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Contrary to what many people think, this is not an exaggerated emotional reaction, but a specific mental disorder that manifests itself physically. Very frequent among women of the 19th century, it presents symptoms such as paralysis and anesthesia, mental confusion, multiple personality and apathy in relation to the outside world – or, on the contrary, those nervous attacks that lay people associate with the word hysteria. The name comes from the Greek hystéra, which means womb. “It was believed, in antiquity, that the vital energy of that organ moved to other regions of the body, causing attacks. Already in the Middle Ages, they were considered a manifestation of witchcraft and many women were burned alive because of it. Nineteenth-century psychiatry, in turn, believed that the root must lie in an organic lesion, while others spoke of pretense,” says psychoanalyst Maria Teresa Lemos, from the Campinas School of Psychoanalysis.
What doctors had never realized was that hysteria represented a cry for help by women against their sexual repression. This secret began to be unveiled by the Frenchman Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893), one of the fathers of neurology, who discovered, through hypnosis, that such symptoms had a psychic origin. Charcot’s most famous student, Sigmund Freud, demonstrated that sexual trauma was always at the origin – the starting point for the creation of a new discipline: psychoanalysis. With the social and cultural changes of the 20th century, hysteria is no longer so common and its place was taken by depression, the main psychological disorder today.