Chapter 3. History of Dissociation (2) From Hysteria to Dissociation (1)

In this chapter, I would like to further discuss the history of hysteria and dissociative disorders. Hysteria is clinically identical to dissociative disorder. While dissociative disorder is now occupying an official position in the modern psychiatry, the term hysteria, still used here and there, still carries a pejorative connotation owing to its long history of discrimination and misunderstanding. The recent book “The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria", the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction” Written by Rachel Maines describes very vividly how hysteria had been misunderstood and discriminated in human history. Galen (AD. 129-200) descried hysteria as a uterine disease caused by sexual deprivation. He mentions in detail a genital massage therapy. In the Medieval era, literature repeats Plato’s account of the “uterus wandering around the body, causing problems as it went, particularly strangulation as it allegedly crawled up into the chest and windpipe”. It is amazing that hysteria was associated with female sexuality almost from the beginning. No other notion of illness has its remedy already incorporated in it.
In the middle age, views of Avicenna (a Persian polymath. Ibn Sīnā, 980-1037) again states that marriage was the best remedy for hysteria, but if all else failed, masturbation to orgasm was induced. This concept of genital stimulation as a therapy for hysteria had been believed until fairly recently, when J-M Charcot’s innovative study was achieved.