Just because brain imaging may back-up theories of psycho-somatic disorders, it does not then follow that ‘hysteria’ as it was understood is an coherent and valid disorder. As the article itself notes in passing, hysteria was a catch-all for a whole range of conditions and disorders including epilepsy and other physiological diseases that would not be diagnosed as hysteria by the medical establishment today.

So why keep using throwing around a vague, inaccurate, and obsolete medical term? Because it’s a lot more amusing to try and get feminists to react hysterically over the word ‘hysteria’.

I’m not really sure how to read Dr. Narrow’s comment here — does he mean that it’s pejorative because it was a term used to dismiss women’s concerns, or does the mere association with women render the term too pejorative to apply to men?

I think it’s actually considered pejorative because it uses a general characteristic of women’s bodies (as Cassandra points out) as a metaphor for irrationality/neurosis, and the metaphor then starts to work the other way, associating the female body with irrationality/neurosis. It’s pejorative towards women, not men.

There’s a nice quote from Elizabeth Grosz (talking about the term ‘invagination’): ‘[t]he problem is not that there is not and cannot be a clear-cut separation between the literal and the metaphoric; the problem is what is at stake in covering the literal in the metaphoric.’

In the eyes of half the world, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m just lazy and don’t like to lift anything heavier than ten pounds, engage in extensive physical effort, would rather sit and piddle on the computer than do something useful, and out of pure laziness needs a nap every afternoon.

Funny how about six different pills will put everything right and let me do what I want, isn’t it.

I almost fell over when I read that! Who is this Dr. Black? I love her.

I wonder how much the complaints about this not being “real science” have to do with the association of hysteria with women?

Just fodder for discussion…

Actually, this probably has less to do with women than it has to do with psychology (as a science) as a whole. There has always been a duality in psychology between the clinical and the scientific. We scientists even sometimes have a little complex about it :) Freud’s work, in particular, has born the brunt of this duality because much of his work is not scientifically testable.

As to the rest of your article… word.