Freud and hysteria - a new interpretation

 Hysteria is a word that is mostly used to describe extreme emotional outbursts, but is also has a special meaning in psychiatry. (See here)

A mental disorder characterized by emotional outbursts, susceptibility to autosuggestion, and, often, symptoms such as paralysis that mimic the effects of physical disorders.

In the early days of his practice as a doctor, Sigmund Freud became convinced that  patients who were displaying strange psychological conditions, such as strange pains or paralysis, were suffering from some kind of trauma, so that had the physical symptoms had psychological causes.
This is from a book about Freud

A large proportion of the patients whom Freud treated during his early years in private practice had initially sought medical advice because they were suffering from physical symptoms; they had enlisted the help of a physician for no other reason than that they believed themselves to be ill. Among their symptoms were headaches, muscular pain, neuralgia, gastric pain, tics, vomiting, clonic spasms, petit mal, epileptoid convulsions, and a host of other physical reactions. [1] It was Freud who, by either making or confirming a diagnosis of hysteria, came to the conclusion that the origin of these symptoms was to be found in his patients’ emotional lives – and specifically in the traumatic events which had supposedly given rise to their illnesses.

He created an idea, that hysteria was sexual in origin  and was related to  child or infant seduction. That the physical symptoms were a defence mechanism against the repressed memory of the seduction.

This seduction theory got him into trouble, as the film "Freud" makes very clear in this clip:




Abuse recovery is still based in this idea.

Present research on the long term effects of child sexual abuse confirms Freud's seduction theory as presented in The Etiology of Hysteria. The theory accurately describes the effects of infantile seduction and the role of repression as a defense mechanism. This study compares the findings presented in Freud's theory to current research on child sexual abuse. Therapists can provide appropriate treatment to adult survivors of child sexual abuse if they recognize the symptoms and understand the role of defense mechanisms.

But the loss of a twin can also produce physical symptoms, such as a feeling of coldness and deadness in the place, or along the side where the twin once was. Birth trauma damage is held in the body as a muscular spasm that can cause muscular pain and skeletal deformity.  Only when the original reason for this muscular spasm is known and fully understood, can healing begin.

I know this from my own experience.  I went to a chiropractor aged 55 with pains in my body and a  30 year limp.  There, in the muscular spasms that lay down my right side, I  found both my birth trauma and my lost twin.   It was the start of this whole Womb Twin project.

(Here is my story to download and read, if you wish to learn more.)

A new view of Freudian theory

When I trained as a social worker at Leicester University in 1969 I discovered for the first time the theories of Sigmund Freud.  He was an Austrian neurologist, and founded all kinds of theories about human psychology.  His work was utterly brilliant, bearing in mind the fact that it was taking place around the turn of the twentieth century. He died in 1926, and therefore knew nothing of the explosion in neuroscience that has taken place in the last hundred years.

Freud's work was based initially on his in depth study of just a few cases - no more than six- and a great deal of long hard thinking about what was going on in the mind of his patients.  Then he began to examine his own psychology. Unfortunately for his followers however, many of these ideas proved to be just to difficult to accept, so they broke away and formed their own theories. But Freudian theory remains as the foundation of psychological thinking, even today. 

But what if we introduced the womb twin survivor hypothesis  and prenatal psychology into the picture?    Would Freud have thought differently if he knew as we now do, that all pre-birth experiences remain in the mind as a template for all future life choices? What if he knew that he was living out his own Dream of the Womb as he sat for years, constantly smoking and giving himself terminal cancer, while thinking about what was going on in the minds of his patients?

A traumatic birth

A multiple pregnancy is associated with problems at birth. It is interesting how many people who complete the research questionnaire say their birth was traumatic, and if indeed the pregnancy that produced them was in fact a multiple pregnancy, one would expect that.

So I have decided to find out a bit more with a wufoo form.

Its here:
http://althea.wufoo.com/forms/birth-trauma/

If you want to tell me more about your birth, do complete it for me. It will help.I will be using the results in the book, " Wombtwin survivors: the lost twin in the Dream of the Womb", to be published next year.