Mad Men And Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria And the Effects of Sibling Relations On the Human Condition

by JulietMitchell (Author)

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  Paperback
  2000

  $3.25

  Hysteria has usually been seen as a female disease. In Ancient Greece it was described as the wandering womb , in the middle ages it was explained as seduction by the devil, and in the 18th century as a touch of the vapours . It was only Jean-Martin Charcot in 19th-century Paris who insisted on the presence of male hysteria. This culturally universal condition - with its symptoms of paralysis, fits, choking, mimicry and hallucinations - was fully diagnozed by Freud, with his famous case study of the 18-year-old hysteric, Dora . But when First World War soldiers began to suffer from this unmanly disorder, the term was dropped. According to modern diagnoses, hysteria no longer exists, yet here Juliet Mitchell shows that it is still just as much with us today, but under other names - trauma, panic attacks, anorexia, multiple personalities, even Gulf War Syndrome. We must, she argues, using studies of soldiers, the Don Juan legend, even Freud's own hysteria, reclaim the term, not just as a feminine disorder, but by recognizing the secret history of male hysterics. While not contesting the importance of the Oedipal complex, Mitchell argues that its discovery has blocked our understanding of hysteria. She proposes a different order, one that implicates siblings, the great omission in both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Understanding hysteria in this way is vital to understanding the human condition.