The author defines hysteria in terms of specific observable classes of interpersonal behaviors and examines the impact of these behaviors on the receiver. The hysteric communicates frailty and helplessness, thus structuring the interpersonal environment to ensure attention and inhibit aggression. The development of these roles is shown in histories of female hysterics, who were selectively rein...

All doctors have encountered patients whose symptoms they cannot explain. These individuals frequently provoke despair and disillusionment. Many doctors make a link between inexplicable physical symptoms and assumed psychiatric ill­ ness. An array of adjectives in medicine apply to symptoms without established organic basis – ‘supratentorial’, ‘psychosomatic’, ‘functional’ – and these are somet...

This article provides a neurobiological account of symptoms that have been called 'hysterical', 'psychogenic' or 'medically unexplained', which we will call functional motor and sensory symptoms. We use a neurobiologically informed model of hierarchical Bayesian inference in the brain to explain functional motor and sensory symptoms in terms of perception and action arising from inference based...

The following account of a case, which I may inadvertently be wrong in terming hysteria, presents a few points of interest, and hence the liberty I take in presenting it before the profession. " 0," a young African mess-room hoy, of the Baganda tribe, agecl about 21 years, intelligent, well nourished, well developed, and healthy, though of a marked nervous tendency, was on the morning of the 28...

on the 2nd day and he fell on all five occasions. No sensory or motor disturbances; other systems and temperature normal. Skiagram of the head did not show anything abnormal. History.?No history or manifestations of syphilis. A somnambulist from the age of 7. 1'rom the age of 9 has been stealing food from other houses when he could. Reeling from the age of 11. During the last three months has b...