There has been no scientifically definitive physiology of the female anatomy until very recently, but strange images from its ambiguous history still haunt the common imagination and impact women’s self-image. None is stranger than the female womb.
An anatomical “reality” that has persisted in Western medical tradition since ancient Greece was that the female uterus becomes upset and shifts, wandering around the body, negatively influencing the brain (I kid you not!). “Hysteria” is derived from the Greek word for womb.
In a fit of fury, the female uterus went through the body, causing all kinds of emotional disturbances -hence hysteria, hysteria- and hysterectomy.
The mental condition of hysteria afflicted legions of women of all ages throughout the patriarchal centuries, and was considered the most common malady after fever. In menopause, specifically, “the belief was that the lack of menstruation caused the uterus to travel throughout the body, ultimately negatively influencing the brain.” (Louis Banner In Full Flower)
Descriptions of hysterical patients painted a terrible caricature of the feminine. Old treatments included bed rest, bandages, beatings, purging, bloodletting and, in the worst cases, hysterectomy and/or clitoridectomy.
Kindness evolved in the 19th century, when hysteria became truly epidemic, especially in the white middle classes. The doctor massaged the genitals until there was a healing convulsion and wet spasms (an orgasm by any other name), which relieved the patient for a while, until the next appointment. Hysteria was considered chronic and incurable and required ongoing treatment.
Electric vibrators were developed in the mid-19th century to help overworked doctors and relieve hysterical women. They were even marketed to women at home for self-treatment and advertised in consumer catalogs and magazines. (There were vibrators in the house before vacuum cleaners). However, by 1930 vibrators had gone underground and weren’t openly advertised again until they resurfaced as sex toys in the 1960s. (This is according to Duana R Anderson in The Wondering Uterus & A Brief History of the Vibrator)
Psychology took over the treatment of hysteria, and Freud practically developed his transcendental theories based on his work with hysterical (and frigid) women. And, well, we should be thankful for that.
He explained hysteria as the physical and psychological expression of internal psychic conflicts about sexuality. (Psyche became soma). He explored the personal history of his patients in search of clues, practiced verbal healing (very innovative for his time) and developed psychoanalysis.
In my opinion, these legions of hysterical women were literally shaking with centuries of misogynist repression, bursting their way out of the collective traumatized psyche; an epidemic that sprouted from the universal unconscious where the goddess of myth lay buried.
In the words of the good doctor himself, “The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression greater than the normal amount, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already encountered in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on his part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.
“This feature … is not infrequently filtered by the existence of a second constitutional character present in hysteria, namely, the predominant development of the sexual instinct. Psychoanalysis … reveals the pair of opposites by which it is characterized : exaggerated sexual desire and excessive aversion to sexuality”.
Modern psychology succeeded in displacing hysteria from the realm of superstition. It could be said that it cured mass hysteria; in 1952, it was officially declared a non-disease.
Freud introduced the concept of libido, the psychic energy expressed through sexuality that lies at the root of every living individual and drives our desires and drives. It can be repressed, expressed, controlled or transmuted. But it exists – a priori!
Psychology helped make conscious the compulsion of the instincts hidden in the unconscious psyche. Basically, ordinary people could now understand their behaviors and symptoms as expressions of an underlying psychic/psychological conflict. Jung introduced the idea of the collective unconscious, which illuminates the universality of dream images and the content of the personal unconscious.
The subjugated sexuality of the hysteric was now the very stuff of the modern age, waiting for the 1960s to burst onto the world stage of post-war baby boomers. The sexual liberation of that period was a huge and abrupt cultural change. Perhaps now we forget how radical and fundamental it was: this sexual break with the past.
However, before we get too pleased with this development, we must ask why, with hysteria safely unplugged, we now have a virtual epidemic of hysterectomies, now the second most common surgery among American women, with C-sections being the first. . One in three women in the United States has had a hysterectomy before the age of 60!
If our hysterical wombs no longer travel through our bodies affecting our brains, why do so many women cut them off?