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There has not been a scientifically definitive physiology of female anatomy till rather lately but strange images from its ambiguous historical past nevertheless haunt the widespread imagination and impact on women’s self image.

An anatomical “reality” that persisted in Western healthcare lore since ancient Greece was that the female uterus becomes displeased and displaced, and wanders with the body, negatively influencing the brain (I kid you not!). “Hysteria” is derived from the Greek word for uterus.

In a fit of fury the female uterus went travelling with the body, producing all manner of emotional disturbances - hence hysteria, hysterical - and hysterectomy.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

In menopause, specifically, “the belief was how the failure to menstruate brought on the uterus to travel around the body, at some point negatively influencing the brain”.(Louis Banner In Full Flower)

The descriptions of hysterical patients painted a terrible caricature from the feminine. Old remedies included bed rest, binding, beating, purging, bloodletting, and, in worse cases, hysterectomy and/or clitoridectomy.

The doctor massaged the genitals right until there was a healing convulsion and moist spasms (an orgasm by any other name), which relieved the patient for a whilst - till the next appointment. Hysteria was considered chronic and incurable, requiring ongoing treatment.

Freud developed and taught psychoanalysis, that is a kind of psychotherapy. Contrary to favorite belief, Freud was not the father of psychiatry. Sigmund Freud suffered from Panic Problem at the time when he wrote his well-known papers on anxiety neurosis. He had quite a few healthcare evaluations for them. Nothing of the considerable health care nature may very well be found wrong with him. He was told that his signs had been ‘nervous’ in origin. Freud was not satisfied with what he was told. In his quest to get a fuller explanation, he searched for just a psychological cause. This type has preoccupied every person studying anxiety for most in the century.

Electric vibrators had been created inside the mid 19th century to support the overworked doctors and ease the hysterical women. They were being even marketed to gals at residence for self-treatment, and were being advertised in customer catalogues and magazines. (There ended up vibrators within the house previous to vacuum cleaners.) However, by 1930 vibrators had gone underground, and have been not openly advertised again until they re-emerged as sex toys inside the 1960s. (This is according to Duana R Anderson in The wondering Uterus & A Brief History from the Vibrator)

(Psyche turned into soma.) He explored his patients’ individual story for clues, practised the talking cure (hugely innovative for its time), and formulated psychoanalysis.

In my view, these legions of hysterical ladies were being literally quivering with centuries of misogynist repressions, bursting to break out with the traumatized collective psyche; an epidemic erupting out from the universal unconscious where the goddess of myth lay buried.

In the very good doctor’s personal words, “The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess in the regular quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with from the kind of shame, disgust and morality), and what appears like an instinctive aversion on their component to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

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