Hysteria

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss a problematic notion which can be an emotional condition, a syndrome, an extreme or over-reaction, or the physical signs of trauma. The term ‘hysteria’ was first used in Greece in the 5th century BC by Hippocratic doctors. They were trying to explain an illness whose symptoms were breathing difficulties and a sense of suffocation, and whose sufferers were seen chiefly to be recently bereaved widows. The explanation was thought to be a wandering womb putting pressure on other organs. The use that Sigmund Freud put to the term was rather different, but although there is no wandering womb in his notion of hysteria, there is still a mysterious leap from the emotional to the physical, from the mind to the body. What is hysteria? How can emotional experiences cause physical illnesses? And has hysteria’s association with old stereotypes of femininity put it off the modern medical map?

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Juliet Mitchell 3 episodes
  Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge
• Rachel Bowlby 2 episodes
  Professor of English at the University of York
• Brett Kahr 2 episodes
  Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London

Related episodes

• The Four Humours
  
  20 Dec, 2007 610 Medicine and health
• The Brain
  
  8 May, 2008 610 Medicine and health
• Tragedy
  
  2 Dec, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Pain
  
  22 Jul, 1999 610 Medicine and health
• Man and Disease
  
  12 Dec, 2002 610 Medicine and health
• Psychoanalysis and Democracy
  
  11 Jul, 2002 150 Psychology
• Sensation
  
  6 Nov, 2003 820 English and Old English literatures
• Sensibility
  
  3 Jan, 2002 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• The Heart
  
  1 Jun, 2006 610 Medicine and health
• Anatomy
  
  14 Feb, 2002 610 Medicine and health
• Consciousness
  
  25 Nov, 1999 120 Epistemology
• Phenomenology
  
  22 Jan, 2015 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Psychoanalysis and its Legacy
  
  4 Feb, 1999 150 Psychology
• Imagination and Consciousness
  
  29 Jun, 2000 120 Epistemology
• Neuroscience
  
  13 Nov, 2008 610 Medicine and health
• Bedlam
  
  17 Mar, 2016 360 Social problems and social services
• Jung
  
  2 Dec, 2004 150 Psychology
• Blood
  
  22 May, 2003 610 Medicine and health
• Anaesthetics
  
  29 Mar, 2007 610 Medicine and health
• Psychoanalysis and Literature
  
  9 Nov, 2000 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism

---

Programme ID: p004y27w

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y27w

Auto-category: 616.85 (Mental disorders and their treatment)