INTRODUCTION: The Destinies of Hysteria

Hysteria, it is often said, has disappeared this century, its problems solved by Freud, or its investigation discredited by the antics of Charcot. And accompanying its alleged disappearance there has been a declining interest in its history among most historians. Yet hysteria was extraordinarily prominent in nineteenth-century medicine and culture.¹ It posed in direct and personal form the key questions of gender and mind/body relations, and, as Henri Ellenberger has shown in his Discovery of the Unconscious, it formed the springboard for the discovery of the unconscious in psychoanalysis.² In this light, it is odd that only two full-length scholarly