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In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), Elaine Showalter explores a range of conditions—chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple personality disorder, recovered memory, satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction, Gulf War syndrome—that she views as modern forms of hysteria as distinct from the old conversion and anxiety hysterias characteristic of the last fin-de-siècle and associated with the names of Charcot, Janet, Breuer, and Freud.
Against the widespread claim that hysteria is a thing of the past, having disappeared due to the rise of feminism or a level of psychological sophistication incompatible with the formation of hysterical symptoms (except perhaps among culturally “backward” populations), Showalter argues that, on the contrary, far from having died, hysteria is alive and well in the form of the psychological plagues or epidemics of “imaginary illnesses” and “hypnotically induced pseudomemories” that characterize today's cultural narratives of hysteria (4-5).
Although she provides a rich description of the new hysterias—the “hystories” or hysterical stories of chronic fatigue, alien abduction, etc.—Showalter does not pretend to offer a depth-psychological account of the psychodynamics underlying these conditions beyond identifying the role of suggestion on the part of physicians and the media in their creation and dissemination. Her definition of hysteria as “a