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“Our eye finds it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different and new in an impression. The latter would require more strength… Even in the midst of strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its “inventor”… All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are accustomed to lying. Or put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.”
“(Nietzsche)1”
The use of quotation marks may indicate different senses in a text. Aiming to consider a classic topic of psychology jointly with a critical light, the use of quotation marks allows us to both highlight the term “discovery” and suggest the questioning of its use. To that we will use contemporary thinking tendencies referring to fields of knowledge like philosophy, psychoanalysis, medicine and history to think over the constructing and use of the concept of hysteria.
This concept is of utmost relevance to the development of psychology at large and, more specifically, of psychoanalysis (like Freud [1927/1996] we understand psychoanalysis as part of the psychology). Hysteria is a classic topic of the so-called “psi field”. It is present since ancient times, including Classic Antiquity: “the word ‘hysteria’ appears for the first time in Hippocrates’ thirty-fifth aphorism, where it is said: “When a woman suffers from hysteria or difficult labor an attack of sneezing is beneficial” (Didi-Huberman, 2003, p. 70). This Greek view on hysteria - whose etymology stems from “uterus” - is not the one to be directly worked on herein. However, it is useful to recall other possible meanings of the term.
For psychoanalysis, hysteria is present since psychoanalysis itself came into life. That is so because Freud’s studies on this topic, based on his clinical experience since his supervised practice with Jean-Martin Charcot, at Hospital Salpêtrière (from October 1885 to February 1886), subverted the concept of anatomic and physiological body existing by that time. Hysterical women have directly contributed with the emergence of concepts such as the sense of symptom...