Psychology Essays Hysteria

psychology Essays rageHysteria has been seen as two a form of governmental protest and as the failure to negotiate and resolve the Oedipus coordination compound. Discuss with name and address to the Dora face.In umteen ways, cult and the psych 1urotic patient go chastise to the very heart of psycho abstract. It was after all, as we shall see, the primer coat of Freud and Breuers assertions on the severity of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic treatment and has been used ever since by theorists and practiti unrivaledrs as a test effort with which to continually asses those initial findings. In the late 19th century, as now, the neurotic patient exists in a kind of backwoods of diagnosis, being appropriated for the good, some quantify, of non themselves tho the larger discourse of psychiatry or critical theory. The many end histories that litter the canonical texts of psychoanalysis ar testament to the wide variety of symptoms and manifestations of hysteria that are as many as are the patients themselves. Karl Abraham, in his attempt on Hysterical trance States (1988) gives us this resembling sense as early as 1910these put ins sweep up issue greatly in degree, exhibit considerable variations in their duration, are a great deal associated with the affect of anxiety(and)I myself obligate come across these state sin a number of patients whom I chip in treated with psychoanalysis. (Abraham, 1988 90)With this in mind, in this essay I would bid to look at dickens of the most heavy aetiological views of hysteria of the last hundred and twenty old age those of Freud and the non-resolution of the Oedipus complex and those of the French and the Statesn feminists who viewed hysteria as being, non further a manifestation of phallocentric social registers simply withal a protest against them. In site to centre this study within an existing analytical poser I will constantly refer both views back to Freuds case history of Dora (Freud, 197 7), itself of course, one of the seminal early works on the administration of psychoanalysis and thinking of hysteria and psychoneurotic symptoms.One can only appreciate the impact of Freuds work on hysteria, I think, if one offshoot enthrones it into the context of contemporary and preceding medical theory. Niel Micklem in his The Nature of Hysteria (1996) details the conditions long historyThe lively interest for medicine that hysteria has aroused since it was beginning(a) recorded in ancient Egypt more than 3,000 years ago has yielded a substantial amount of writing(and)the most accomplished search 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 sleep with both by the physician and the historian. However right from its earliest beginnings, the public opinion of hysteria has always been associated with the notion of knowledgeable deve lopment and, in smashicular, that of women. Grecian myth is littered with countless examples of phantasmatic conditions brought on by either informal excess or repression from the mythological portrait of Demeter to Platos assertions in Timaeus thatWhen (sexual) desire is insatiable the man is over-mastered by the power of the generative organs, and the adult female 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 denim Martin Charcot, the reliance upon sex and frustration as a central receive of hysteria was abandoned in prefer of an approach that concerned itself cold more with genetic and here(predicate)ditary eventors. It w as at this time, too, that the psychiatric profession began to take hysteria seriously as a condition and it was chiefly done this that it was twinned with neurosis a factor that was to have a mark 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 archives of neurological illness. Charcots work on hysteria concretized the condition as one that could be studied done recognition of underlying psychopathological crusades instead than carnal 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 astir(predicate) a historical illness, and work-related trauma. (Finger, 2000 194)This notion, as Ernest Jones suggests in his The look 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 (1972).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 fat 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 shortness of breath (dyspnoea), turn a loss 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 get down Doras fuss 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 try material for Freuds 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 childhood event or trauma. In the first dream analysis, for instance, Freud links Doras dream concerning the burning of a house in which she stays with childhood memories of bedwetting and being woken up by her father compute of the expressions you used that an accident might 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 kindle, 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 insistency on childhood trauma but, of course, by the studys publication in 1905 Freud had hypothesize his concept of the Oedipus complex (Jones, 1961) and it is this, along with transference perhaps, that provides much of the analytical undertide of the text.The symbolism of Doras first dream, for instance, is suffused with Oedipal imagery and name and address. 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 jewelry box but is stopped again by her father as Dora exists the house she awakens.Freud interprets this dream as an meter reading of Doras oppress 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 si tuation that became the scene of the attempted seduction by Herr K. and this was seen by Freud as an indication that Doras repressed sexual desires for her father were being awakened in order to further suppress her mature desire for her suitorMy interpretation was that she had at that forecast 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)hither we have two important features of Freuds notion of the importance of the Oedipus complex in the formation of neurosis, firstly that this manifests itself in dreams and secondly that Dora unconsciously drew upon her undefendable Oedipal or Electra complex in order to repress mature 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 wit h the locking of her brothers room by her motherMy brothers room, you see, has no separate entrance, but can only be reached through the dining-room. Father does not want my brother to be locked in like that. (Freud, 1977 101)We can detect quite distinctly 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 opened complex is repressed and manifests itself as hysteria.Of course, the one-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 great stories of seduction, of reader by author, in psych oanalysis. In Freud and the Passions, John ONeil suggests thatListening with the third ear to Dora meant taking on the part of a hysterical miss caught in a series of transgressive erotic triangles, while at the same time, attempting to preserve his own discrete boundary as analyst-father. It meant supplementing a fractured communicative narration (her story) with meanings he read into her physical symptoms (his story), joining them together as a single story. (ONeill, 1996 101)Whereas, as many commentators have pointed out (Blass, 1992 Krohn and Krohn, 1982) in that respect is a wealth of Oedipal content in the Dora case and Freuds interpretation it has also been the basis for much criticism.Much of this criticism, in recent years has come to 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 actions as merely the understandable reactions of a woman caught up in a, mainly masculine, play of power.In her essay The Hysterical charr Sex functions and Role Conflict in 19th Century America (1992), Carroll smith Rosenberg highlights this phaollocentric construction of the hysterical patientContemporaries noted routinely in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s that middle class American girls seemed ill-prepared to occupy 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. T he phallocentric construction of the feminine binary in the text, displaying on the one hand the ineffectual housewife in the shape 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 unsurmountable situation that they found themselves inIt is quite possible that many women undergo a significant level of anxiety when forced to confront or adapt in one way or another to these changes. thence hysteria may have served as one option to tactical maneuver offering particular women otherwise unable to respond to changes (Smith Rosenberg, 1992 26)We can note, for instance, that on that point is a distinct link between the concept of illness in the case of Dora and the inability to accept social utilisations. Her Fathers illness preclud es 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 forced, 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 largely masculine society. Freuds c ase 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 looked briefly at only two of the many psychoanalytical frameworks that have been designed to study hysteria. We might mention, for instance Lacans sermon of the Dora case in essay Function and Field of Speech and linguistic communication (Lacan, 2004) or Kleins notions of the father as good object in the etiology 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 proportionate 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, negatively charged transference and, in fact, the whole basis of modern psychoanalysis. As we have seen, the criticism of the second wave feminists was, perhaps, well founded. The case study, whilst being an framework 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, Mary Jo (1998), Feminism and its Discontents A Century of difference of opinion with Psychoanalysis, (London Harvard University)Finger, Stanley (2000), Minds Behind the Brain, (Oxford Oxford University Pre ss)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 news report 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 University Press)ONeill, John (1996), Freud and the Passions, ( dada Pennsylvania State University)Plato (1970), Dialogues of Plato, (trans. 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