Jacobi (Mary Putnam) on hysteria

In her Essays on Hysteria, she suggested that “weakened nerve tissue (whether debilitated by constitutional weakness, illness, or overwork) might be overtaxed by relatively ordinary sensations, failing to store force or to take in nourishment. She therefore sketched out a narrative of the onset of hysteria, a narrative located in the ‘cortex of the hysterical brain’: storage power becomes deficient; centripetal (sensory) impressions are stored in sensory centers rather than the cortex; centrifugal activities (voluntary acts) decline; sensory centers fail to discharge shored materials and become hyperexcitable; sensory centers inhibit brain activity. Or, as a later physician would put it, hysterics suffer from reminiscences. . . . Putnam Jacobi’s understanding of hysteria placed the disease in the nervous system and the brain. This theory of hysteria suggested a therapy that was both physical and mental, that respected the hysteric’s consciousness and potential strength” (Wells, 180, 181).