous as a re the patients themselves. Karl Abraham, in his essay on Hysterical Dream States (1988) gives us this same sense as aboriginal as 1910these states differ greatly in degree, exhibit considerable variations in their duration, are often associated with the affect of anxiety(and)I myself have come across these state sin a number of patients whom I have treated with psychoanalysis. (Abraham, 1988 90)With this in mind, in this essay I would like to look at two of the most grave aetiological views of hysteria of the last hundred and twenty years those of Freud and the non-resolution of the Oedipus complex and those of the French and American feminists who viewed hysteria as being, not only a manifestation of phallocentric societal registers but as well as a protest against them. In order to centre this study within an existing analytical frame proceed I will constantly refer both views back to Freuds case register of Dora (Freud, 1977), itself of course, one of the seminal other(a) works on the formation of psychoanalysis and thinking of hysteria and hysterical symptoms.One can only appreciate the impact of Freuds work on hysteria, I think, if one first places it into the context of contemporary and preceding health check theory. Niel Micklem in his The Nature of Hysteria (1996) details the terminal doubles long historyThe lively interest for medicine that hysteria has aroused since it was first recorded in antediluvian patriarch Egypt more than 3,000 years ago has yielded a substantial amount of writing(and)the most accomplished research worker would be hard pressed to account for all the literature. (Micklem, 1996 1)As Micklem suggests, hysteria is a protean and multifaceted disease (Micklem, 1996 3) that is difficult to discern both by the physician and the historian. However right from its earliest beginnings, the arbitrariness of hysteria has always been associated with the notion of sexual development and, in particular, that of women. Greek myth is littered with countless examples of phantasmatic givens brought on by either sexual surplusage or repression from the mythological portrait of Demeter to Platos assertions in Timaeus thatWhen (sexual) desire is unsatisfied the man is over-mastered by the power of the generative organs, and the woman is subjected to disorders from the obstruction of the passages of the breath, until the two meet and pluck the fruit of the tree. (Plato, trans. Howett, 1970, steph.91)As Micklem suggests, this swing between repression and nymphomania has been a constant leitmotif in aetiological thinking regarding hysteria since Plato and Homer. However, in the nineteenth century work of Pierre Briquet and, later Jean Martin Charcot, the reliance upon sex and frustration as a central feature of hysteria was abandoned in favor of an approach that concerned itself far more with genetic and hereditary factors. It was at this time, also, that the psychiatric profession began to take hysteria seriously a s a condition and it was chiefly through this that it was twinned with neurosis a factor that was to have a marked impact on Freuds interest in it as a basis for psychoanalysis.Around the end of the nineteenth century, then, the work of Briquet and Charcot had instilled hysteria into the annals of neurological illness. Charcots work on hysteria concretized the condition as one that could be studied through recognition of underlying psychopathological causes rather than physical symptoms, as Stanley Finger assertsCharcot hypothesized that mental events can act as agents provocateurs, or triggers, for hysterical reactions, at least in an individuals with weak constitutions. He found provoking agents in the loss of a loved one, fears about a real illness, and work-related trauma. (Finger, 2000 194)This notion, as Ernest Jones suggests in his The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1961 208) was to have a profound effect on Freud and form the basis of his and Breuers Studies on Hysteria (19 72).The case history of Dora stands, along with Anna O, Little Hans and the Rat Man, as seminal texts in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud prefaces his study with the caution that it represents only part of the over all research, however it is a remarkably illuminating and complete record of the early applications of psychoanalysis. The case itself surrounds Dora, an eighteen year old woman who suffered a variety of neurotic illness including suddenness of breath (dyspnoea), lose of voice, paralysis, fainting spells, depression and threats of suicide.In analysis, Dora revealed that she had been pursued by Herr K. a family friend, whose wife was conducting a sexual affair with Doras father Doras come was an ineffectual figure in the story who was marginalized both by Dora and, subsequently by Freud himself. Doras bouts of hysteria coincided with real and imaginary contact with Herr K. and reveal themselves through a series of paraparaxes and dreams that picture material for Fre uds interpretation.For Freud, of course, hysteria existed as a psychic rather than a physical condition (Freud, 1972 25). His and Breuers Studies in Hysteria and his own case notes on Dora follows, in some senses, what we have seen as Charcoldian lines of thought, tracing the source of the patients hysterical symptoms back to some puerility event or trauma. In the first dream analysis, for instance, Freud golf links Doras dream concerning the burning of a house in which she stays with childhood memories of bedwetting and being woken up by her fatherThink of the expressions you used that an accident big businessman happen in the night, and that it might be necessary to leave the room. Surely the allusion must be to a physical need? And if you transpose the accident into childhood what can it be but bedwetting? (Freud, 1977 108)The Dora study is interesting, I think, in that it provides us with an ideal fulcrum around which to place Freuds thought. We can note echoes still of Charcot in the analysis and of Freuds earlier insistence on childhood trauma but, of course, by the studys publication in 1905 Freud had formulated his concept of the Oedipus complex (Jones, 1961) and it is this, along with transference perhaps, that provides much of the analytical undercurrent of the text.The symbolism of Doras first dream, for instance, is suffused with Oedipal imagery and reference. It details the dreamer trapped in a burning house whereupon she is awoken by her father. Her Mother, in the meantime, attempts to save her jewellery box but is stopped again by her father as Dora exists the house she awakens.Freud interprets this dream as an indication of Doras pent-up sexual desires for her father the jewelry box becoming symbolic of both her womb and the favour of her father for her mother. The dream reoccurred whilst the subject was visiting the lakeside holiday home that became the scene of the try seduction by Herr K. and this was seen by Freud as an indication that Do ras repressed sexual desires for her father were being awakened in order to further suppress her come on desire for her suitorMy interpretation was that she had at that point summoned up an infantile affection for her father so as to be able to keep her repressed love for Herr K. in its state of repression. This same revulsion in the patients mental life was reflected in the dream. (Freud, 1977 124)Here we have two important features of Freuds notion of the impressiveness of the Oedipus complex in the formation of neurosis, firstly that this manifests itself in dreams and secondly that Dora unconsciously drew upon her unresolved Oedipal or Electra complex in order to repress get sexual desire.If we return again to the first dream we note tropes and Oedipal leitmotifs that even Freud did not discover. The locking of the jewelry box, for instance, is linked with the locking of her brothers room by her motherMy brothers room, you see, has no separate entrance, but can only be reache d through the dining-room. Father does not want my brother to be locked in like that. (Freud, 1977 101)We can detect quite clearly here the extent of the Oedipal reference in the dream. Commensurate with Freuds notions of condensation (Freud, 1965 312) and displacement (Freud, 1965 340), Dora suggests that her brother is, in fact the treasure or jewel that her Mother wants to lock away by not allowing this, her Father both displays his own Oedipal affect (in reality) and strengthens Doras Oedipal attachment to him (in her dream). For Freud, of course, this unresolved complex is repressed and manifests itself as hysteria.Of course, the third element of Oedipal attachment here (after her father and Herr K) is the transference onto Freud himself and the Dora case history stands, perhaps, as one of the greatest stories of seduction, of reader by author, in psychoanalysis. In Freud and the Passions, John ONeil suggests thatListening with the third ear to Dora meant taking on the part of a hysterical daughter caught in a series of transgressive erotic triangles, plot at the same time, attempting to preserve his own discrete boundary as analyst-father. It meant supplementing a fractured verbal narration (her story) with meanings he read into her physical symptoms (his story), joining them unitedly as a single story. (ONeill, 1996 101)Whereas, as many commentators have pointed out (Blass, 1992 Krohn and Krohn, 1982) there is a wealth of Oedipal content in the Dora case and Freuds interpretation it has also been the basis for much reflection.Much of this criticism, in recent years has centered around Freuds phallocentric interpretation of Doras symptoms (Horrocks, 2001). Freuds assertions that Doras revulsion upon being kissed by Herr K. is reflective of her repressed desires, be they Oedipal in the first instance or for Herr K in the second, is for instance refuted by Roger Horrocks in Freud Revisited Psychoanalytic Themes in a Postmodern Age (2001), who sees her a ctions as merely the understandable reactions of a woman caught up in a, mainly masculine, play of power.In her essay The Hysterical Woman depend upon Roles and Role contrast in 19th Century America (1992), Carroll metalworker Rosenberg highlights this phaollocentric construction of the hysterical patientContemporaries noted routinely in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s that nitty-gritty class American girls seemed ill-prepared to assume the responsibilities and trials of marriage, motherhood and maturation. Frequently women, especially married women with children, complained of isolation, loneliness and depression. (Smith Rosenberg, 1992 26)This views hysteria as the outcome of an oppressive masculine society that both controls and diagnoses. Dora, for instance, is defined by the wishes of her father, as daughter as lover by Herr K. and as hysteric by Freud. The phallocentric construction of the feminine binary in the text, displaying on the one hand the ineffectual housewife in the s hape of Doras mother and the cause of desire in the form of Frau K. traps Dora who fits into neither and so is labeled neurotic.Smith Rosenberg (and others such as Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady 1987) also point to the adoption of hysterical symptoms as a sociopolitical protest by the women against the impossible smudge that they found themselves inIt is quite possible that many women experienced a significant level of anxiety when forced to confront or adapt in one way or another to these changes. Thus hysteria may have served as one option to tactic offering particular women differently unable to respond to changes (Smith Rosenberg, 1992 26)We can note, for instance, that there is a distinct link between the concept of illness in the case of Dora and the inability to accept social roles. Her Fathers illness precludes him from satisfactorily fulfilling his role as father, lover and husband and Doras hysterical attacks seems to occur at times of stress, when she is being fo rced, either by her father, Herr. K or Freud to adopt an external, clearly defined feminine role to which she is not accustomed. In fact Freud mentions but then glosses over this very point in his early analysis (Freud, 1977 74-75).Caught within a binary of feminization, Dora exists as the projections of the male presences around her and, in order to protest against this, withdraws into hysteria, and as Mari Jo Buhle suggestsFreuds most acclaimed study of a hysteric discloses such a huge blind spot that the celebrated case of Dora documents more clearly the authors own avoidance mechanisms. (Buhle, 1998 30)As we have see, then, there are cases to made for hysteria to be based in both Freudian notions of the unresolved Oedipus complex and the creation of feminine ideals and social norms by a mostly masculine society. Freuds case study is as interesting to the student of the development of Freudian psychoanalysis, I think, as the psychoanalyst him or herself.Of course, we have here l ooked in short at only two of the many psychoanalytical frameworks that have been designed to study hysteria. We might mention, for instance Lacans discussion of the Dora case in essay conk and Field of Speech and Language (Lacan, 2004) or Kleins notions of the father as good object in the aetiology of feminine sexuality and how it relates to the resolving of the Oedipus complex. What we can assert, by looking at these two specific instances, is the extent that psychoanalytic and socio-political interpretations of hysteria say as much about the wider culture than they do about the condition itself. This view, of course, is commensurate with Foucaults concept of enunciative discourses in his Madness and Civilization (2004) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1989)The case of Dora provides us with an interesting picture of Freud struggling to come to terms with not only concepts such as hysteria and the Oedipus complex but transference, negative transference and, in fact, the whole bas is of modern psychoanalysis. As we have seen, the criticism of the second wave feminists was, perhaps, well founded. The case study, whilst being an exemplar in the ways that analysis can be used is also just as indicative of its problems and shortfalls.ReferencesAbraham, Karl (1988), Hysterical Dream States, published in Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, (London Karnac)Adler, Alfred (1956), The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, (London Harper Torchbooks)Beizer, Janet (1994), Ventriloquized Bodies Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth Century France, (Ithaca Cornell University Press)Buhle, bloody shame Jo (1998), Feminism and its Discontents A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis, (London Harvard University)Finger, Stanley (2000), Minds Behind the Brain, (Oxford Oxford University Press)Freud, Sigmund (1977), Case Histories 1 Dora and Little Hans, (London Penguin)Freud, Sigmund (1965), The Interpretation of Dreams, (London Discus Books)Freud, Sigmund and Breuer, Joseph (1972) , Studies in Hysteria, (London William Benton)Freud, Sigmund (1976), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, (London Penguin)Freud, Sigmund (1974), Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, (London Penguin)Foucault, Michel (2004), Madness and Civilization, (London Routledge)Foucault, Michel (1989), Archaeology of Knowledge, (London Routledge)Foucault, Michel (1990), The History of Sexuality Vol. 3 The Care of the Self, (London Penguin)Horrocks, Roger (2001), Freud Revisited Psychoanalytic Themes in the Postmodern Age, (London Palgrave)Jones, Ernest (1961), The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, (London Pelican)Kahane, Claire (1990), In Doras Case Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, (New York Columbia University Press)Klein, Melanie (1997), The Psycho Analysis of Children, (London Verso)Lacan, Jacques (2004), Ecrits A Selection, (London Routledge)Micklem, Niel (1996), The Nature of Hysteria, (London Routledge)Murohy, Sean and Popay, Jennie (eds), Health and Disease A Reader, (Milton Keynes Open Uni versity Press)ONeill, John (1996), Freud and the Passions, (Pennsylvania Pennsylvania State University)Plato (1970), Dialogues of Plato, (trans. 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