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PARTISAN REVIEW
Hysteria in History
Approaching Hysteria. Disease and Its Interpretations. By Mark
Micale.
Princeton University Press. $29.95.
Mark Micale, who teaches history at Manchester University, is one of
the modem masters of the study of hysteria. The author of a brilliant dis–
sertation on Jean-Martin Charcot, Micale began in 1989 to publish a
series of essays on the meanings attached to hysteria over the past century.
His work addressed hysteria not just in the light of its "medical" defini–
tions, but also how its meaning (or better, these meanings) came to
constitute the image of hysteria and the hysteric in modem consciousness.
Micale divides this book into two sections: the medical meanings of
hysteria (and their reception), and their cultural appropriation in the gen–
eral culture of the West. Physicians have looked at hysteria from a wide
range of contexts. Historians have superimposed their own interpretations
on these definitions. Intellectual and psychoanalytically oriented historians
have dealt with this "object" in complex ways, usually assuming its basic
validity as a diagnostic criteria. Feminist historians, on the other hand,
have believed hysteria a theoretical construct and have asserted how its
various symptoms mimicked the role into which women were placed
during the late nineteenth century. Feminists assumed that the original
meaning of hysteria (taken from the Greek word for womb) implied that
it had to be understood as a means by which to control women. Male
hysteria, the discovery of Jean-Martin Charcot, was ignored or rela–
tivized. Yet Charcot himself came to be of major interest to modem
historians. His weekly public presentations of hysterics were visited by
tout Paris,
including Marcel Proust. Sigmund Freud's tutelage under
Charcot had been intended to enable the young Viennese neurologist to
catch up on the most recent ideas concerning nervous ailments. But he
returned to Vienna a disciple of Charcot's, at least to the extent that he
began to focus more and more on hysteria. Espousing it to be both a male
and female "problem," he managed to suppress the other lesson he
learned at Charcot's clinic - that male Eastern-European Jews were the
most at risk for hysteria, especially when they found themselves in the
intellectual hothouse of Paris. This image fitted Freud completely, and
surprisingly enough Freud's hysterics turned out to be mostly upper–
middle-class Jewish women in Vienna. Not a single male Jewish hysteric
haunts his published case studies.
Mark Micale traces the complexity of this tradition and its reading in
the histories of hysteria. His evaluations are fair, and he seems to have ex-
