Mad Men & Medusas

Hysteria has usually been seen as a female disease. This culturally universal condition was fully diagnosed by Freud, with his famous case-study of the eighteen-year-old hysteric, 'Dora'. But when First World War soldiers also began to suffer from this unmanly disorder, the term was dropped. According to modern diagnoses, hysteria no longer exists, yet here Juliet Michell shows that it is still just as much with us today, but under other names - trauma, panic attacks, anorexia, multiple personalities, even Gulf War Syndrome.While not contesting the importance of the Oedipal complex, Mitchell argues that its discovery has blocked our understanding of hysteria. She proposes a different order, one that implicates siblings, the great omission in both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Understanding hysteria in this way is vital to understanding the human condition.