Freud's hysteria and its legacy.

Abstract

Though Freud was himself interested in neurologic disorders, the model of hysteria he developed - of the repression of painful experiences, and their conversion into physical symptoms - made the disorder psychiatric, as the increasingly complex explanations came to rely on the "meaning" of events, which could not easily be understood neurologically. This evolved to become a prototype for psychiatric illness more broadly, a model which, though challenged by the First World War, enjoyed great success, notably in the USA, dominating psychiatric thinking for most of the 20th century. Concerns about the empiric basis for his ideas latterly led to a rapid decline in their importance, however, exemplified by 1980's "etiologically neutral" DSM-III. Hysteria, now renamed conversion disorder, retained its Freudian explanation for another 30 years, but as psychiatry lost its faith in Freud, so psychiatrists stopped seeing the disorder he had made theirs, and returned it once more to neurology.