Introduction the Destinies of Hysteria

Hysteria, it is often said, has disappeared this century, its problems solved by Freud, or its investigation discredited by the antics of Charcot. And accompanying its alleged disappearance there has been a declining interest in its history among most historians. Yet hysteria was extraordinarily prominent in nineteenth-century medicine and culture. 1 It posed in direct and personal form the key questions of gender and mind/body relations, and, as Henri Ellenberger has shown in his Discovery of the Unconscious, it formed the springboard for the discovery of the unconscious in psychoanalysis. 2 In this light, it is odd that only two full-length scholarly surveys of its history have been published within the last half century: Ilza Veith's Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), and Etienne Trillat's Histoire de I'Hysterie (Paris: Seghers, 1986). There have been, of course, other approaches, for example, in the work of practicing doctors, amateur historians, and psychoanalytic theorists. Yet these two books have had a curious lack of influence. In the late 1960s, broad cultural and contextual approaches had not yet been developed within medical history, and there was little sense of the wider implications of Veith's newly published and widely praised history. Veith wrote as an internalist medical historian who construed the history of hysteria in its realist dimension only, without casting an eye on its forms of representation or its broad social and cultural subtleties of class, gender politics, and ideology. 4 Trillat too took an internalist approach, meticulously consulting the history of a medical condition without considering the cultural, contexvii

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