Mad Men And Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria And the Effects of Sibling Relations On the Human Condition - Hardcover

Mitchell, Juliet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713992301 ISBN 13: 9780713992304

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2000

Synopsis

Has hysteria really disappeared from the categories of diagnosed mental illnesses while remaining a widely used lay term? Or has it merely become convenient for psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts to abandon this emotive term for more discreet diagnoses? Juliet Mitchell traces the history of hysteria from the Greek 'wandering womb' to modern day psychiatric diagnoses to argue that we need to reclaim hysteria to understand how trauma and distress express themselves in different societies at different times. She posits a new theory of the causes of trauma that stresses lateral relationships over the classic generational ones. Sibling relations are the great omission in both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.

About this title

Review:

In 1974, Juliet Mitchells groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism presented the (then largely unpopular) case for a feminist engagement with psychoanalytic theories of sexuality and the unconscious. Nearly three decades later, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effect of Sibling Relationships on the Human Condition is another key intervention on a topic of hysteria, which has been central to the development of both psychoanalysis and feminism. Arguing against one influential (psychiatric) account of hysteria as the disease that has disappeared in the course of the 20th century, Mitchell re-opens the debate on the meaning of hysteria from a number of different psychoanalytic and cultural perspectives. There is no way in which hysteria cannot exist, she concludes (aware that such a statement risks both universalism and essentialism); it is a particular response to particular aspects of the human condition of life and death. Mitchell is especially concerned to question, and displace, the neglect of sibling relationships in psychoanalysis (the dominance of the Oedipus complex as a site of intergenerational conflict) at the same time as she brings the topic of lateral relations--with sibling, peers, partners--into contact with the concept of the death drive in psychoanalytic thought. This is an ambitious, and often complex, task, one that Mitchell traces through a range of contemporary debates (on male hysteria, trauma, memory, multiple personality) as well as some of the key texts in the psychoanalytic canon. In Dora: A Fragment of a Case of Hysteria in a Female, for example, Mitchell returns to one of Freud's most controversial cases to re-interpret it in terms of Doras relationship with her brother. Elsewhere, she turns to clinical and literary characters--Don Juan, Iago--to further this important new psychoanalysis of the reach, and significance, of that elusive state of hysteria. --Vicky Lebeau

Synopsis:

It has become fashionable in the West to argue that hysteria has disappeared, indeed to challenge the notion that it ever existed. Hysteria's symptoms, first recorded by Hippocratic doctors in the fifth century B.C., were attributed to supernatural causes in the Middle Ages. The medicalization of hysteria in the 17th century moved its site from the womb to the brain, allowing it to be equally available as a diagnosis for men. In the 19th century, when hysteria appeared to be epidemic, Jean-Jacques Charcot photographed and classified hysterical patients and the symptoms were nicknamed "mysteria". But what exactly is hysteria, and is it still with us? do we need the term to describe the consequences of experiences that are fundamental to the human condition in all societies and without which we lose an understanding of those experiences, for both women and men? This volume offers a transhistorical and cross-cultural description of hysteria in which Juliet Mitchell argues that it is always a potential human condition with varying but persistent manifestations in different cultures and at different times.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0713992301
• ISBN 13: 9780713992304
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400