Freud's Psychology of Hysteria: History and Theory

Introduction

For a man who dedicated his life's work to furthering humanity's understanding of its own psychological processes, the revolutionary pioneer of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud remained woefully misunderstood during his own era, and has remained so ever since. Although Freud published a voluminous body of innovative research during his professional career as a neuropathic researcher — studying a wide array of cognitive disorders from addiction to aphasia — it is the Austrian's radical reimagining of the human mind's very structure that has made Freud a household name for multiple generations.

By conceiving of the mind as being similar to an iceberg floating in the sea — with only a small portion of the entire entity ever visible — Freud's conceptualization of the human psyche as a behavioral balancing act between the id, the superego, and the ego, with thought occurring at both the conscious and subconscious levels, proved to be a truly groundbreaking theory that still generates intense scholarly debate to this day. Coming of age during an era of unprecedented empirical investigation, Freud's groundbreaking theory of personality — and the accompanying theory of psychoanalysis used to decipher the mysteries of the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious — proved to be an amalgamation of prior tradition and progressive thought.

The History of Hysteria

Indeed, modern scholars observe that "Freud's framework seems to parallel the different emphases that have distinguished psychological schools in this century, since it acknowledges the importance of inborn tendencies and environmental pressures, as well as the power of cognitive processes — reason and individual choice — to moderate both these influences" (McCrae & Costa, Jr., 2012). By studying the import of Freud's body of work from both the historical and contemporary perspectives, while also examining his revolutionary work on the phenomenon of hysteria, it is possible to develop a greater understanding of his ultimate contributions to this specialized field of psychological inquiry.

The concept of hysteria has long been believed to be a mental affliction that primarily affects women, with the prevailing belief being that a female's inherent frailty left her susceptible to the psychological pressures of extreme stress. The first physicians to emerge from ancient Greece coined the term hysterical to describe the mental state of women who suffer a loss of self-control, bouts of paranoid delusion, and other erratic behavior. Indeed, the word hysteria is actually derived from the Greek word hystera, meaning "uterus," because the limited extent of medical knowledge during that era led men to believe that the condition was caused by disturbances or dysfunction within a woman's womb.

The Psychoanalytical Framework of Sigmund Freud

Despite the pace of progression throughout the centuries — which expanded mankind's understanding of both human anatomy and cognitive processing — this outmoded belief as to the cause of hysteria managed to survive through the age of Freud. Psychological experts at the time largely attributed the episodes of unexplainable behavior characterized as hysteria to women unable to cope with stress. By subjecting Freud's own work on the concept of hysteria to a comparative analysis with contemporary literature and scholarly research published during his lifetime, one can begin to grasp the impact of his investigations and experiments on our modern understanding of the psychological syndromes covered by the catch-all term hysteria.

Among Freud's most often discussed ideas is a postulation known as the Five Stages of Psychosexual Development, which asserts that human beings possess an instinctual libido from birth onward — a sexual drive that develops through five stages throughout the course of adolescence and puberty. According to Freud, frustration or impediments encountered during the development of these five stages — oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital — dictate the experience of neuroses and fixations that often preoccupy people throughout their adulthood. Freud also speculated on the influence of the so-called Oedipal Complex, wherein a child experiences intense emotional longing for their opposite-sex parent during the third, or phallic, stage of psychosexual development — feelings which can be internalized and repressed to form unconscious attraction.

Applying his theory of psychosexual development to the study of hysteria, Freud postulated that episodes of hysterical behavior are most likely caused by the subconscious repression of memories associated with sexual abuse during childhood (1896). While Freud's views on the link between psychology and sexuality were considered highly scandalous at the time of their inception, modern cognitive researchers have since confirmed many of his theories as partially accurate. The prevailing opinion among psychoanalytic researchers today is that "from a personality perspective, the psychosexual stage model marks a turning point in the history of psychoanalysis because it was only with the articulation of this model that personality moved from the periphery to the center of psychoanalytic theory" (Bornstein, 2003). As is the case with so many of Freud's major theoretical constructs, while he may not have been entirely accurate with his bold hypotheses on the nature of hysteria, the audacity of his inferences served to compel further research into the emerging field of personality-based psychoanalysis.

Conclusion

A review of the wider literary world during Freud's lifetime provides further confirmation of the societal conception of hysteria as an infirmity limited primarily to women, and two of the era's most lasting contributions to the literary canon offer direct evidence of this assumed association. Loosely based on a contemporary murder case which captivated the Midwest during her day, the subtly constructed plot envisioned by Susan Glaspell in Trifles is strikingly similar to the 1900 murder of John Hossack, who was bludgeoned to death by his wife while he slept. By reimagining the circumstances of the Hossack case — of which Glaspell became intimately aware during her stint as a news reporter for the Des Moines Daily News — the story told on stage during a production of Trifles is one defined by America's institutionalized unwillingness to recognize the capabilities of women at the dawn of the 20th century.