Art Criticism - The State University of New York

1830-1980 (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 154.
21 This is apparent in medical and psychiatric records where patients before Freud
were objects and not subjects.
22 In other words, Charcot rarely listened to what his patients had to say. He
preferred to look for signs of hysteria and neurosis on/in the patient's external
and internal physical body. Freud notes that Charcot was often in search of a
mental lesion in his patients' brains. He thought it was the main cause of
hysteria. Charcot rarely found such lesions.
23 This idea is further elaborated in Verhaeghe 7-8.
24 Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (New York: Avon, 1966, [1893] ), 38.
25 Micale 97.
26 Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 40-41.
26Freud speculated that the reason for this lack of response may be because the
majority of his patients unlike Anna 0, were not suffering from "pure" hysteria,
but rather hysteria combined with various other neuroses.
28 Bertha von Pappenheim called this "chimney sweeping."
29 Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 52. "For we found to our great surprise at
first that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently
disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of
the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and
when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had
put the affect into words. Recollection without affect almost invariably produces
no result" (40-41). Freud eventually encountered transference, another important
psychoanalytical term.
30 For clarification, I do not mean to suggest that society alone (patriarchal or
otherwise) created hysteria. Rather, society must have, on some level, contributed
to it, since cultural practices playa major role in establishing what is
acceptable/non-acceptable behavior.
31 This point is often discussed in connection with feminist readings of Freud, such
as those by Juliet Mitchell and Julia Kristeva.
32 This is not to say that Freud was incorrect in his interpretation, but it does
suggest that he may have overlooked an important catalyst of Dora's hysteria,
namely the "rules" of the society she lived in and how they "determined" the
social impropriety of her actions. Freud's wrote Studies on Hysteria: "In the
first group are those cases in which the patients have not reacted to a psychical
trauma because the nature of the trauma excluded a reaction, as in the case of the
apparently irreparable loss of a loved person or because social circumstances
made a reaction impossible or because it was a question of things which the
patient wished to forget, and therefore intentionally repressed from his [her]
conscious thought and inhibited and suppressed" (44, my italics). While he
acknowledges the importance of the social circumstances of the neuroses, how
they affect his patients as women is left unaddressed.
33 Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, preface to first edition, xx.
34 George Frederick Drinka, M.D. The Birth of Neurosis, Myth, Malady and the
Victorians (New York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1984),324.
35 Ibid.,324.
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