Professional paper

FUNCTIONAL DISORDERS, RESPECTIVELY HYSTERIA From nosology to psychotherapy

Stanislav Matačić ; MD, Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist, IPA Psychoanalyst, Training and supervising analyst of the Croatian Psychoanalytical Society. Private practice, Zagreb, Dugi dol 5
Sanja Borovečki-Jakovljev ; MD, Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist, IPA Psychoanalyst, Training and supervising analyst of the Croatian Psychoanalytical Society, Private practice, Zagreb, Stiplošekova 22

Abstract

Keyword for understanding so-called functional disorders i.e. psychogenic disorders or neurosis is – hysteria. This ancient medical term has its roots back in Old Egypt and stays as the diagnosis in medical nosology since 17th Century, but in contemporary psychiatric nosology it has been renamed and excluded since 1952. and the first DSM and especially after revolutionary DSM-III (1980) and turned
into different diagnostical categories that we consider as „breaking up of hysteria“ as the kind of unifying frame for understanding neurotic suffering. As psychoanalysts and psychodynamic psychiatrists as well, we consider that in this way it has opened the path for the creation of the vast number of behavioural sindroms, so-called disorders without psychogenic etiologies. Psychoanalysis itself has started as a psychotherapy of hysteria and did understand this disease better than
anyone and anything before or after. Psychoanalysis didn’t answer yet to all the questions concerning the „enigma of hysteria“ and new answers we expect from the neuroscientific fields: neurobiology and neuropsychoanalysis. We think also that we as psychoanalysts should keep hysteria „alive“ in medical disciplines that gave up this ancient term too easily. Also that we should stay in constructive dialogue
with hysteria, the protean illness that changes its clinical pictures in every epoch and to continue to treat hysterics whatever diagnosis or ideology they could use as a mask. Although there is a reference to womb (Hystera), Hysteria is not a „female malady“, is evident in both sexes and in many fashionable „genders“ as well. In this paper we will use just the medical history of the disease, psychiatryc nosology and recent psychoanalytical views on hysteria.

Keywords

hysteria; functional disorders; psychoanalysis

Hrčak ID:

187080

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/187080

Publication date:

13.6.2017.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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