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NLP 29:12-43 (1997) • DOI: 10.4324/9780203360378-7

The Primal Book of Psychoanalysis: Studies on Hysteria A Hundred Years On

Author: Ilse Grubrich-Simitis

I

The great French neuropathologist Jean-Martin Charcot died in the summer of 1893. When Sigmund Freud was not yet thirty, on his study trip to Paris, he had attended Charcot’s lectures at his Salpêtrière clinic for some months in 1885 and 1886 and become acquainted with the masters novel research on hysteria. It was an encounter which, as we know, was instrumental in the transition, in Freud’s intellectual development, from neuropathology to psychopathology. In his obituary1Freud describes how, through the authority of Charcot, hysteria had at a stroke become the focus of general attention. Charcot had restored dignity to the topic and vouched for the genuineness of the symptoms. Until then, such patients had been met with a scornful smile because they were considered to be malingerers. For the first time, what was in those days a widespread illness became an object of serious scientific concern.2

Freud goes on to outline the approach to solving the riddle of hysteria as follows:

A quite unbiassed [sic] observer might have arrived at this conclusion: if I find someone in a state which bears all the signs of a painful affect—weeping, screaming and raging—the conclusion seems probable that a mental process is going on in him of which those physical phenomena are the appropriate expression. A healthy person, if he were asked, would be in a position to say what impression it was that was tormenting him; but the hysteric would answer that he did not know. The problem would at once arise of how it is that a hysterical patient is overcome by an affect about whose cause he asserts that he knows nothing. If we keep to our conclusion that a corresponding psychical process must be present, and if nevertheless we believe the patient when he denies it; if we bring together the many indications that the patient is behaving as though he does know about it; and if we enter into the history of the patient’s life and find some occasion, some trauma, which would appropriately evoke pre

NLP 29:12-43 (1997) • DOI: 10.4324/9780203360378-7

The Primal Book of Psychoanalysis: Studies on Hysteria A Hundred Years On

Author: Ilse Grubrich-Simitis

I

Freud goes on to outline the approach to solving the riddle of hysteria as follows:

A quite unbiassed [sic] observer might have arrived at this conclusion: if I find someone in a state which bears all the signs of a painful affect—weeping, screaming and raging—the conclusion seems probable that a mental process is going on in him of which those physical phenomena are the appropriate expression. A healthy person, if he were asked, would be in a position to say what impression it was that was tormenting him; but the hysteric would answer that he did not know. The problem would at once arise of how it is that a hysterical patient is overcome by an affect about whose cause he asserts that he knows nothing. If we keep to our conclusion that a corresponding psychical process must be present, and if nevertheless we believe the patient when he denies it; if we bring together the many indications that the patient is behaving as though he does know about it; and if we enter into the history of the patient’s life and find some occasion, some trauma, which would appropriately evoke pre