Women's agency in hysteria and its treatment

About this book

Feminist hysteria studies have explained both hysteria symptoms and treatments for them as expressions of patriarchal oppression. Re-reading case histories of Bertha Pappenheim (patient of Josef Breuer), Ida Bauer (patient of Sigmund Freud), and Jean-Martin Charcot's so-called "theater of hysteria" (where working class French asylum women performed hysteria on stage), it is argued that female patients transformed situations of abandonment, death mourning, incest, abuse, and ultimately hysteria symptoms into opportunities to achieve things that were arguably difficult or impossible to achieve outside the constraint situations. The dissertation exemplifies the general theoretical and empirical point that opportunity may open vectors of opportunity. As they say, the story (of success) is in the struggle.