���On Elaine Showalter's book *Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern
Media*, Stephen Black quotes from the Amazon review (Library Journal)
and concludes:
>It sounds like a good starting point for your student.
I suspect Stephen would have added a caveat had he read Frederick
Crews' review of *Hystories* ("Keeping Us in Hysterics", The New
Republic, 12 May 1997; republished in Crews, F., *Follies of the Wise:
Dissenting Essays*, 2006, pp. 173-186). For instance, Showalter
declares herself as one of the "New Hysterians" who understand hysteria
as "a body language for people who otherwise might not be able to speak
or even admit what they feel". Such understanding, for Showalter, comes
from studies "at the busy crossroad where psychoanalytic theory,
narratology, feminist criticism, and the history of medicine
intersect." Crews regards her theoretical positioning as "a
middle-of-the-road outlook that could pass for sheer reasonableness,
but is… more a matter of dodging trouble and taking refuge in received
ideas."
Crews asks some pertinent questions, such as the rationale for
Showalter's including, e.g., belief in UFOs as a form of hysteria:
"Showalter has yoked together vastly disparate phenomena, from merely
mistaken and correctible beliefs on the part of normal people through
paranoid phatasms and lasting physical debility." He also challenges
her certitude on the supposed hysterical basis of Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome and Gulf War Syndrome.
According to Crews, Showalter's writings show that she retains an
"unreflective loyalty to the broad outlines of the psychoanalytic
revelation". Elsewhere one can find signs of that adherence. As late as
1993 she wrote of the case of "Anna O.", "Rather than continuing her
[Anna O.'s] role as a passive hysterical patient, through her writing
she became one who controlled her own cure" – this despite Henri
Ellenberger's revelation more than 20 years earlier that this "famed
‘prototype of a cathartic cure’ was neither a cure nor a catharsis”.
Again in 1993 she praises as a "brilliant suggestion" that a scene in
Jane Austen's *Persuasion" should be seen from a Freudian perspective,
citing Freud as her authority: “falling, stumbling and slipping need
not always be interpreted as purely accidental miscarriages of motor
actions. The double meanings that language attaches to these
expressions are enough to indicate the kind of phantasies involved,
which can be represented by such losses of bodily equilibrium.” Thus
is a fall by a character in Austen's book [!] in reality an
unconsciously motivated accident. Presumably this is an example of what
Showalter calls the crossroad between psychoanalytic theory and
narratology.
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number15/showalter.htm
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
http://www.esterson.org
--------------------------------------
Re: [tips] Help with hysteria
sblack
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:56:09 -0800
On 3 Dec 2009 at 15:32, [email protected] wrote:
> One of the students in my intro psych course is writing a paper for
her
> English class on hysteria.
>
> I am not a clinician and I have a very limited ability to answer her
> questions she asked me. I could
> probably google some information--but then so could she. I know
wikipedia has
> a good treatise.
>
> Specifically, she'd like to know two things:
> (1) what do we now label the disorders that used to be called
hysteria.
I have a vague memory of reading something on the topic which
impressed me. After a bit of searching, it seems to me it might
be Elaine Showalter's book "Hystories: hysterical epidemics and
modern culture" (1997).
Here's what an Amazon review (Library Journal) says about it:
The ends of centuries have historically given rise to increased
incidents of hysterical epidemics. Literary critic and medical
historian Showalter has written a challenging and insightful
history of hysteria that brings us up to the Nineties. After
defining hysteria, she examines the subject from three
perspectives: historically, including the work of Charcot and
Freud; culturally, through literature, theater, and film; and,
finally, in what is likely to be the book's most controversial area,
in terms of epidemics. In this last section, the author
hypothesizes that many of today's syndromes, including chronic
fatigue, Gulf War, recovered memory, and multiple personality,
along with increased reports of satanic ritual abuse and alien
abduction, should be correctly categorized as hysterias.
Showalter's main point, however, is not the denial of these
phenomena but rather "how much power emotions have over
the body." A thought-provoking work for informed readers.--
Kathleen L. Atwood, Pomfret Sch. Lib., Ct.
It sounds like a good starting point for your student.
Stephen
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen L. Black, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, Emeritus
Bishop's University
e-mail: [email protected]
2600 College St.
Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7
Canada
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