The Psychoanalysis of Hysteria and Anxiety

The term "hysteria" dates back to the earliest days of medicine and derives from a prejudice, only overcome in our own time, that linked neurosis to diseases of the female genital organs. In the Middle Ages, neuroses played an important role in the history of civilisation; they appeared in epidemic form as if they stemmed from a psychic contagion and became part of the history of obsessions and witchcraft. Some documents from that time show that the symptoms of neuroses have not changed up to the present day. A fair assessment and better understanding developed only following the studies of Charcot and the Salpêtrière school he inspired. Until then, hysteria had been the bête noire of medicine.