II.

Hysteria and the Question of Its Relation to the Sexual Emotions—­The Early Greek Theories of its Nature and Causation—­The Gradual Rise of Modern Views—­Charcot—­The Revolt Against Charcot’s Too Absolute Conclusions—­Fallacies Involved—­Charcot’s Attitude the Outcome of his Personal Temperament—­Breuer and Freud—­Their Views Supplement and Complete Charcot’s—­At the Same Time they Furnish a Justification for the Earlier Doctrine of Hysteria—­But They Must Not be Regarded as Final—­The Diffused Hysteroid Condition in Normal Persons—­The Physiological Basis of Hysteria—­True Pathological Hysteria is Linked on to almost Normal States, especially to Sex-hunger.

The nocturnal hallucinations of hysteria, as all careful students of this condition now seem to agree, are closely allied to the hysterical attack proper.  Sollier, indeed, one of the ablest of the more recent investigators of hysteria, has argued with much force that the subjects of hysteria really live in a state of pathological sleep, of vigilambulism.[251] He regards all the various accidents of hysteria as having a common basis in disturbances of sensibility, in the widest sense of the word “sensibility,”—­as the very foundation of personality,—­while anaesthesia is “the real sigillum hysteriae.”  Whatever the form of hysteria, we are thus only concerned with a more or less profound state of vigilambulism:  a state in which the subject seems, often even to himself, to be more or less always asleep, whether the sleep may be regarded as local or general.  Sollier agrees with Fere that the disorder of sensibility may be regarded as due to an exhaustion of the sensory centres of the brain, whether as the result of constitutional cerebral weakness, of the shock of a violent emotion, or of some toxic influence on the cerebral cells.

We may, therefore, fitly turn from the auto-erotic phenomena of sleep which in women generally, and especially in hysterical women, seem to possess so much importance and significance, to the question—­which has been so divergently answered at different periods and by different investigators—­concerning the causation of hysteria, and especially concerning its alleged connection with conscious or unconscious sexual emotion.[252]

It was the belief of the ancient Greeks that hysteria came from the womb; hence its name.  We first find that statement in Plato’s Timaeus:  “In men the organ of generation—­becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust—­seeks to gain absolute sway; and the same is the case with the so-called womb, or uterus, of women; the animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and, when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and, wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration,[253] drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease.”