I’m working to finish up a big project this week, so I’m a little dizzy at the moment, surfing the kind of hysteria I write about below— the kind that comes, for me, when I’m immersed in a writing project. But this project in particular also has me thinking a lot about how women’s sexual responses and desires have been pathologized throughout the ages, so I thought I’d share an old essay with you all this week on that subject. It’s from the archives, and explores how hysteria remains foundational to psychology today. I’ve removed the paywall and condensed it a bit, and I’ve also included some related writing from the archives on women and madness, in case you are new around here and missed them. I hope they get you thinking about the state of hysteria today.
Towards a New Theory of Hysterical Women
I watched the film Call Jane last weekend. The tone of the film felt off for me at times (a little too rah-rah, isn’t illegal abortion fun and empowering), but there was one scene I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, in which the main character, Joy, a fictional Chicago housewife, has her file reviewed by a board of medical directors, a nonfictional protocol. Carrying her baby to term could kill her, but after a short interrogation, these men decide quickly and dispassionately to deny Joy the potentially life-saving abortion, in a scene that highlights how little women’s lives are valued.
Joy exits the room abruptly, angrily, then returns: she brought cookies to show her worthiness, but now she snatches them from the conference table where her fate has been decided, before storming out again. The board exchanges looks, making faces. Women, they seem to say.
I have been writing in and around the subject of hysteria and the gendering of pathology in this newsletter since its inception. Some of what I am trying to do here is name the inseparability of the personal and the political—both in terms of form and the way the political manifests in our bodies, even as we remain stuck within institutions that deny that historical and cultural reality.
But what I’ve discovered over the years is that writing often becomes its own kind of madness— a form of hysteria, perhaps, which is sometimes defined as “ungovernable emotional excess.” I love this, actually, as a working definition of writing, but I also see that embracing this definition of creative practice is limited. I have to live and do care work and perform other labor for an income, and sometimes I write down into a rabbit hole and find it hard to dig myself out. This doesn’t always end well.
I have also been thinking lately about unhinged women. Last year, two books titled “Hysterical” came out. Why the renewed interest in this term, this concept, this use of the first psychological illness linked to women as an allegory of our times? The term hysteria, you probably already know, comes from the Greek hystera, or uterus. Women diagnosed with hysteria were believed to have wandering wombs that caused all sorts of ailments, from depression to spontaneous convulsions.
Treatments were wide-ranging—from medicinal approaches for repositioning the uterus, to marriage, sexual penetration, “massage” (read: medical assault), and other methods of “honoring the phallus.” It was not until 1980 that hysterical neurosis was removed from the DSM.
The hysterical woman exists at the center of many of the concepts I’ve been exploring for years—bodies, feelings, gender, parenting, the sexual division of labor, mental health/wellness culture, sexuality, creativity, work. My book, Touched Out, links many of these themes, but there are many more angles to explore.
Hysteria was always characteristic of a broad network of beliefs about women’s bodies and minds (not to mention the presumed separation of the two), many of which persist today. Support for anti-abortion legislation, for example, builds on beliefs that women cannot to be trusted to understand their own needs, health, bodies, lives, and medical files. They are too emotional, incapable of reason. And because of this, they are a threat to humanity. Left to their own devices, the story goes, women will destroy us all.
Some people look at hysteria as though it were just one “bad apple” of history. But the idea that people with uteruses are predispositioned to madness—whether because they are intellectually weak or simply because they have the capacity to carry children—is a foundational feature of Western psychology and culture.
How do the concepts of illness and wellness, for example, remain categories thrown around to cover over or excuse systemic or institutional abuse, whether in clinical or casual settings? How is the image of the hysterical woman still used as shorthand for the everyday policing of women’s behavior, identity, politics, and feelings today? How are women’s bodies still disciplined with regard to what they are allowed to feel, think, say, do, and write? How do beliefs about women’s supposed emotionality and dangerous sexuality continue to provide a “rationale” for this patrolling of bodies? And how do the cultures of wellness, mental health, parenting, and American politics replicate dated misogynistic beliefs about bodies of all genders?