Bodies, Affects, Politics by Steve Pile;

Bodies, Affects, Politics by Steve Pile;

Author:Steve Pile; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118901946
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2021-01-28T00:00:00+00:00


Hysterical Symptoms and the Unconscious: Dora, What She Does Not Know or Cannot Tell Us

The idea of the repressed unconscious – and its significance for understanding what makes people sick – has its origins, not in a pre‐existing conceptual framework or a pre‐determined model of human psychical development, but in the external world. This is as true of Freud’s patients’ symptoms as the psychoanalytic concepts and techniques that have emerged over more than a century to understand them. Let me be clear, the idea of a repressed unconscious emerges in response to some extremely puzzling medical problems that had already baffled medicine for well over 150 years before Freud. In particular, hysterical symptoms, where people’s distress was expressed through the body in often bizarre and seemingly theatrical ways, were particularly puzzling as they could not be directly correlated with brain disease or other physical characteristics. In 1885, Freud is in Paris, with Jean‐Martin Charcot, seeking to understand whether abnormalities in different regions of the brain had any connection with hysteria (see de Marneffe 1991; and Sulloway 1979, pp. 28–30). What Freud witnesses is astonishing: see Figure 5.1.

What we see in this painting is Charcot proving – to a fascinated audience – that the origins of some nervous disorders, such as hysteria, do not lie in the body, but solely in the mind. He is demonstrating that a patient’s symptoms could be turned on and off, literally, by the gentle touch of a hand. Put another way, what clinicians were (and still are) faced with was a wide variety of physical symptoms that appeared to have no foundation in physical problems, despite a prolonged search for explanatory physical abnormalities in autopsies of dead patients (with particular emphasis on the search for lesions in the brain – which was Freud’s own particular interest, too, although he cautioned against a too localised understanding of brain functioning). You will note the instruments that lie on table by the standing central figure, Charcot. These consisted of probes and electrical stimulation devices. Using these, Charcot demonstrated that his patients’ symptoms were not simply faked or simulated. Paralysed limbs really were paralysed, beyond the conscious control of the patients. Yet, using hypnosis, Charcot could make the paralysis completely disappear (and reappear). Here was proof of the power of the mind to dominate the body – not consciously, but unconsciously. Returning to Vienna, brimming with enthusiasm and confidence, Freud sets about developing a cure for hysteria using hypnosis.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.