HYSTERIA SIMPLIFIED AND EXPLAINED.

Somatization, hysteria, or incompletely explained symptoms?

I n this month's In Review section, all the contributors—Dr François Mai (1), Dr Laurence Kirmayer and colleagues (2), and I—wrestle with the seemingly intractable and endlessly interesting topic of body–mind relations. In the first review article, Dr Mai lays out the justification for a diagnostic category of somatization disorder. He recognizes that the standard monistic approach that accepts...

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 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...