#Tells of histera series

His accounts in Studies On Hysteria would still make exemplary reading for those working with conversion disorder patients today who also deserve to be listened to. In his many case examples, Freud carefully traces these initially hidden traumas.

#Tells of histera series

After ten years of this practice, Freud came to believe that behind every hysterical symptom, such as convulsions, paralysis, blindness, epilepsy, amnesia or pain, lay a hidden trauma or series of traumas.Ĭharcot demonstrating hypnosis on a hysterical patient. In a radical departure from the practice of the day, which either paraded hysterical patients around at public demonstrations – as the French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot did – or treated them as malingerers, Freud sat his patients down and listened attentively to them. But it was the limitations inherent in the brain sciences of his day that led him to develop a more psychological map of the mind.

Since we can use sophisticated medical testing, we now know that it is not the neurological “hardware” that is damaged, so it must be the “software”, our psychological response to the meaning of trauma, that leads to conversion disorder.įreud originally studied anatomy and neurology and wrote notable papers, some of which are still considered classics today, such as On Aphasia. In fact, it would be a very small repertoire if you excluded Freud. For example, the neurologist Richard Kanaan in BBC Radio 4’s All In The Mind states that Freud still “looms quite large in our repertoire of explanations”. … for all the shortcomings in the concepts proposed by Freud and Breuer in Studies, the 21st century has brought no great advances to a better understanding of the mechanisms for this disorder. O’Sullivan is left wondering what this patient “could not bear to look upon” or “tolerate to remember”.ĭespite the many new technical means of investigation, researchers have very little to offer beyond Freud to account for how psychological and emotional experiences manifest in physical symptoms.

Brain scans and an EEG were normal, but a neighbour told O’Sullivan that her husband had been released from prison. But a month later, she was readmitted, suffering from amnesia. Treated with muscle relaxant drugs, she soon recovered. Her husband was on remand for child abuse, but she refused to think this might be an important factor in her illness. The woman (Mary) who felt compelled to shut her eyes is one of many cases described by the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan in It’s All In Your Head. Two days later, she was able to leave the hospital, unaided. She found that talking her experiences through repeatedly was cathartic – her pent up feelings were released. She evidently knew this, but had pushed its significance out of her conscious awareness to protect herself. This caused the unbearable mental conflict that was “converted” into her physical symptoms. On interviewing Ely, he eventually discovered that she had been raped by someone she knew. Perplexed, Turnbull’s mind “suddenly jumped to Freud”, who he recalls said that mental conflict could become physical disability. The nurses thought she was putting it on. She seemed indifferent to her sudden paralysis. Ely didn’t even wince as the needle went in. After X-rays for a bleed in Ely’s spinal cord came back negative, Turnbull tried a lumber puncture to extract fluid. What is more surprising is that cases like this are typical of those routinely seen by neurologists today.įor example, the case of the 35-year-old woman (Ely), noted above, is given in Gordon Turnbull’s Trauma, a book on the history and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. It was Freud who proposed that the memory of trauma which the patient fails to confront, because it will cause them too much mental anguish, can be “converted” into physical symptoms. Josef Breuer, co-author of Studies On Hysteria.