Hysteria

“With increases in general medical knowledge and advances in diagnostic techniques, many cases of hysteria were not believed to involve physical diseases, such as epilepsy, syphilis, multiple sclerosis, and cranial injury. At the same time that the diagnosis was losing ground to ascertainably organic ailments, it was being redefined by new and more nuanced psychiatric classifications. Most important in this regard were the psychoses described by Kahlbaum, Hecker, Kraepelin, and Bleuler and a series of theories about the psychoneuroses, such as Janet’s psychasthenia, Babinski’s pithiatism, and Freud’s anxiety neurosis. The large majority of these changes took place during 1895-1910 . . . In large measure, it is the process of the atomization of the diagnosis of a century ago and its reconstitution in many new placed and under a multitude of different names that has created the historical illusion of a disappearance of the disorder itself” (525-26).