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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's 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 Bilby, who has written the introduction to the

Penguin Edition of Studies in Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breyer.

Julie Mitchell, Professor of psych analysis 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 Center for Child Mental Health in London.

Julie Mitchell, I 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 behavior, dramatizing 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 one can find treatments for them but one can't find actually causes of those illnesses.

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