Male hysteria - a non-gendered disorder

For several millennia, hysteria, la maladie de la matrice, had been seen as a pathology of femininity.’ But is this really the case?

From ‘melancholia’, the ‘hypochondriac’, ‘nervous’ or ‘splenetic’ men of the 17th and 18th centuries, the ‘neurasthenics’ and ‘decadents’ of the 19th, and in the ‘creative illnesses’ of young intellectuals such as David Hume, John Stuart Mill – or Sigmund Freud. In fact, all these men suffered from hysteria.

The line of reasoning of how hysteria became feminine, stemmed from the notions that an unacceptable femininity was not accepted by the body of masculine medicine, which reliant on the diktats of its day,  could only ‘repress’ and ‘exclude’ by projecting it, hysteria,  misogynistically, onto the ravings of the female. Of course masculinist  medicine (Freud) could not face up to their own hysteria, their own ‘mental and emotional femininity’.

Te majority of doctors in the 18th century didn’t grant any ontological (reality) status to the difference between female hysteria and male ‘hypochondria’, or between ladies’ ‘vapours’ and gentlemen’s ‘spleen’. Not only could men suffer just as much as women from their nerves, it was even a sign of distinction and ‘sensibility’ that in no way compromised their virility.

However come the 19th century and we witness hysteria being overwhelmingly feminised, pathologised, moralised and, above all, sexualised.

A classic case of male hysteria was Freud; ailments that plagued Freud in the mid-1890s were nasal affections, abrupt mood swings and cardiac arrhythmia accompanied by dyspnoea and of course his
predilection to fainting. A male hysteric par excellence.

source: 

Gentlemen’s Spleen

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness by Mark Micale

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/mikkel-borch-jacobsen/gentlemens-spleen