1,137
Views
6
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Review Articles

The mysteries of hysteria: a historical perspective

Pages 437-450 | Received 06 Jan 2020, Accepted 19 May 2020, Published online: 05 Jun 2020
 

Abstract

Jean-Martin Charcot started his main work on hysteria around 1870, until his death in 1893. Désiré Bourneville had triggered Charcot’s interest in hysteria during his stay as an interne in his department, while Charles Richet’s 1875 article on somnambulism was the trigger for Charcot to develop hypnotism. Charcot’s collaborators Paul Richer, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Paul Sollier, Joseph Babinski, Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet subsequently became most famous in hysteria. In 1908, a “quarrel of hysteria” opposed several of Charcot’s pupils, from which Babinski, who had developed the concept of “pithiatism”, was considered victorious against Charcot’s first successor Fulgence Raymond. There was a surge of interest in hysteria associated with war psycho-neuroses in 1914–1918, and Babinski’s pupil Clovis Vincent developed a treatment called torpillage (torpedoing) against war hysteria, associating painful galvanic current discharges with “persuasion”. After World War I, the neurological and psychiatric interest in hysteria again faded away, before a renewed interest at the turn of the last century. Contrary to a common view, the modernity of several of Charcot’s concepts in hysteria is remarkable, still today, mainly for: (1) his traumatic theory, which encompassed psychological and certain sexual factors several years before Freud; (2) his personal evolution towards the role of emotional factors, which opened the way to Janet and Freud; (3) his claim of specific differences vs. similarities in mental states such as hypnotism, hysteria, and simulation, which has recently been confirmed by functional imaging; and (4) his “dynamic lesion” theory, which now correlates well with recently established neurophysiological mechanisms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.