How Hysterical

Part medical mystery, cultural criticism, and rallying cry, Editor of the Funny Women column at The Rumpus shares her journey to reclaim her authentic voice in a culture that doesn't want to hear or understand women. Throughout the first half of President [BLEEP]'s term, Elissa Bassist saw seventeen medical professionals, joining millions of American women who suffer from indescribable chronic pain. She consulted a psychologist, psychiatrist, ophthalmologist, neurologist, radiologist, psychopharmacologist, allergist, Ear/Nose/Throat specialist, gastroenterologist, orthopedic hand surgeon, occupational therapist, physical therapist, massage therapist, acupuncturist, herbalist, and an obsessive-compulsive disorder specialist. It was the acupuncturist who inquired about caged fury as a contributing factor of the physical maladies, as if the problem had something to do with her voice and what she hadn't expressed. As if treating the voice would treat the problem. Turns out, it did. In sharing her story, Elissa explains how women and girls internalize and perpetuate directives about what to do with their voice, making it hard to "just speak up" and "burn down the patriarchy." Today's mind-body doctors theorize that some physical pain is, in fact, repressed emotional pain finding expression, that emotions pile up in the unconscious, going unarticulated until they hit max capacity and tell the brain to create physical symptoms. When the mind denies itself language, it gives the body pain. If you don't share your story, your pain will tell it for you. Hysterical is inspired by Elissa's own journey to reclaim her authentic voice in a culture that weaponizes silence, noise, and language against women. She offers new ways to think about the female voice and calls on other women to unleash their unheard cry, which was theirs before the world intervened, the one they can learn to hear above all others and use again without regret.

Originally published in 1895, this early work of psychology is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It contains Freud and Breuer's case studies of hysteria and their methods of psychoanalytic treatment. This is a fascinating work and is thoroughly recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of psychology. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Over the course of several centuries, Western masculinity has successfully established itself as the voice of reason, knowledge, and sanity - he basis for patriarchal rule - in the face of massive testimony to the contrary. This book boldly challenges this triumphant vision of the stable and secure male by examining the central role played by modern science and medicine in constructing and sustaining it.

We seem to be living in hysterical times. A simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of “hysterical” discussions on diverse topics such as the #metoo movement, Trumpianism, border wars, Brexit, transgender liberation, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and climate change, to name only a few. Against the backdrop of such recent deployments of hysteria in popular discourse––particularly as they emerge in times of material and hermeneutic crisis––Performing Hysteria re-engages the notion of “hysteria”. Performing Hysteria rigorously mines late 20th- and early 21st-century (primarily visual) culture for signs of hysteria. The various essays in this volume contribute to the multilayered and complex discussions that surround and foster this resurgent interest in hysteria––covering such areas as art, literature, theatre, film, television, dance; crossing such disciplines as cultural studies, political science, philosophy, history, media, disability, race and ethnicity, and gender studies; and analysing stereotypical images and representations of the hysteric in relation to cultural sciences and media studies. Of particular importance is the volume's insistence on taking the intersection of hysteria and performance seriously.

How Hysterical reads scenes from the films Light It Up , Three Kings , Remember the Titans , Paris is Burning , Boys Don't Cry , and Magnolia alongside biblical texts from Numbers , Exodus , Isaiah , Micah , Ezekiel and Revelation . An innovation in studies on Bible and film, How Hysterical is less centred on direct citation of the Bible in film than on analyses of hypostasized biblical influence in culture. Here, through accessible engagement with feminist, queer, post-colonial and ideological critical theories, Runions discusses the processes by which biblical and filmic texts can both bolster and disrupt identifications with the norms that drive politics and culture.

Hysterical Water is a collection of fierce, funny, feminist poems, prose poems, and essays with poems woven through them, all connected by threads associated with female “hysteria” and motherhood. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh troubles the historic pseudodiagnostic term hysteria as both a constraining mode used to contain and silence women and as a mode that oddly freed women to behave outside the bounds of social norms. The poems in this collection question the way maternal thinking, sexuality, affect, and creativity have been dismissed as hysterical. Saltmarsh reclaims the word hysteria by arguing that women poets might, in art as in life, celebrate incongruous emotional experiences. Drawing on and reshaping an intriguing array of source materials, Saltmarsh borrows from the language of uncontrollable emotion, excess, cure, remedy, and cult-like obsession to give shape not only to the maternal body but also to a hysterical textual one. She revisits selective silence and selective speech in everyday crises of feelings, engages meaningful “anticommunication” through odd gestures and symbols, and indulges in nonsensical dream-speak, among other tactics, to carve a feminist poetics of madness out of the masculinist discourse that has located in the woman the hysteric.

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.

The story of hysteria is a curious one, for it persists as an illness for centuries before disappearing. Andrew Scull gives a fascinating account of this socially constructed disease that came to be strongly associated with women, showing the shifts in social, cultural, and medical perceptions through history.

Hysteria is probably the condition which best illustrates the tight connection between neurology and psychiatry. While it has been known since antiquity, its renewed studies during the 19th century were mainly due to the work of Jean-Martin Charcot and his school in Paris. This publication focuses on these early developments, in which immediate followers of Charcot, including Babinski, Freud, Janet, Richer, and Gilles de la Tourette were involved. Hysteria is commonly considered as a condition that often leads to spectacular manifestations (e.g. convulsions, palsies), although both structural and functional imaging data confirm the absence of consistent and reproducible structural lesions. While numerous hypotheses have tried to explain the occurrence of this striking phenomenon, the precise nosology and pathophysiology of hysteria remain elusive. This volume offers an enthralling and informative read for neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, as well as for general physicians, historians, and everyone interested in the developments of one of the most intriguing conditions in medicine.

The author explores hysteria in Western medicine throughout the ages and examines the characterization of female sexuality as a disease requiring treatment. Medical authorities, she writes, were able to defend and justify the clinical production of orgasm in women as necessary to maintain the dominant view of sexuality, which defined sex as penetration to male orgasm - a practice that consistently fails to produce orgasm in a majority of the female population. This male-centered definition of satisfying and healthy coitus shaped not only the development of concepts of female sexual pathology but also the instrumentation designed to cope with them.