Hysteria

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 follows a hypersexual, self-destructive young woman who becomes convinced, over the course of 48 feverish hours, that her Brooklyn bartender is Sigmund Freud.

New York Times bestselling author Megan Miranda's masterful storytelling brings readers along for a ride to the edge of sanity and back again. Mallory killed her boyfriend, Brian. She can't remember the details of that night but everyone knows it was self-defense, so she isn't charged. But Mallory still feels Brian's presence in her life. Is it all in her head? Or is it something more? In desperate need of a fresh start, Mallory is sent to Monroe, a fancy prep school where no one knows her . . . or anything about her past. But the feeling follows her, as do her secrets. Then, one of her new classmates turns up dead. As suspicion falls on Mallory, she must find a way to remember the details of both deadly nights so she can prove her innocence-to herself and others.

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.

These days, hysteria is known as a discredited diagnosis that was used to group and pathologize a wide range of conditions and behaviors in women. But for a long time, it was seen as a legitimate category of medical problem—and one that, originally, was applied to men as often as to women. In On Hysteria, Sabine Arnaud traces the creation and rise of hysteria, from its invention in the eighteenth century through nineteenth-century therapeutic practice. Hysteria took shape, she shows, as a predominantly aristocratic malady, only beginning to cross class boundaries (and be limited to women) during the French Revolution. Unlike most studies of the role and status of medicine and its categories in this period, On Hysteria focuses not on institutions but on narrative strategies and writing—the ways that texts in a wide range of genres helped to build knowledge through misinterpretation and recontextualized citation. Powerfully interdisciplinary, and offering access to rare historical material for the first time in English, On Hysteria will speak to scholars in a wide range of fields, including the history of science, French studies, and comparative literature.

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.

In 1862 the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris became the epicenter of the study of hysteria, the mysterious illness then thought to affect half of all women. There, prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's contentious methods caused furore within the church and divided the medical community. Treatments included hypnosis, piercing and the evocation of demons and, despite the controversy they caused, the experiments became a fascinating and fashionable public spectacle. Medical Muses tells the stories of the women institutionalised in the Salpêtrière. Theirs is a tale of science and ideology, medicine and the occult, of hypnotism, sadism, love and theatre. Combining hospital records, municipal archives, memoirs and letters, Medical Muses sheds new light on a crucial moment in psychiatric history.

Asked to search within themselves for hidden personalities, they came up with entire squadrons: children, harlots, angels, devils."--BOOK JACKET. "This book describes how a group of reckless therapists used hypnosis, drugs, and sheer persuasion to mold their patients' symptoms into multiple personality disorder."--BOOK JACKET.

This debut book from Andrew Burt details the pivotal moments in American political history when outliers moved to the center, capturing the national spotlight and turning fringe politics mainstream. American Hysteria puts readers at the center of the nation’s most prominent periods of political extremism, from the Anti-Illuminati movement of the 1790s to McCarthyism in the 1950s to the Anti-Sharia movement of today. Both a deep dive into American history and a riveting narrative account, this is book is as much history lesson as it is drama. Burt argues that political hysteria arises in periods of deep uncertainty about American identity, and that when Americans lose their sense of who they are, they lash out against perceived threats with blacklists, scapegoating, conspiracies, cover-ups and more. By exploring the infamous and sometimes forgotten movements and characters of our nation’s past, this fascinating book provides a unique view into America’s history, its identity, and ultimately its future.