The sad story of the hysterical uterus

There has been no scientifically definitive physiology of female anatomy until very recently, but strange images from its ambiguous history still haunt the common imagination and impact women’s self-image. No one is stranger than the female uterus.

An anatomical “reality” that persisted in Western medical tradition since ancient Greece was that the female uterus becomes disgusted and displaced, and wanders through the body, negatively influencing the brain (I’m not kidding!). “Hysteria” is derived from the Greek word for uterus.

In a fit of rage, the female uterus ran through the body, causing all kinds of emotional upheavals, hence hysteria, hysteria, and hysterectomy.

The mental condition of hysteria afflicted legions of women of all ages throughout the patriarchal centuries and was considered the most common disease after fever. At menopause, specifically, “the belief was that the lack of menstruation caused the uterus to move through the body, eventually negatively influencing the brain” (Louis Banner In Full Flower).

The descriptions of hysterical patients painted a terrible caricature of the feminine. Older treatments included bed rest, restraints, beatings, purges, bleeding, and in the worst case, hysterectomy and / or clitoridectomy.

Kinder treatment developed in the 19th century, when hysteria became a veritable epidemic, especially among the white middle classes. The doctor massaged the genitals until there was a healing seizure and wet spasms (an orgasm by any other name), which relieved the patient for a while, until the next appointment. Hysteria was considered chronic and incurable and required ongoing treatment.

Electric vibrators were developed in the mid-1800s to help overworked physicians and relieve hysterical women. They were even marketed to women at home for self-treatment and advertised in consumer catalogs and magazines. (There were vibrators in the house before vacuum cleaners.) However, by 1930 vibrators had gone underground and were not openly advertised again until they resurfaced as sex toys in the 1960s. (This is according to Duana R Anderson in The wondering Uterus & A Brief History of the Vibrator)

The treatment of hysteria was taken up by psychology, and Freud practically developed his momentous theories based on his work with hysterical (and frigid) women. And, well, we should be grateful for that.

He explained hysteria as the physical and psychological expression of internal psychic conflicts over sexuality. (The psyche became soma). He explored the personal histories of his patients for clues, practiced spoken healing (enormously innovative for its time), and developed psychoanalysis.

In my opinion, these legions of hysterical women were literally shaking with centuries of misogynistic repressions, bursting out of the traumatized collective psyche; an epidemic that springs from the universal unconscious where the goddess of myth lay buried.

In the words of the good doctor, “The hysterical character shows a degree of sexual repression greater than the normal amount, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already encountered in the form of shame, disgust and morality). And what it seems like an instinctive dislike on his part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

“This trait … is not infrequently filtered by the existence of a second constitutional character present in hysteria, namely, the predominant development of the sexual instinct. Psychoanalysis … reveals the pair of opposites by which it is characterized: desire exaggerated sexual and excessive aversion to sexuality “.

Modern psychology succeeded in bringing hysteria out of the realm of superstition. You could say that it cured mass hysteria; in 1952, it was officially declared non-disease.

Freud introduced the concept of libido, the psychic energy expressed through sexuality that is at the root of each living individual and that drives our desires and impulses. It can be repressed, expressed, controlled, or transmuted. But it exists, a priori!

Psychology helped make conscious the compulsion of instincts hidden in the unconscious psyche. Basically ordinary people could now understand their behaviors and symptoms as expressions of an underlying psychic / psychological conflict. Jung introduced the idea of ​​the collective unconscious, which illuminated the universality of dream images and the content of the personal unconscious.

The subjugated sexuality of the hysterics was now the very essence of the modern era, waiting for the 1960s to explode on the postwar baby boomers world stage. The sexual liberation of that period was a huge and abrupt cultural change. Perhaps now we forget how radical and fundamental this sexual break with the past was.

However, before we are too pleased with this development, we must ask ourselves why, with hysteria safely disconnected, we now have a virtual epidemic of hysterectomies, now the second most common surgery among American women, and cesarean delivery. it is the first one. One in three women in the United States has had a hysterectomy by age 60!

If our hysterical wombs no longer travel through our bodies affecting our brains, why are so many women removed?

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