Hysteria in Boys and Youths

Hysteria, belief, and magic.

(a) A courageous OP refers a boy aged eight who has †̃¿ gone off his legs' that morning. The OP says he knows it is hysterical but that he cannot stop it. The boy is brought by car. A kind psychiatrist negotiates through the window the need for the boy to mount the steps to come and talk. The boy comes. He talks about how his estranged father had promised first a trip to the cup final and then...

Suggestibility and Hysteria.

Crime , Hysteria and Belle

Hysteria and hypnotism became a favorite topic of studies in the fin de siècle neurology that emerged from the school organized at La Salpêtrière by Jean-Martin Charcot, where he had arrived in 1861. Georges Gilles de la Tourette started working with Charcot in 1884 and probably remained his most faithful student, even after his mentor’s death in 1893. This collaboration was particularly intens...

Hysteria in Four Acts

I 1973, the journalist Flora Rhea Schreiber collaborated with Cornelia Wilbur, a Manhattan psychiatrist, in writing Sybil., the story of a young woman who, while under Wilbur's care, developed sixteen "personalities." In each distinct "alter"— alternative personality—she behaved in a different way, at one time or another "depicting" aggressive males, defenseless children, and intellectual women...

Hysteria revisited.

Despite the attrition of psychoanalytic explanations for clinical conditions and the disappearance of “hysteria” from diagnostic lexicons, the phenomena first addressed in an orderly manner by Charcot and Freud continue to reassert themselves, as is apparent in the article by Vorhees in this issue of the JABFP. An elderly woman began to have spells of falling, paralysis, paresthesia, and uncont...