Studies On Hysteria Quotes

It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma. But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently. p9-10

In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Dore. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.

A cult is a group of people who share an obsessive devotion to a person or idea. The cults described in this book use violent tactics to recruit, indoctrinate, and keep members. Ritual abuse is defined as the emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive acts performed by violent cults. Most violent cults do not openly express their beliefs and practices, and they tend to live separately in noncommunal environments to avoid detection. Some victims of ritual abuse are children abused outside the home by nonfamily members, in public settings such as day care. Other victims are children and teenagers who are forced by their parents to witness and participate in violent rituals. Adult ritual abuse victims often include these grown children who were forced from childhood to be a member of the group. Other adult and teenage victims are people who unknowingly joined social groups or organizations that slowly manipulated and blackmailed them into becoming permanent members of the group. All cases of ritual abuse, no matter what the age of the victim, involve intense physical and emotional trauma. Violent cults may sacrifice humans and animals as part of religious rituals. They use torture to silence victims and other unwilling participants. Ritual abuse victims say they are degraded and humiliated and are often forced to torture, kill, and sexually violate other helpless victims. The purpose of the ritual abuse is usually indoctrination. The cults intend to destroy these victims' free will by undermining their sense of safety in the world and by forcing them to hurt others. In the last ten years, a number of people have been convicted on sexual abuse charges in cases where the abused children had reported elements of ritual child abuse. These children described being raped by groups of adults who wore costumes or masks and said they were forced to witness religious-type rituals in which animals and humans were tortured or killed. In one case, the defense introduced in court photographs of the children being abused by the defendants[.1] In another case, the police found tunnels etched with crosses and pentacles along with stone altars and candles in a cemetery where abuse had been reported. The defendants in this case pleaded guilty to charges of incest, cruelty, and indecent assault.[2] Ritual abuse allegations have been made in England, the United States, and Canada.[3] Many myths abound concerning the parents and children who report ritual abuse. Some people suggest that the tales of ritual abuse are "mass hysteria." They say the parents of these children who report ritual abuse are often overly zealous Christians on a "witch-hunt" to persecute satanists. These skeptics say the parents are fearful of satanism, and they use their knowledge of the Black Mass (a historically well-known, sexualized ritual in which animals and humans are sacrificed) to brainwash their children into saying they were abused by satanists.[4] In 1992 I conducted a study to separate fact from fiction in regard to the disclosures of children who report ritual abuse.[5] The study was conducted through Believe the Children, a national organization that provides support and educational sources for ritual abuse survivors and their families.

THE CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MINDS There is a section in Studies on Hysteria entitled “Unconscious Ideas and Ideas Inadmissible to Consciousness—Splitting of the Mind,” written by Breuer. Today, we would substitute the word emotions for ideas, but that disagreement aside, the concept that we humans have two minds is very important to an understanding of TMS. It is clear that we are two different people—one of them conscious and the other unconscious.

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

It comes from the Greek and Latin word hyster, which means womb. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was the word men gave to a disease defined as insanity as a result of being female. They’d lock women away for it, women who wanted to do things like write books, or study science. Or play music. The prescribed treatment was rest—by which they meant having no mental life whatsoever. There’s a whole novella about it, in fact, called “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s the story of a woman who’s confined to her bed by her husband, a wife who winds up being driven insane by the cure he has inflicted on her. I told Mom that we didn’t live in the nineteenth century, and that if anybody could prove that it was possible to redefine gender, it was me.

We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them. Shrill… vituperative… no concern for the future of society… maunderings of antiquated feminism… selfish femlib… needs a good lay… this shapeless book… of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond… twisted, neurotic… some truth buried in a largely hysterical… of very limited interest, I should… another tract for the trash-can… burned her bra and thought that… no characterization, no plot… really important issues are neglected while… hermetically sealed… women's limited experience… another of the screaming sisterhood… a not very appealing aggressiveness… could have been done with wit if the author had… deflowering the pretentious male… a man would have given his right arm to… hardly girlish… a woman's book… another shrill polemic which the… a mere male like myself can hardly… a brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria which… feminine lack of objectivity… this pretense at a novel… trying to shock… the tired tricks of the anti-novelists… how often must a poor critic have to… the usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism… denial of the profound sexual polarity which… an all too womanly refusal to face facts… pseudo-masculine brusqueness… the ladies'-magazine level… trivial topics like housework and the predictable screams of… those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate will… unfortunately sexless in its outlook… drivel… a warped clinical protest against… violently waspish attack… formidable self-pity which erodes any chance of… formless… the inability to accept the female role which… the predictable fury at anatomy displaced to… without the grace and compassion which we have the right to expect… anatomy is destiny… destiny is anatomy… sharp and funny but without real weight or anything beyond a topical… just plain bad… we "dear ladies," whom Russ would do away with, unfortunately just don't feel… ephemeral trash, missiles of the sex war… a female lack of experience which… Q. E. D. Quod erat demonstrandum. It has been proved.

Two entirely distinct state of consciousness were present which alternated very frequently and without warning and which became more and more differentiated in the course of the illness. In one of these states she recognized her normal surroundings; she was melancholy and anxious, but relatively normal. In the other state she hallucinated and was "naughty" —that is to say, she was abusive, used to throw the cushions at people, so far as the contractures at various times allowed, tore buttons off her bedclothes and linen with those of her fingers which she could move, and so on. At this stage of her illness if something had been moved in the room or someone had entered or left it (during her other state of consciousness) she would complain of having "lost" some time and would remark upon the gap in her train of conscious thoughts.

She had to know, and I’m certain she did, that even the simple matter of dark skin would be a cause of consternation for her parents. I came to imagine them as Ward and June Cleaver. I recalled my mother happening upon me watching that television show one afternoon. It launched her into such a fit of hysteria that I was afraid she might become pregnant again. “How dare they put that propaganda on the television?” my mother barked. “But of course that’s what the box is for, isn’t it? Here is my black son sitting here in his black neighborhood watching some bucktoothed little rat and his washed-out, anally stabbed Nazi-Christian parents.” “There’s a brother, too,” I said, being six or so and not really understanding the tirade. “Oh, a brother, too. I see him there, an older lily white acorn fallen so close to the tree. Turn that crap off. No, leave it on. Study the problem, Not Sidney. Soak it in.” With that she marched off to make cookies.

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics..." "The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head..." "One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle — and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse. She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

Arabelle was so upset, it was clear that she was not filled with the thrill of discovery. She was instead several steps over the edge into hysteria, and talking to hysterical people, like so much of ordinary human interaction, takes no particular empathy or liking for people, happily for Dark and Dismal Dexter. It was all technique, a craft and not an art, and that put it squarely inside the expertise of anyone who has studied and copied human behavior. Smile in the right places, nod your head, pretend to listen—I had mastered it ages ago.

After fifteen minutes in the air, Sharko started leafing through the book on mass hysteria. As Dr. Taha Abou Zeid had briefly explained, this phenomenon had cut across time periods, nationalities, and religions. The author based his thesis on photos, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with specialists. In France, for instance, witch hunts in the Middle Ages had provoked an inordinate fear of the devil and mass acts of insanity: screaming crowds hungry for blood, mothers and children who cheered to see “witches” burning alive. The cases in the book were astounding. India, 2001: hundreds of individuals from different parts of New Delhi swear they were attacked by a fictional being, half man, half monkey, “with metal claws and red eyes.” Certain “victims” even leap from the window to flee this creature, who’d surged right out of the collective imagination. Belgium, 1990: the Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena suddenly receives several thousand sightings of UFOs. The most likely cause was held to be sociopsychological. A sudden mania for looking for flying objects, exacerbated by the media: when you want to see something, you end up seeing it. Dakar: ninety high school students go into a trance and are brought to the hospital. Some speak of a curse; there are purification rituals and sacrifices to remedy the situation. Sharko turned the pages—it went on forever. Sects committing group suicide, panicked crowds, haunted house syndrome like the Amityville Horror, collective fainting spells at concerts…There was even a chapter on genocides, a “criminal mass hysteria,” according to the terms of certain psychiatrists: organizers who plan coldly, calculatingly, while those who execute sink into a frenzy of wholesale destruction and butchery.

Insurrections may be provoked or incited or may occur spontaneously as the expression of grievances or of frustrated aspirations or because of other factors: religious frenzy, blood feuds; mass hysteria induced by anything from a sports contest to a rape in Mississippi can lead to bloodshed and temporary anarchy. Guerrilla warfare does not necessarily follow. Insurrection is a phenomenon, revolution a process, which cannot begin until the historical stage has been set for it.

One of the most remarkable cases published in France is that of Louis Vivet, studied from 1882 to 1889 by many authors, by Legrand du Saulle, Voisin, Mabille and Ramadier, Bourru and Burot. This boy has six different existences. Each of them is characterized, first, by modifications of the memory affecting now one period, now another; secondly, by modifications of character; in one state he is gentle and industrious, in another he is lazy and irascible; thirdly, by modifications of sensibility and of motion; in one state he is insensible, and paralyzed in his left side; in another he is paralyzed in his right side; in a third he is paraplegic, etc.

Medical Warning: Talk to your doctor before beginning a John Locke series, as studies have shown them to be habit-forming and highly addictive. Do not read Locke if you suffer from high blood pressure or other heart-related issues, as readers often experience mood swings, increased pulses, elevated heart rates, and have reported unexpected shifts in body position that take them to the edge of their seats. Do not drive or use machinery while reading Locke novels. Locke novels are not for everyone, and may cause serious reactions including insomnia, night terrors, and uncontrollable, maniacal laughter. Tell your doctor right away if you have these, or if you experience unusual changes in your behavior including increased sexual urges, palpitations, or prolonged erections. Common side effects include confusion, hysteria, and trouble swallowing a given premise. Do not drink alcohol while reading Locke novels, though those with a history of drug or alcohol abuse may be more prone to understanding the material. Adverse reactions to Locke novels include nausea and vomiting, loss of appetite, severe itching, rectal bleeding, purple spots under the skin, and Jimmy Legs. In extreme cases, readers have reported laughing so hard they not only shit their pants, but other’s pants, as well. Upon completing a Locke series be prepared to experience symptoms of withdrawal, including fear, anger, extreme sadness, and moderate to severe depression. Ask your doctor today if John Locke novels are right for you!

One of the more fascinating examples came when a reader sent me a 1973 paper from what at the time was the Journal of Hygiene (now known as Epidemiology and Infection). The paper reported on an outbreak of respiratory illness in 1969 at a British research base in Antarctica—in the middle of the Antarctic winter, after 17 weeks of complete isolation. Out of nowhere, six of the twelve researchers at the base had developed colds. Despite intensive study, the researchers never figured out how the illness had started or what pathogen was behind it. I linked to the piece on Twitter as an example of the absurdity of hoping that lockdowns could ever completely contain a respiratory virus.12

European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure: when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations [...] the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused.

Prince Andrew is a very interesting case study for sex researchers.

The first published discussion of it of any length was by Breuer (in semi-physiological terms) in his theoretical part of the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895). He there defines it as ‘the tendency to keep intracerebral excitation constant.

There are a range of useful and illuminating analyses of the media construction of organised abuse as it became front-page news in the 1980s and 1990s (Kitzinger 2004, Atmore 1997, Kelly 1998), but this book is focused on organised abuse as a criminal practice; as well as a discursive object of study, debate and disagreement. These two dimensions of this topic are inextricably linked because precisely where and how organised abuse is reported to take place is an important determinant of how it is understood. Prior to the 1980s, the predominant view of the police, psychiatrists and other authoritative professionals was that organised abuse occurred primarily outside the family where it was committed by extra-familial ‘paedophiles’. This conceptualisation; of organised abuse has received enduring community support to the present day, where concerns over children’s safety is often framed in terms of their vulnerability to manipulation by ‘paedophiles’ and ‘sex rings’. This view dovetails more generally with the medico-legal and media construction of the ‘paedophile as an external threat to the sanctity of the family and community (Cowburn and Dominelli 2001) but it is confounded by evidence that organised abuse and other forms of serious sexual abuse often originates in the home or in institutions, such as schools and churches, where adults have socially legitimate authority over children.

As historian Johanna Fernández writes in a study co-authored with political prisoner Abu-Jamal, “The deployment of hysteria around the issue of crime and the association of crime with black rebellion helped consolidate public support for legislation designed to suppress political dissent.”[18]

You’re talkin’ ‘bout the deaths at the high school, huh?” I nodded and waited to be let in, and then I would ask to open a window. He was still studying me. “You’ve gone to the cops already, huh?” “Like I said, they think my story is just kids over-reacting, teenage hysteria.

Dissociative disorders (DDs) were first recognized as official psychiatric disorders in 1980 with the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM III) in 1980. Prior to this, the related symptoms were listed under ‘hysterical neuroses’ in the second edition of the DSM.[1,2] Interestingly, all of the current DDs that have been described were discovered prior to 1900 but decades passed with little study or research of this spectrum of psychiatric pathology.