The Shape of Distress

Hysterical paralysis was epidemic in 1880 and is a curiosity now. The distress did not go anywhere — it changed shape, and this is how that happens.

A course on the thought of Hysteria.

Psychology · Medicine

What you will learn

Distinguish a psychogenic symptom from a somatogenic one without implying that either is unreal.
State why an investigation that finds no organic cause does not thereby establish a psychological one.
Describe how the form of a mass workplace illness differed between 1880 and 1990.
State what the symptom pool is and what it claims the unconscious cannot do.
Explain why a culture-bound symptom such as koro is evidence for the account rather than a curiosity.
Distinguish the shaping of symptoms from conscious deception.
Describe what Briquet's series is and why its size makes it usable as evidence.
Identify the precipitant in his data that supports transmission by observation.

Thirty-Four Toll Takers — In February 1990, thirty-four people who collected tolls on a New York bridge fell ill on the same shift, and no cause was ever found. What their employer refused to say about it is where this course…
The Symptom Pool — Edward Shorter's account of why distress takes the forms it does. The unconscious does not invent a symptom; it selects one from a stock the surrounding culture supplies, and the stock changes.
Four Hundred and Fifty at the Pitié — Pierre Briquet spent ten years at a Paris hospital writing down what had set each of his hysterical patients off. It is the largest such record from the nineteenth century, and one line in it is…
The Comedy — What a nineteenth-century fit looked like to the people in the room, and two physicians who ended one by embarrassing the patient out of it. Both wrote it up proudly. Neither understood what he had…
The Same Number, A Different Disease — A Swiss university clinic diagnosed as many hysterical patients in the 1970s as in the 1910s. Almost none of them had the same symptoms. The second test is the two world wars, fought by the same army…
Nuns and Farmwives — The old hysteria vanished first among the fashionable and lingered longest among the poor and the rural, and it was borne overwhelmingly by women in every century anyone counted. Two historians on…

psychogenic, somatogenic, the symptom pool, somatisation, conversion, secondary gain, motor and sensory symptoms, epidemic hysteria

Part of the Simposeum course library.