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Anna is a young woman who suffers from “attacks.” She says that she has “bad nerves.” Everything seems to have started when she was nineteen years old and ran away from her mountain hometown, rebelling against her mother as the result of a violent fight with her sister. She was found some days later wandering naked in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The police took her to a hospital where she was admitted screaming and hitting. Her eyes were rolling, foam was coming out of her mouth, and her whole body was shaking in a seizure. Shortly thereafter, she lost consciousness. Anna was diagnosed as suffering from the Puerto Rican Syndrome (see Comas-Dias).
It was during the 1950s that the commonly noted ataque (attack) started to be identified by Anglo doctors as the Puerto Rican Syndrome. Army psychiatrists noted that Puerto Ricans in military settings behaved in “peculiar” ways whenever they were anxious. The Puerto Rican Syndrome was described as a complex of capricious somatic manifestations, combined with terror, agitation, and violence—all manifestations considered to be of psychogenic origin (see Mehlman; Fernandez-Marina; and Sierra and Trent).
The “conversion disorder” known as ataque coincides point by point with the Charcotian and Freudian description of hysterical conversion, which includes anesthesia, hyperesthesia, pain, paralysis, convulsions, hyperventilation, mutism, uncommunicativeness, self-mutilations, violence, and in some cases deafness and blindness. In Studies in Hysteria (see Lacan, Seminar V). Freud identifies as a hystericizing situation one in which too much time is spent taking care of a sick person, placing one in a passive situation, awaiting the other's demand. This is a position in which one's own wishes remain in suspense, repressed, subordinated, servicing the other's needs. Any attempt to have an independent wish is suppressed and returned as guilt. Today, Puerto Ricans repeat this hysterical position of subaltern service occupied by Freud's Vienn