Hysteria The Rise Of An Enigma

Hysteria is probably the condition which best illustrates the tight connection between neurology and psychiatry. While it has been known since antiquity, its renewed studies during the 19th century were mainly due to the work of Jean-Martin Charcot and his school in Paris. This publication focuses on these early developments, in which immediate followers of Charcot, including Babinski, Freud, Janet, Richer, and Gilles de la Tourette were involved. Hysteria is commonly considered as a condition that often leads to spectacular manifestations (e.g. convulsions, palsies), although both structural and functional imaging data confirm the absence of consistent and reproducible structural lesions. While numerous hypotheses have tried to explain the occurrence of this striking phenomenon, the precise nosology and pathophysiology of hysteria remain elusive. This volume offers an enthralling and informative read for neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, as well as for general physicians, historians, and everyone interested in the developments of one of the most intriguing conditions in medicine.

Examining historical, clinical and artistic material, in both written and visual form, this book traces the figure of the contemporary hysteric as she rebels against the impossible demands made upon her. Exploring five traits that commonly characterise the hysteric as an archetype – a specific body, mimetic abilities, a shroud of mystery, a propensity to disappear and a particular relationship to voice – the authors shed light on what it means to be hysterical, as a form of rebellion and resistance. This is important reading for scholars of sociology, gender studies, cultural studies and visual studies with interests in psychoanalysis, art and the characterisation of mental illness.

In The Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation—Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector—to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draws on writing and other creative practices to conceive of unconscious processes and the transformation sought through analysis. Thus, the "aesthetic clinic" of the book's title (a term Negrete adopts from Deleuze) is not an applied psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis. Rather, The Aesthetic Clinic privileges the call and constraints issued by each woman's individual work. Engaging an artwork here is less about retrieving a hidden meaning through interpretation than about receiving a precise transmission of sensation, a jouissance irreducible to meaning. Not only do art and literature serve an urgent clinical function in Negrete's reading but sublimation itself requires an embrace of femininity.

Discover the complete social history of the housewife archetype, from colonial America to the 20th century, and re-examine common myths about the “modern woman.” The notion of “housewife” evokes strong reactions. For some, it’s nostalgia for a bygone era, simpler and better times when men were breadwinners and women remained home with the kids. For others, it’s a sexist, oppressive stereotype of women’s work. Either way, housewife is a long outdated concept—or is it? Lisa Selin Davis, known for her smart, viral, feminist, cultural takes, argues that the “breadwinner vs. homemaker” divide is a myth. She charts examples from prehistoric female hunters to working class housewives in the 1930s, from First Ladies to 21st century stay-at-home moms, on a search for answers to the problems of what is referred to as women’s work and motherhood. Davis discovers that women have been sold a lie about what families should be. Housewife unveils a truth: interdependence, rather than independence, is the American way. The book is a clarion call for all women—married or single, mothers or childless—and for men, too, to push for liberation. In Housewife, Davis builds a case for systemic, cultural, and personal change, to encourage women to have the power to choose the best path for themselves.

The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.

This book fills a gap in the historiographical and theoretical fields of race, gender, and war. In brief, Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare (RGMWW) offers an introduction into how cultural constructions of identity are transformed by war and how they in turn influence the nature of military institutions and conflicts. Focusing on the modern West, this project begins by introducing the contours of race and gender theories as they have evolved and how they are employed by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars. The project then mixes chronological narrative with analysis and historiography as it takes the reader through a series of case studies, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the Global War of Terror. The purpose throughout is not merely to create a list of so-called "great moments" in race and gender, but to create a meta-landscape in which readers can learn to identify for themselves the disjunctures, flaws, and critical synergies in the traditional memory and history of a largely monochrome and male-exclusive military experience. The final chapter considers the current challenges that Western societies, particularly the United States, face in imposing social diversity and tolerance on statist military structures in a climates of sometimes vitriolic public debate. RGMWW represents our effort to blend race, gender, and military war, to problematize these intersections, and then provide some answers to those problems.

How we can use what we’ve learned about the brain to improve our mental health There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events—and treatments—can affect people in such different ways. In The Balanced Brain, Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health—actively striving to maintain balance in response to our changing circumstances. While a mentally healthy brain deals well with life’s turbulence, poor mental health results when the brain struggles with disruption. But just what is the brain trying to balance? Nord describes the foundations of mental health in the brain—from the neurobiology of pleasure, pain and desire to the role of mood-mediating chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and opioids. She then pivots to interventions, revealing how antidepressants, placebos and even recreational drugs work; how psychotherapy changes brain chemistry; and how the brain and body interact to make us feel physically (as well as mentally) healthy. Along the way, Nord explains how the seemingly small things we use to lift our moods—a piece of chocolate, a walk, a chat with a friend—work on the same pathways in our brains as the latest treatments for mental health disorders. Understanding the cause of poor mental health is one of the crucial questions of our time. But the answer is unique to each of us, and it requires finding what helps our brains rebalance and thrive. With so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think.

"I can be a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a woman without having periods." This book explores two of the oldest and most important symbols of all time: menstruation and secondary amenorrhea. Women of menstruating age commonly experience secondary amenorrhea – a cessation of periods – but most people have never heard of the term, nor do they realise what it represents. Danielle Redland’s curiosity as to why this is posits that menstrual conditions need to be decoded, not just simply treated. Surveying menstruation and Secondary Amenorrhea (SA) principally from a psychoanalytic perspective, with sociocultural, historical, political and religious angles also examined, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women, Menstruation and Secondary Amenorrhea draws secondary amenorrhea out of the shadows of its menstruating counterpart, and explores how narratives of womanhood and statehood dominate. Chapters on blood ideology and war amenorrhea, on Freud’s treatment of Emma Eckstein and on the psycho-mythology of Pygmalion, present the reader with visions beyond patriarchy towards more thoughtful ideas on the feminine, challenging assumptions about gender, identity and what is deemed "good" for women. Rich in clinical examples, the book locates menses and their cessation at the heart of personal experience and examines psychosomatic phenomena, the link between psyche and body and the value of interpretation. From the author’s own analysis to a variety of cases linked to hysteria, anorexia, stress, trauma, abuse, helplessness and hopelessness, individual stories and narratives are sensitively recovered and carefully revealed. This refreshing example of multi-layered research and psychoanalytic enquiry by a new, female writer will be of great interest to psychologists, psychotherapists, healthcare and social work professionals and readers of gender studies, history, politics and literature.