The symptoms described by Freud were : episodic episodes of "psychosomatic" dyspnea, cough, afonia (without a medical explanation and then " conversion" symptoms ) but also : depression, " hysterical "
social withdrawal, and "taedium vitae" ( i.e. for the modern " emptiness" ? )
Above a brief description given by Freud at the beginning of his famous book. But there is also a hystory of a suicide attempt, some manipulatory traits and, last but not least, some traumatic sexual experiences.
Well, probably today someone would employ the DSM IV diagnostic definiton of " hystrionic personality disorder" . But my purpose would be debating in a practical way a question proposed yet here, on Researchgate : where are the hysteria cases of Freud gone today ?
There are different definitions of hysteria today. The term does not stem from Freud but from Hippocrates or actually from ancient Egypt. But, during Freud's time the term was most frequently used. In ancient Egypt, the womb was thought able of affecting much of the body, but "there is no warrant for the fanciful view that the ancient Egyptians believed that a variety of bodily complaints were due to an animate, wandering womb". Prolapse was also known. The theory of a wandering uterus was developed in Ancient Greece, being mentioned in many sections of the Hippocratic treatise "Diseases of Women https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria
Merriam-Webster: Definition of hysteria
1 : a psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychogenic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions
2 : behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess
- political hysteria
- The plague had caused mass hysteria in the village.
hysterichɪˈstɛrɪk/nounplural noun: hysterics
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=1JmTW-zqC_DOrgSazoOwDg&q=hysteria+definition&oq=hysteria+&gs_l=psy-ab.
- uncontrollable laughter.noun: hysteric"they began to giggle and fled upstairs in hysterics"synonyms: fits of laughter, gales of laughter, peals of laughter, uncontrollable laughter, convulsions, fits, guffawing, howling; More informal stitches, hooting; rare cachinnation "this started them both giggling and they fled upstairs in hysterics"
adjective: hysteric
The womb was thought to walk around in the body. Cf my attached paper:
today you could speak about panic disorder and hypervigilans and other anxiety disorders.
Just an young girl, longing for real love, as most people do. (And if not, tant pis.)
Maybe, with a good psychotherapist and or with some luck, Dora could become a young girl, longing for real love, as most people do. Actually, for Freud a good psychoanalitic treatment could give to the patient just the " common unhappyness". Unfortunately when a young try to suicide, like Dora did, something have to be done by us, in order to avoid consequences over all the life of the young person.
Lack of the experience of meaning in life in a more and more secular world leads to noötic frustration according to Viktor E. Frankl and the feeling that my life is of no worth (then death is also not dangerous when both God, devil, hell and heaven are deleted) and we can as well abstain from living this life):
Does "Dora case" could receive a diagnosis of "Borderline personality disorder" by some modern clinician, instead that of "petite hysterie" of Freud?
Well, that's probable. The criteria provided by the DSM at the time of diagnosis are sustained in an epistemological perspective (the phenomenology) that makes the observable prevail over the structural. The consequence of this is to think of the symptoms as a manifestation that shows the existence of a disease and not as the "knot" in which the elements that make up the subjective structure are linked.
Now, in the context of a more extensive discussion, this mode of operation (that of diagnosis based on the DSM) does not find in the contemporary subject the manifestations described by Freud, basically because that subject has changed. We must remember that neuroses are not only "individual" but historical and cultural. That is, they depend not only on subjective sexual conflicts but on the social conditions surrounding that person. If the Circumstances of the environment change, so will the ways of expressing each neurosis.
No - in that the history of Borderline/Borderland (WA White 1912) shows it to be a " diagnostic waste bucket" for persons unaware of E Minkowski's work on structure (1924). Conversion points to hysteria - no more but no less.
David F Allen