Neurasthenia was first identified in the United States and linked with the nation's nervous modernity. In American Nervousness, George M. Beard, who named the new disorder, defined neurasthenia as a condition of nervous exhaustion, an "impoverishment of nervous force, caused by competitive business and social environments”.203 So the
198 Jeanne Peterson, "Dr. Acton's Enemy: Medicine, Sex, and Society in Victorian England," Victorian Studies 29 (Summer 1986): 578 n. 29.
199 Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1982), 30.
200 Ernst von Feuchtersleben, The Principles of Medical Psychology, trans. H. E. Lloyd, ed. B. G. Babington (London: Sydenham Society, 1847), 228.
201 Wilhelm Reich, Character-Analysis , 3d ed., trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1949), 189.
202 John H. Smith, "Abulia: Sexuality and Diseases of the Will in the Late Nineteenth Century," Genders 6 (Fall 1989). 110.
203 George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences , 1881; reprint (New York:
Arno Press, 1972), 44.
condition identified masculinity with power. Beard estimated that one out of every ten neurasthenics was a doctor.204 The construction of neurasthenia as masculine was a fabrication of medical journals in the United States as the ratio of male and female was equal.205
In England, neurasthenia quickly lost its sheltering power for men and became a female malady like hysteria; it was estimated that there were fourteen neurasthenic women for every neurasthenic man.206
Despite evidence and findings indicating the existence of male hysteria, the spectre of the uterine hypothesis persisted. Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939), after his time at Charcot’s clinic, faced opposition and ridicule when he presented his paper on male hysteria before the Viennese Society of Physicians on the 15th of October 1886.207 To his colleagues the idea of a male hysteric defied semantic logic for a male does not possess a uterus.208
This approach to hysteria as an inherent female condition persisted with contemporaries of Charcot and other later medical experts.The French physician Auguste Fabre, a
contemporary of Charcot, writes that, “as a general rule all women are hysterical and every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria. Hysteria, before being an illness, is a rule, and what constitutes the temperament of a woman is rudimentary hysteria”.209 Thus, according to the British analyst Gregorio Kohon, "A woman at heart always remains a hysteric”.210 Psychiatrist Paul Chodoff further remarks that hysterical behaviours "may present as...unattractive, noisy, emotional displays...or as the hysterical (histrionic) personality disorder – a DSM-3 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) diagnostic label,
204 Ibid.
205 F. S. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 34.
206 Showalter,”Hysteria, Feminism and Gender”, 297.
207 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. and trans. J. Strachey, A. Freud, A Strachey, and A. Tyson, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1955-1974), 1:58.
208 Ibid.
209 A. Fabre, L'Hystérie Viscérale: Nouveaux Fragments de Clinique Médicale, (Paris: A. Delahaye & E.
Lecrosnier, 1883), 3.
210 Gregorio Kohon, "Reflections on Dora: The Case of Hysteria," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 65 (1984).
referring to habitual and sustained patterns of behaviour characteristic of some women”.211
Sydenham, though a visionary, was very much a man of his time when it came to treatment and he often prescribed bleeding and purging to purify the blood.212 While Charcot did not consider the uterine to be the cause of hysteria, he still viewed the organ as problematic in the diagnosis of hysteria. He believed that the ‘hysterogenic zones’
created a topography or mapping of the female body that gave a central position to the ovaries and mammary glands which he claimed could trigger or arrest a hysterical fit.213 An invention of his is the ‘ovary compressor,’ an apparatus that worked like a vice grip to apply pressure to the hysterogenic zone to trigger or restrain a hysterical fit.214
The ideologies of gender still remain a factor in the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders. In his study L'hystérique, le sexe, et le médecin, the French psychiatrist Lucien Israël (1925-1996) discusses the "unconscious complicity between sick men and male doctors to avoid the shameful and infamous diagnosis of hysteria”.215
Israel explains:
The hysteria diagnosis became for a man ... the real injury, a sign of weakness, a castration in a word. To say to a man 'you are hysterical' became under these conditions a form of saying to him 'You are not a man.'216
This chapter further establishes the polemical trajectory of hysteria. The category of hysteria was consequently set against a category of masculine nervous disorders whose name was constantly shifting to avoid the contentious term of hysteria. When hysteria was ultimately diagnosed in men, it was defined as ‘male hysteria’ and thus a different
category. It highlights not only the persistence of language in the history of hysteria but
211 Hysteria and Women," American Journal of Psychiatry,” May 1982, 545 -551(http://psycnet.apa.org/
psycinfo/1982-23662-001, accessed April 4, 2012.
212 Boss, “The Seventeenth-Century Transformation of the Hysteric Affection, and Sydenham's Baconian Medicine.”
213 Hustvedt, 26.
214 Ibid., 26, 27.
215 Lucien Israël, L'hystérique, le sexe, et le médecin, (Paris: Masson, 1983), 60.
216 Ibid.,197.
also the role of physicians in propagating the myth of hysteria as essentially a female condition. The suppressing of male neurosis and its exclusion from official discourses exposes the authority of the archive, and the notion of ‘archival violence’.
Chapter Three
Forms of Classification
Throughout the thirty years of Charcot at its helm, the Salpêtrière was transformed from an antiquated hospice into a monolithic institution with a highly sophisticated laboratory for pathological anatomy.217 The Salpêtrière’s renowned reputation as a teaching hospital attracted medical practitioners all over Europe who came to study under Charcot’s tutelage and observe the weekly theatrical performances of his hysterical patients, conducted by the charismatic Charcot himself. In 1885, at the age of twenty-nine, Sigmund Freud came to the clinic for one year to study Charcot’s techniques. The sojourn was to be important in Freud’s eventual classification of the nature of hysteria, his use of hypnosis, and in the development of his own clinical method.218