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Sweeping histories of this supposed disease, this supposed singularity–such as Ilza Veith’s classic, Hysteria: The History of a Disease–are flawed in that they create what Mark Micale, author of Approaching Hysteria, calls "a remote and venerable historical heritage" (Mic95 46) rooted in the Hippocratic texts. In "Once upon a Text: Hysteria and Hippocrates," Helen King undercuts traditional histories of hysteria in three crucial ways: (1) by problematizing the similarity between popular conceptions of hysteria in its modern forms and the hysterike pnix, or "suffocation by the womb" (Gil93 28-9), which Hippocrates described; (2) by arguing that anything recognizable as a modern form of hysteria was not recorded until the 16th century; and (3) by pointing out that the diagnosis "hysteria " was not coined until 1801 (Gil93 73). According to Micale, the common type of mythical historical heritage of a disease entity for something "as elusive and mysterious as hysteria ... implies the universality of the disorder, establishes the validity of the diagnostic category, and bolsters the scientific status of psychiatric medicine itself" (Mic95 46). Even during the latter part of the nineteenth century, which Fulgence Raymond called "la période héroïque de l’hystérie" (qtd. in Mic95 3), hysteria’s symptomatology could not sustain what most nosologists, then or now, would consider proper disease status. Jean-Martin Charcot’s conceptions of hysteria in his writings of the 1870s and 1880s reveal a dizzying polysymptomatology despite his efforts to make the diagnosis functional through a delimiting classification system. Basically any behavioral abnormality in a woman was suspect of being a sign of hysteria during "la période héroïque de l’hystérie."

Contemporary symptomatologies for hysteria–a diagnosis unfortunately still in use–are also extremely vague and general. The very recently outdated Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition–Revised) or DSM-III-R lists "paralysis, aphonia, seizures, coordination disturbance, akinesia, dyskinesia, blindness, tunnel vision, anosmia, anesthesia, and paresthesia … [disturbances of the] autonomic and endocrine systems … [and v]omiting" (257) as symptoms of the more specific category of "Hysterical Neurosis, Conversion Type." The DSM-III-R also lists the dissociative type of hysterical neurosis, hysterical personality (histrionic personality disorder), and various kinds of hysterical psychoses. The updated and current DSM-IV does not list hysteria at all, I hope in recognition of the nosological chaos of the history of this diagnosis and, more importantly, the often violent misogyny of the history of "hysteria’s" theorizations and treatments. Since the term remains a common element of psychoanalytic discourse, it seems that the psychoanalytic community is far from acknowledging this history of misogyny and nosological chaos. To do so would be to undercut the origin myth and therefore the very foundation of the supposed scientific status of psychoanalysis–not to mention the complicity of psychoanalysis in the latter part of this misogynistic history.

As with many psychoanalytic feminists who write about hysteria, many Freudian faithful attempt to limit hysteria to symptoms of "conversion," the somatic expression of psychical conflict, as Freud, early in his career, claimed should be done (see I 41-52 passim). Reducing the vast polysymptomatology of hysteria to its merely broad psychosomatic component appeals to psychoanalytic feminists because the metaphorics of the silenced women who can only express their dis-ease with(in) the patriarchy through their culturally hypercathected bodies is indeed powerful. This reduction appeals to the Freudian faithful because the mythologies surrounding Freud’s supposed cure of hysterics, and hysteria as the womb of psychoanalysis, comprise the origin myths of psychoanalysis (Freud cures/anchors the womb that gives birth to psychoanalysis as anchor). Freud’s own symptomatologies and theorizations with respect to hysteria, however, were varied, inconsistent, contradictory, and usually conflated with female homosexuality after the initial writing of the Dora case–a far cry from the "gross, florid motor and sensory somatizations" (Mic95 4) we associate with Freud’s earlier work on hysteria with Breuer. At the same time that Freud would try to limit the symptomatology of hysteria in order to make it manageable, he would also bring in many other symptoms from the dizzying polysymptomatology when they would suit his particular purposes at that time.

If hysteria could be said to have been one thing, something that might constitute a categorization, it was simply a diagnosis, one that was historically made by males in positions of authority–primarily nineteenth-century physicians–about women who were somehow beyond the boundaries of what was contemporaneously considered proper womanhood. The diagnosis of hysteria itself may be a symptom of a patriarchal "dis-ease"–that is, the patriarchy’s dis-ease with those bodies classified as female that did not conform to, were in excess of, its dictates of proper womanhood. Many of the feminists who make this argument or similar ones, however, treat hysteria as if it were something beyond a diagnosis. If they don’t explicitly do this, and even if they at times argue against such a position, their common unproblematized use of "hysteria" suggests just such an assumption (see Showalter, Kahane, Matlock, Smith-Rosenberg, among others). In other words, many feminist theorists often use "hysteria" as an unproblematized denotation of an actual disease even though these feminists suggest that the word "hysteria" itself cannot be anything but the discursive manifestations of a variety of related patriarchal defensive strategies, especially with its unavoidable anatomical etymology of a diseased womb. There seems to be an understandable, if unfortunate, need to figure out the causes of hysteria-the-disease at the same time that some feminists argue for hysteria as a part of a reappropriative discourse of nineteenth century physicians made insecure by the changes happening with respect to women and their roles in society, in the family, and in their personal and sexual relations.

Histories such as Veith’s–not a "hys-story" as much as a case of "historia"–if not histories of a disease entity, may be useful as histories of what Elaine Showalter calls "the pervasive association of women and madness" (Sch85 4), if their use of "hysteria" is retroactively problematized. For two reasons I hesitate to say that such histories might be considered histories of female madness. First of all, Showalter would see this as a redundancy since she argues "madness is a female malady" (Sch85 3). Second, Derrida might argue that this would be an "infeasible" (Der78 33) categorization for the same reasons that Foucault’s intention of writing his History of Madness from the position, as Foucault said, "of madness itself … before being captured by knowledge" (qtd. in Der78 34), is for Derrida infeasible, or even "the maddest aspect of his project" (ibid.). Any history is on the side of reason, thus making a history of madness a reduction of the Other of "madness" to reason’s more of the Same. Indeed, madness can be read as the (op)position that allows for reason.

What these "hys-stories" mask as aspects of this general reduction of the Other to the Same with respect to reason/madness, are the undecidables of certain boundaries that make up the dualisms or (op)positionalities that have played major roles in the West’s representational histories. This masking is a process of naturalization of dualisms such as male/female and reason/madness, a deciding of undecidables along traditional lines. A third dualism, mind/body, is also a major player in the general representational histories of the West. On one level, what is at stake with these hys-stories, and the many questions of hysteria in general, is the reproduction of what Showalter calls "the fundamental alliance between ‘woman’ and ‘madness’" (Sch85 3) and "how women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind" (Sch85 3-4). These dualisms have been hierarchies in practice, and they mask the undecidables–the radical alterity of what is Other, the instability of the same–and the futility of the various patriarchies’ attempts to reduce what is Other to its dualistic codes and hierarchies once and for all.

Showalter’s feminism itself seems to be based on the self-evidence or naturalness of such a dualism, male/female, and therefore it risks reproducing the phallogocentric reduction of what is Other to more of the Same–that is, inasmuch as such an assumption necessarily leads to such a reproduction, and inasmuch as feminism necessarily makes such an assumption. In, "Deconstruction in America," Derrida suggests that feminisms are necessarily phallogocentric:

Psychoanalysis, of course, would also be one of these phallogocentric forms. The appeal of psychoanalysis for some feminisms seems to be what these forms of feminism read as its anti-essentialism, which gets away from "anatomy is destiny." And yet, since Derrida argues both psychoanalysis and feminism are forms of phallogocentrism, the source of this attraction may also be that they share phallogocentric assumptions. In so far as phallogocentrism prescribes a destiny, a destinational linguistics, ultimately "anchored" to the letter of anatomy, the two "lures" of psychoanalysis for certain feminisms–anti-essentialism and sharing phallogocentric assumptions–become mutually exclusive. Without getting embroiled in the intricacies of the relationship between deconstruction and feminism at this point, I am interested in suggesting here that the conflicted strategies of treating hysteria as a discursive formation and attempting to theorize the origins and essence of hysteria–that is, treating it as a "real" illness–can be understood in relation to the certain feminisms’ conflicted relationship to phallogocentrism and the mainstyles of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. I return to these issues in the concluding chapter.

The primary function of hysteria is to bolster and reproduce the aforementioned hierarchical dualisms–mind over body, reason over madness, and male over female. Even when the diagnosis of hysteria was used for men, as in the late nineteenth century by Charcot and Freud–and though the diagnosis was severed here from its history of connecting the pathology to a diseased womb–the diagnosis was used figuratively to suggest that the male had succumbed to a feminine type of madness, a "female malady." Freud returns to this type of metaphorics–the type where Freud must cure himself of his hysterical symptoms, his femininity–in the late essay, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," where he stresses the difficulty of curing his male patients of their residual femininity (though he never theorizes this source of femininity beyond simply stating the universality of bisexuality).

The discursive formation "hysteria," the diagnosis, was used to justify oppressive practices in the service of the stability of various patriarchies. Prior to the inception of "hysteria" as a diagnosis in 1801, the theories, speculations, and "treatments" of aberrant forms of femininity were also used oppressively, often violently. I will refer to all aberrant forms of femininity I deal with here that various Western patriarchies felt the need to classify or diagnose to defend against their disruptive potential, borrowing from Showalter, "the female malady"–though I use this phrase, not as a synonym for madness in general, but as a way of denoting the paradoxical imbrications of femininity and madness from the perspective of a hom(m)osexual patriarchy–that is, the malady of being female, and, furthermore, the malady of not being female enough. Psychoanalysis continues this treatment of the themes of femininity in terms of a malady for both men (see "Analysis Terminable and Interminable") and women (the "peculiar" sex, penis envy), and this contradictory treatment of the feminine malady as not being female enough (either hysteria or female homosexuality with respect to Freud’s "three lines of development"). With respect to terminology, my hope here is to differentiate the broader term, "the female malady," from its subset "hysteria," and therefore to historicize "hysteria" as a diagnosis made after 1800. This allows me to maintain the broad strokes of related histories of female oppression associated with female madness without reifying hysteria and making the error of assuming that nineteenth-century hysteria has a "remote and venerable historical heritage" (Mic95 46) rooted in the Hippocratic texts. In fact, I would say that a "remote and (un)venerable historical heritage" of the imbrication of femininity and madness would be less vulnerable to "historia" than a comparable hys-story.

The theories and treatments for the female malady were aspects of varied though similar forms of patriarchal reappropriation, where the aberrancy of things feminine–that is, associated with femininity yet in excess of its proper form–is reappropriated by establishing that which is aberrant as the abject form of the proper in a name-game of mastery that re-establishes the One and the same in the face of the Other. As usual, the aberrancy–the transgression, perversion–was used as limit and negative in order to establish and center the proper, the norm, the law. In the Timaeus, Plato wrote:

With proper femininity in Plato’s Greece, the womb is irrigated and inseminated; the happy womb does not wander as it is anchored by the penis. A proper sexuality, a proper relation of womb to penis, therefore, is the cure and antithesis of the diseased womb, the symptom of aberrant femininity. The themes of proper sexuality and the curative penis/phallus would recur throughout the history of the female malady. For example, Rudolph Chrobak sent along the following course of treatment with a patient he had diagnosed as hysterical and had sent to Freud: "penis normalis dosim repetatur" (Gay 92).

Another recurring theme in histories of the female malady is violent misogyny. Despite what seems like what should have been the sound security of Western patriarchies throughout history due to their rootedness and overwhelming power, violent misogyny regarding the treatment and theorization of the female malady has been common and often virulent, which suggests that these patriarchies were not as stable as they were powerful, and that the threat of what is Other associated with the phantasmatic feminine was consistently great. After St. Augustine, who attributed all illness to "a manifestation of innate evil" (Mic95 20), the female malady became synonymous with witchcraft and possession by the devil:

The violence of the nineteenth-century patriarchal reactions to what was named "hysteria" is consistent with the violence of previous eras’ patriarchal reactions to the demonic female malady, such as the uncountable murders of women deemed to be witches. Nineteenth century forms of violence were often medicalized and sexualized in keeping with its less religious Enlightenment ethos. The seventeenth century would see the beginning of a neurological model used to theorize the female malady, one that would evolve until the present time. A revival of uterine theories would occur in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, hence the womb-oriented diagnosis of "hysteria" for what were considered materialist maladies circa 1801. As examples of this combination of medicalization and sexualization, treatments that stemmed from a combinatory, neuro-uterine model of "hysteria" included "intrauterine injections, the cervical and vulvar application of leeches, and clitoral cauterizations," and recalcitrant "cases were occasionally subjected to amputative and extirpative gynecological surgery, including bilateral ovariotomies" (Mic95 24). Though a pioneer in getting away from physically violent forms of treatment, Freud in 1896 volunteered one of his "hysterical" patients, Emma Eckstein, for a procedure developed by his friend Wilhelm Fliess, who posited that the cauterization of the turbinate bone of the nasal cavity could supposedly cure sexually related neurotic and physiological ailments such as hysteria. By Freud’s own account, the operation had disastrous effects: the patient nearly bled to death because of bone chips and a meter of gauze left in her nose after the operation. As late as 1920, Freud would consider an overidectomy as a potential therapy for one of his patient’s homosexuality and the hysteria Freud associated with it (XVIII 172). Whether neurological or uterine/sexual, there are clear connections between "hysteria, " the female malady, aberrant forms of femininity, proper forms of femininity, feminine sexuality, patriarchal insecurity, and the violence to which this insecurity led.

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