(I want to be upfront about the fact that the opinion I am expressing here is probably more Freudian than the common consensus. Keep that in mind as you read on.)
I decided recently to read the original Studies in Hysteria, which introduced the concept of “the talking cure” as a means of treating the titular ailment. I believe that whereas in Freud’s time one might understand that psychosis’ female-dominance as an outcome of the male-dominated nature of his society, one might look to a society such as ours as precisely the place in which the universality of the human psyche would be made manifest in the form of the male equivalent.
I don’t believe it is precisely the same, but I am going to propose the idea in this post that the antisocial behavior which is in some circles an epidemic among young men might be thought of as resulting from interplay between the same fundamental principles which underly “hysteria”.
On a basic level, an individual is either stably adjusted to their social setting, or they are in some way maladjusted. Dabrowski viewed these maladjustments as a sign of potential, and I agree. I think that we humans possess the ability to uncover new ideas which our societies were previously unaware-of, and that one mechanism for doing this is to partially or entirely disconnect from one’s society, “retrieve the truth from the fabric of the unknown”, and then bring it back to society to share with others. Moreover I do believe that the glue which holds a society together is some form of empathy network, and to my “Freudian” identification that there is a connection between biological and emotional intimacy.
I mention this because I believe that this explains the etiology of hysteria. I think that in the time in which Breuer and Freud started their work it was not uncommon for women to respond to treatment which they would not be subjected to in their ideal society by fleeing from society led by their wombs, as if fleeing an abusive relationship for the benefit of a mistreated child. I think that what they succeeded in achieving was to create a society in which these behaviors were reduced to the point that “hysteria” is far less widespread than it was among women when they first started.
I don’t think that the penis and the womb are strictly interchangeable, but I imagine that a similar instinct to escape from a bad situation in an eccentric way might also be thought of as led by a male’s reproductive machinery. If one imagines the experience of being a non-mating male in a polygynous society, an extremely common experience among non-human primates, the instinct to leave this situation in favor of one in which reproduction were possible might have driven males that had the potential to start their own societies to do just that.
I view hysteria as the female equivalent of wanting to run off and start a new society. The feedback loop which makes the solution pioneered by Breuer and Freud work is not only that someone’s faith in society is restored to the point that they no longer find themselves uncontrollably fleeing from it as an outcome of a pleasant conversation, but also that their underlying complaints are understood and acted upon by those listening to them.
The complexity of what I’m calling “male hysteria” is that strictly speaking you might imagine that an early polygynous human society would have developed a mechanism for ensuring the cooperation of males whose reproductive drives were not being satisfied at all. Which is to say that the system of control which I am suggesting to be falling apart is quite a bit older than the concept of monogamy.