Hysteria, Foucault and Feminism. Resistance in Psychiatric Power and Phallogocentric Discourse

Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Medicine - Neurology, Psychiatry, Addiction, grade: 84, Staffordshire University, language: English, abstract: This paper is about hysteria and its different discourses. Hysteria as a disease has over 4000 years of history. Freud invented psychoanalysis on the basis of his work with female hysterics like ¿Dorä (Ida Bauer). In 1952, with the elimination of the word ¿hysteriä as a separate clinical entity from the first edition of DSM-I, it left the psychiatric nomenclature. As an event, hysteria has come to be perceived within socio-political parameters, its history manifesting an interesting shift in power relations between doctor and patient, master and hysteric, as well as male and female. Thus, one sees remarkable convergences between Foucault¿s exploration of hysteria as a ground-breaking event and feminist interpretations of it. The resistance of the hysteric, as well as the hysterical engagement has been an influential theme in feminist thought.
The first description of hysteria is found in the Kahun Papyrus (1900 BC) which attributes the disease to the movement of the uterus within the female body. Plato, in Timaeus, wrote that the uterus is sad when it does not ¿join with the male and does not give rise to a new birth, and Aristotle and Hippocrates were of the same opinion¿ (ibid.). He also described the womb as an animal: ¿voracious, predatory, appetitive, unstable, forever reducing the female into a frail and unstable creature¿. The term ¿hysteriä was first adopted by Hippocrates in 5th century, who also believed that its cause was the wandering uterus.