Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture

  • Elaine Showalter
Columbia University Press/Picador: 1997. Pp.231 $24, £16.99

Junk Psychology: Fallacies in Studies of ‘Repression’ and Childhood Trauma

  • Harrison G. Pope,
Social Issues Resources Series: 1997. Pp.125 $12.95

Everyone loves stories or, as Elaine Showalter rather portentiously calls them, “narratives”. In Hystories — which might more appropriately, as she half admits, be entitled Herstories — she examines the tales developed by hysterics in both literature and real life.

She uses the term “hysteria" in the layman's sense to refer broadly to any hyperemotional state accompanied by histrionic and attention-seeking behaviour. One of her rasher suggestions is that the British reaction to “mad-cow disease" was caused by the British fear of madness, a bizarre speculation given that the consumption of beef at one time declined more in Germany than in Britain.

Her review of the portrayal of hysteria in literature is not without interest, although her belief that it began with Flaubert's Madame Bovary and the Victorian romantics is odd. Perhaps she should try rereading Euripides’ Bacchae.

Although she is a professor of English literature, her account of recent epidemics of hysteria in the United States is perhaps more worthwhile: although slight, it pulls together the different outbreaks, but the recent torrent of books on this subject makes it impossible to say anything new.

She deals with the syndromes of recovered memory, multiple personality, satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction, and courageously includes Gulf War and chronic fatigue syndromes as examples of hysteria: not only is it just possible that a pathogenic agent will be found in both illnesses, but the sufferers desperately want the cause to be organic, presumably to avoid the stigma of mental illness.

Like Freud, she concentrates on case histories rather than a scientific approach. She rightly stresses that people develop these syndromes partly as an excuse for and an explanation of their own failings and sometimes to escape punishment. Some have pleaded that they committed murder or rape as a different personality, and at least one person has pleaded in court that he had been forced to commit a crime by aliens.

Indeed, the most interesting aspect of these “hysterias” is their causes, many of which Showalter does not mention. They include: the desire for attention; the comfort of being able to abdicate responsibility for one's failings by ascribing them to an illness; the luxury of receiving therapy (compounded in the case of multiple personality by the fact that in the United States therapy can now be obtained under health insurance thanks to its recognition as a disorder by the American Psychiatric Association); the excitement added to a humdrum life by weird beliefs about one's past; the propagation of hysterics’ stories by the mass media; and the attempts by therapists to push their clients into revealing multiple personalities, non-existent sexual abuse, and even alien abduction in the mistaken belief that such revelation will effect a cure.

Finally, there may be a monetary pay-off for hysteria: although nobody has yet sued an alien abductor, people have obtained compensation from their fathers for abuse and others are busy suing the American military for the Gulf War syndrome. In a wry twist, patients are now prosecuting their therapists for breaking up their lives by instilling fictitious beliefs.

Showalter suggests that one cause of these hysterias is to give vent to repressed desires in concealed form. Women feel frustration for the sexual acts they have not performed and guilt for those they have. There is no suggestion that male hysteria, which is comparatively rare, is caused by sexual problems — although in this age men have plenty of those. She displays an uncritical acceptance of Freudian beliefs and ways of thought, an act of faith now virtually confined to novelists and literary critics, both professions more interested in a good ‘narrative’ than the truth.

The approach of Harrison Pope, a psychiatrist, could hardly be more different. He eschews all case histories on the grounds that they are biased by both the therapist's and the patient's ability to deceive themselves.

In evaluating whether there exist repressed but recoverable memories of traumatic events, Pope points out that in every study where survivors of a traumatic event, such as a collision between ships or the kidnapping of a school bus, have been interviewed several years later, all participants have had excellent recall — no sign of repression there.

He meticulously destroys the findings of a study by L. M. Williams which is the one most cited by believers in repressed memory: she interviewed 129 people who had been evaluated in hospital for signs of sexual abuse. Of these women, 49 claimed to have forgotten the abuse.

Using known facts on the reporting of abuse, Pope is able to show convincingly that their forgetting can readily be accounted for — at the time of the abuse some were under the age when memories can be formed; others had not been sexually abused at all according to the hospital's investigation; and a few did not want to disclose the abuse, a tendency well documented in other studies.

There is no need to invoke repression as the cause of forgetting: indeed there is no evidence for the existence of repression. Pope also demonstrates that the belief that sexual abuse propagates from one generation to the next is equally groundless.

Junk Psychology is a model of clear thinking and clear exposition. It outlines the pitfalls of epidemiology such as confounding causes: post hoc does not mean propter hoc — two correlated events may have a common cause, such as genetic factors.

To clarify his argument he analyses widely held but mistaken popular and medical myths: for example that salt is bad for you, that power lines damage the body, and that schizophrenia is caused by bad upbringing. Pope's careful analysis of possible sources of error should be useful to intending epidemiologists, and regrettably some practising ones, and to other disciplines within the social sciences.

A comparison of the two texts shows that, as is usually the case, the prose style and clarity of the scientist are far superior to those of the professor of English. In this postmodernist world, literary criticism might well fare better if it were taken over by scientists. But God help science if literary critics reciprocated this gesture.