Social Context of Hysteria in Freud's Time Term Paper

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Psychology of Hysteria During Sigmund Freud's Era

For a man who dedicated his life's work to furthering humanity's understanding of its own psychological processes, the revolutionary pioneer of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud remained woefully misunderstood during his own era, and has so ever since. Although Freud published a voluminous body of innovative research during his professional career as a neuropathic researcher, studying a wide array of cognitive disorders from addiction to aphasia, it is the Austrian's radical reimagining of the human mind's very structure that has made Freud a household name for multiple generations. By conceiving of the mind as being similar to an iceberg floating in the sea -- with only a small portion of the entire entity ever visible -- Freud's conceptualization of the human psyche as a behavioral balancing act between the id, the superego, and the ego, with thought occurring at both the conscious and subconscious levels, proved to be a truly groundbreaking theory that still generates intense scholarly debate to this day. Coming of age during an era of unprecedented empirical investigation, Freud's groundbreaking theory of personality -- and the accompanying theory of psychoanalysis used to decipher the mysteries of the conscious, unconscious and subconscious -- proved to be an amalgamation of prior tradition and progressive thought. Indeed modern scholars observe that "Freud's framework seems to parallel the different emphases that have distinguished psychological schools in this century, since it acknowledges the importance of inborn tendencies and environmental pressures, as well as the power of cognitive processes -- reason and individual choice -- to moderate both these influences" (McCrae & Costa, Jr., 2012). By studying the import of Freud's body of work from both the historical and contemporary perspectives, while also examining the Austrian lightning rod's revolutionary work on the phenomenon of hysteria, it is possible to develop a greater understanding of his ultimate contributions to this specialized field of psychological inquiry.

The History of Hysteria

The concept of hysteria has long been believed to be a mental affliction which primarily affects women, with the prevailing belief being that a female's inherent frailty left them to succumb to the psychological pressures of extreme stress. The first physicians to emerge from ancient Greece coined the term hysterical to describe the mental state of women who suffer a loss of self-control, bouts of paranoid delusion, and other erratic behavior. Indeed, the word hysteria itself id actually derived from the Greek word hystera, which means uterus, because the limited extent of medical knowledge during this era left men to believe that disturbances or dysfunction within a woman's womb. Despite the pace of progression throughout the centuries which expanded mankind's understanding of both human anatomy and cognitive processing, this outmoded belief as to the cause of hysteria managed to survive through the age of Freud, with psychological experts at the time largely attributing the episodes of unexplainable behavior characterized as hysteria to women unable to cope with stress. By subjecting Freud's own work on the concept of hysteria to a comparative analysis with contemporary literature and scholarly research published during Freud's lifetime, one can begin to grasp the impact between his investigations and experiments and our modern understanding of the psychological syndromes covered by the catch-all term hysteria.

The Psychoanalytical Framework of Sigmund Freud

Among Freud's most often discussed ideas is a postulation known as the Five Stages of Psychosexual Development, which asserts that human beings possess an instinctual libido from birth onward, a sexual drive that develops through five stages throughout the course of adolescence and puberty. According to Freud, frustration or impediments encountered during the development of these five stages -- oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital -- dictates the experience of neuroses and fixations that often preoccupy people throughout their adulthood. Freud also speculated as the to the influence of the so-called Oedipal Complex, wherein a child experiences intense emotional longing for their opposite-sex parent during the third, or phallic, stage of psychosexual development, feelings which can be internalized and repressed to form unconscious physical attraction. Applying his theory of psychosexual development to the study of hysteria, Freud postulated that episodes of hysterical behavior are most likely caused by the subconscious repression of memories associated with sexual abuse during childhood (1896). While Freud's views on the link between psychology and sexuality were considered highly scandalous at the time of their inception, modern cognitive researchers have since confirmed many of his theories as partially accurate, and the prevailing opinion among psychoanalytic researchers today is that "from a personality perspective, the psychosexual stage model marks a turning point in the history of psychoanalysis because it was only with the articulation of this model that personality moved from the periphery to the center of psychoanalytic theory" (Bornstein, 2003).

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As is the case with so many of Freud's major theoretical constructs, while he may not have been entirely accurate with his bold hypotheses on the nature of hysteria, the audacity of his inferences served to compel further research into the emerging field of personality-based psychoanalysis.

Freud's Contributions to the Study of Hysteria

The introduction of the so-called "Seduction Theory" in 1896 expanded on the publication of his Studies in Hysteria the previous year, and in both of these studies Freud seeks to determine the true causation of hysterical behavior. According to Freud's Studies in Hysteria, "the discrepancy between the hysterical symptom of many years' duration and the single precipitating cause is the same as the discrepancy which we are accustomed to see in traumatic neurosis … (and) quite frequently, events from childhood establish a symptom of varying degrees of severity which persist for many years to come" (1895), and this notion of repressed trauma precipitating hysteria formed the basis of Freud's wider theoretical framework on the subject. Despite his groundbreaking research into the psychoanalytical foundations of hysteria, Freud's work also reveals the latent marginalization of women that was the legacy of ancient Greek inquiries into hysteria, as he repeatedly attributes the behavior to the inability of girls and women to cope with life's naturally occurring stressors. In providing a set of examples to confirm his previously stated hypothesis, Freud writes of "a girl, who, tormented by anxiety, is watching over a sick bed, falls into a twilight state, and has a terrifying hallucination," before envisioning "a child who is critically ill has at last fallen asleep; the mother exerts all of her willpower in an attempt to keep quiet and not wake the child, but precisely as a consequence of this intention she makes a clicking noise with her tongue" (1895). The psychological constructs put forth by Freud in regards to hysteria and its causes invariably involve girls and women struggling to exert control over their minds and bodies, with their inevitable failure providing the subconscious catalyst for the erratic behavior classified as hysteria.

Freud's trailblazing psychological research continued into the 20th century, and "in 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, introducing the wider public to the notion of the unconscious mind while furthering his firmly held belief that hysteria was rooted in the repression of memory. In 1901, Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he theorized that "forgetfulness or slips of the tongue (now called 'Freudian slips') were not accidental at all, but were the 'dynamic unconscious' revealing something meaningful" (PBS, 2012), once again reaffirming the view that hysterical behavior represented a manifestation of unconscious or subconscious thoughts. These contributions offered laymen an opportunity to consider psychoanalytic theories for the first time by applying Freud's theories to their own lives, enabling average people to engage in dream analysis and other forms of self-diagnosis while attempting to understand their personal experiences with hysteria. In each of these additions to Freud's body of scholarly research, his fundamental belief that "observations of this kind seem to us proof of an analogy between the pathogenesis of common hysteria and that of traumatic neurosis, and to justify an extension of the concept of 'traumatic hysteria'" (1895) are clearly evident in the construction of his arguments and the empirical focus of his experimental inquiries.

Contemporary Literature on Hysteria Published During Freud's Lifetime

A review of the wider literary world during Freud's lifetime provides further confirmation of the societal conception of hysteria as an infirmity limited primarily to women, and two of the era's most lasting contributions to the literary canon provide direct evidence of this assumed association. Loosely based on a contemporary murder case which captivated the Midwest during her day, the subtly constructed plot envisioned by Susan Glaspell in Trifles is strikingly similar to the 1900 murder of John Hossack, who was bludgeoned to death by his wife while he slept. By reimagining the circumstances of the Hossack case -- of which Glaspell became intimately aware during her stint as a news reporter for the Dew Moines Daily News -- the story told on stage during a production of Trifles is one defined by America's institutionalized unwillingness to recognize the capabilities of the fairer sex during the dawn of the….....

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