Hysteria: An Affective History and Contemporary Manifestations

The affective understanding of “hysteria” has twists and turns in its historic origin as well as in its contemporary manifestations, either in a colloquial or a capitalist sense. It is puzzling to wonder how we have arrived to its use as a term signifying that one is “frenzied, frantic, or out of control,” according to McVean in “The History of Hysteria” or to the creation of the Japanese designer label, “Hysteric Glamour,” in 1984 by the artist Nobuhiko Kitamura (para. 1). This requires a historical examination, allowing an opportunity to observe the forces influencing the understanding of hysteria and how it lingers in culture and collective formations or assumptions of feeling as they are attached to gender and systems of power. The History of Hysteria McVean expresses that hysteria persisted as a formally studied psychological disorder until the DSM-III, the “American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” in 1980 and it was a “major point of contention” for second wave feminists (para. 1). McVean continues, highlighting how historically, hysteria is known as a “sex-selective disorder,” specifically affecting those “with a uterus” and it was believed in ancient Greece that a uterus could “migrate around the female body” and specifically place “pressure on other organs,” therefore causing “ill effects” (para. 2). This “‘roaming uteri’ theory” as stated by McVean was supported by the philosopher Plato and the physician Aeataeus and was “called ‘hysterical suffocation’,” with the uterus “coaxed back into place” by the treatment of “placing good smells near the vagina” accompanied by “bad smells near the mouth” and sneezing (para. 2).  <a href="https://medium.com/@sienafroment/hysteria-an-affective-history-and-contemporary-manifestations-d12f3f5403d3">Read More</a>