Psychoanalysis and Social change

In Many Societies attempts are made to remedy human ailments by means of word and gesture, for the suffering person is in the first instance understood as one who must be summoned into the state of health. Our civilization, on the contrary, has developed a body of medical knowledge which seeks to trace the phenomena of suffering back to some organic background and to develop a corresponding causal medical therapy of the body.

For people of this medical outlook, states of suffering which show more or less circumscribed symptoms but cannot be traced to a basic organic disturbance are a thorn in the flesh. Those disturbances that we now call neuroses have always existed, but they have grown in significance, not in the first instance because they have become more frequent, but because problems manifest themselves in neuroses which are of especial concern to people living in contemporary civilization.

Psychoanalysis is, up to the present time, the most radical answer to the problem raised by the existence of such patients, not only for medical science but, moreover, for anthropology in general. Sigmund Freud has grappled with this problem on both the practical and the theoretical levels and attempted to resolve it in a manner that makes his work the classical example of all endeavors by medical men to gain an understanding of human suffering.

II

When Freud began to concern himself with the problems of illness which psychoanalysis was intended to clarify, the interest of medical men was already being directed to “hysterical” symptoms. The word “hysteria,” derived from hystéra, the uterus, indicates a classical etiology already established among the Greeks. This gives rise to two considerations: in the first place, it justifies the conclusion that hysterical symptoms made their appearance in the majority of cases in women and, in the second place, that the ancient hypothetical localization gives grounds for the assumption that genital or sexual problems become expressed in hy