Hysteria
In nineteenth-century medicine, the name for an illness in which symptoms such as paralysis or fits appear although no injury or lesion can be found to explain them.
The symptoms varied widely: paralysed limbs, disturbed sight or hearing, loss of voice, a severe cough. In a lecture of 1909 Freud recalled that doctors could picture what was happening in a disease of the brain, but found their knowledge useless here, and tended to blame the patient for exaggeration and withdraw their interest[1].
In the early 1880s the Viennese physician Josef Breuer reported that a symptom could disappear when the patient recalled and described the scene in which it began. Breuer and Freud published a book of such cases in 1895[2]. Freud summed up the idea by saying that these patients suffer from reminiscences[1].
It is listed here as a diagnosis that appears in the sources of the time.
Related terms
- Talking cureA treatment that tries to relieve symptoms by having the patient talk. The name was given in English in the early 1880s by Josef Breuer's patient known as Anna O.
- PsychoanalysisThe method of treatment created by Sigmund Freud, which looks for the causes of symptoms in what the patient says, together with the theory built on it.
- HypnosisLeading a person by suggestion into a special, sleep-like state of consciousness. Physicians used it for treatment and research at the end of the nineteenth century.