Freud’s three ideas about Hysteria

The first idea Freud presents is the relationship between the patient’s hysteria symptoms with the events of her life. This means that certain events can cause hysteria in some cases. “ It is quite true that all her traumas dated from the period when she was nursing her sick father and that her symptoms can only be regarded as mnemic signs of his illness and death. “ In this case, the patient developed hysteria symptoms caused by her traumas that at the same time were caused by an event, taking care of her sick father and finally his death. The second idea shown by Freud is connected to the first one, the suppression of traumas. This happens when we experience a traumatic event and we save it internally, We do not let it go. This causes damage in the long term everytime we remember that specific event. Is like obstructing the mouth of a balloon as it inflates, at some point it would explode. “One was driven to assume that the illness occurred because the affects generated in the pathogenic situations had their normal outlet blocked, and that the essence of the illness lay in the fact that these ‘strangulated’ affects were then put to an abnormal use.” The third and last idea exposed by Freud is the power of the conscious. Basically there are different states of mind. For example, when someone suffers from a double personality, the conscious tends to stick to one of the personalities or “state of mind”. The other part is the unconscious part. “Cases of this kind, too, occasionally appear spontaneously, and are then described as examples of ‘double conscience’.¹ If, where a splitting of the personality such as this has occurred, consciousness remains attached regularly to one of the two states, we call it the conscious mental state and the other, which is detached from it, the unconscious one”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *