Traumatic paralysis and the dynamic lesion: can an idea produce a bodily disease?

Jean-Martin Charcot, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

There are paralyses with no lesion the scalpel can find — paralyses produced by a trauma, a fright, an idea fixed in the mind and cut off from the will. I call the cause a dynamic lesion: a functional derangement of the nervous system set going by a psychical shock, as real in its effects as any severed nerve, though it leaves no mark on the tissue.1234

Sources

  1. Now, observe, I do not say imaginary paralyses, for indeed these motor paralyses of psychical origin are as objectively real as those depending on an organic lesion; they simulate them, as you will soon see, by a number of identical clinical characters, which render their diagnosis very difficult.
    Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Series III, pp. 289–290
  2. It marks the transition, so that no part of the series is juissing. Here, then, are two examples of hysterical brachial monoplegia of traumatic origin occurring in the male. I think that I have demonstrated that the brachial monoplegia supervening on an injury in the two men who formed the subjects of the preceding lectures, is of a hysterical nature.
    Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Series III, pp. 288–289
  3. Ordenstein.^ It behooves us therefore to establish a parallel between these two affections, by comparing them with each other in the threefold relations of symptoms, causes, and that purpose, we shall refer to the afore-mentioned and to the numerous observations which we have colhospital.
    Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, US ed, pp. 109–110
  4. What are the characters of this hyperplasia? The narrative is silent respecting them. There is no mention, in the original text, of any atrophy of the nervous elements, nor of any signs of fatty degeneration, two lesions given, for what reason I know not, in the version adopted by Trousseau in his clinical lectures.
    Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Series I, pp. 151–152

Where the argument is made

  • The studies of traumatic and hysterical paralyses without organic lesion — the "dynamic lesion" produced by shock, emotion, or idea

How the argument was received

This is, against my own organic instincts, the most fertile idea I reached — that an idea can paralyse a limb. I did not develop its psychological mechanism; that was left to my pupils. But the recognition that a functional, psychically caused disorder is a genuine disease stands, and it is the bridge from my neurology to their psychology.