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The British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 9(2) published a special section entitled ‘100 Years of Psychoanalysis’ which consisted of a group of papers that examined and re-evaluated Freud's concept of hysteria. The publication of these papers was received with interest and formed the basis of a conference held conjointly by the BJP and the Freud Museum in February 1994. Bob Hinshelwood, the founder/editor of the British Journal of Psychotherapy set the framework for these papers by writing in his editorial introduction that psychoanalysis is the only nineteenth-century treatment within psychiatry that has survived into the end of this century and is thus the oldest treatment in psychiatry. As such, it is ripe for removal unless it speaks in some specially apt way to the condition of man today. In this context, we will be looking at hysteria as a cultural entity, at its history, its role in the development of psychoanalytic theory, and what seem to be its new permutations found in the consulting-room.
The defining characteristic of hysteria in the nineteenth century was the conversion symptom. Women suffered from mysterious paralyses of parts of the body, convulsions and faints. There were strange disturbances of sensation, blindness, deafness and anaesthesias in some obscure leap from the mind to the body. David Smith's paper tracks the development of Freud's thoughts on the question of how the mind and body are related. From a ‘split consciousness’ theory and the philosophical background of Cartesian dualism with which hysteria was associated, Freud moved to a unitary theory, of the identity of the mind and brain which provided the philosophical underpinnings of his theory of the unconscious and aligns him with the majority of philosophers today. In his endeavour to understand how these otherwise intelligent women succumbed to the irrationality of a body dysfunction without neurological explanation, Freud's contribution was to alter the notion that it was ‘innate m