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Hello, the term hysteria was first used in Greece in the 5th century BC by Hippocratic Doctors. They were trying to explain an illness whose symptoms were breathing difficulties and a sense of suffocation and whose sufferers were seen chiefly to be recently bereaved widows.

The explanation was thought to be a wandering womb, putting pressure on other organs. The use that Sigmund Freud put to the term was rather different, but although there was no wandering womb in his notion of hysteria, there still a mysterious leap from the emotional to physical, from mind to the body.

But what is hysteria? How can emotional experiences cause physical illnesses? And has hysteria's association with old stereotypes of femininity put it off the modern medical map?

With me to discuss hysteria is Professor Rachel Bellby, who has written the introduction to the Penguin edition of Studies in hysteria by Sigmund Freud-Niches Breuer.

Julie Mitchell, professor of psychoanalysis and gender studies at Cambridge University, who has written a book on reclaiming hysteria, and Brett Carr, senior clinical research fellow in psychotherapy at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London.

Julie Mitchell, I'm referred briefly to the Greek notion of hysteria. Could you develop that a little?

Yes, I think what we have to consider is that hysteria comes along a line, really, from how we use it colloquially to mean something that the Greeks are really referring to there, which is hysterical behaviour, dramatising all sorts of physiological symptoms, which have no organic base as far as we can discover.

And probably as far as the Greeks could discover, I'm going to find treatments for them, but one can't find actually causes of those illnesses.

You can think of somebody like Alice James, sister of Henry and Henry James, the novelist. She had a paralyzed leg and was incapacitated all her life.

It had no organic base whatsoever, so it can be very serious condition, or it can be just as we use it, as I said colloquially, like in a hysterical crowd in a football game or something like that.

When what seems to be happening is a sort of contagion between people, as though one person's emotion becomes somebody else's emotion and you get a movement of a hysterical sort between people.

So it is a long aspect from the whole concept of hysteria, I think, but from the mild episode, which is a hysterical outbreak of eating disorders and a rexero or something you want in what used to be.

I mean, I knew somebody who had symptoms of a heart attack, but was finally discharged from a major London teaching hospital only a few years ago with devil's grip.

One of the factors that you brought up immediately, one of the difficulties that we might try to resolve during this program, is as you say, the range of it, hysterical can be at the very mild and outbursts, a hysterical outburst, which most people suffer from or offer up.

And as we've got hysterical blindness, as you mentioned hysterical paralysis, called hysterical because the cause is an outside event, not an organic event, not an inside event.

But it's interesting that the Greeks were onto it. It was there in their society and they gave it the name, which has stayed with it.

And they themselves were associating it with women, with bereavement, with an outside event. Do you find that has that been significant throughout the study of hysteria, Julian?

Yes, I think so. That seems to be often what today we would call a trauma somewhere in the background of hysteria. It's a response to something that maybe what another person would define as traumatic, but certainly the person feels it to be traumatic.

So the Greeks thought, for example, if you married and had babies or something, you might overcome the traumatic experience of being widowed, which would be the end of a sexual relationship, and that could be experienced as traumatic.

That notion of trauma is somewhere there throughout its history in some ways. But you have to search for it at certain points.

In the 17th century, Edward Jordan brought something fresh to bear on it. Can you just tell us about that?

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