crazier: man or woman? ( Archived) (40)

tomcatwarne: With the Freudian theory and treatment of hysteria, psychoanalysis was born. That Freud was led to discover the unconscious mind as a result of his treatment of women suffering from hysteria is significant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

It is also, I will argue, significant for feminism. In the expression of the hysteric’s symptoms Freud read the expression of something which confounded his medical and scientific knowledge, a psychical force which could cause illness with the malignancy of a cancer. Freud’s theory of hysteria, which became the theory of the unconscious, opened up a whole new way of thinking about the human psyche and human suffering. Indeed, the idea that repression caused by social norms and prohibitions can lead to hysterical illness has had a significant influence on feminist thought. It is psychoanalytic theory which has led some feminists to suggest that hysterical symptoms are a form of feminist rebellion or “protofeminism.”

This connection between repression and oppression, social norms and suffering, has long been drawn on by feminists as evidence for and representation of women’s suffering under patriarchy. In fact it was the image of the hysterical housewife with which Betty Friedan began her 1963 feminist call to arms, The Feminine Mystique, the book widely crediting with launching the second wave of the feminist movement in America.