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Hysteria Quotes

“Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.”

WritingStoriesStorytellingSuspenseStoryWritersDoomedHysteriaHuntedCornell WoolrichNightmarishAlfred Hitchcock
Book:Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
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“The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse doesn’t happen - that it is our illicit desires that drive us crazy. A century ago, Freud recoiled from his own theory of the sexual seduction of children and projected the problem back into the patient. He claimed in his Aetiology of Hysteria that clients, typically women, were describing their fantasies, not facts, not ‘real events’. P3”

RealFactsFantasyCrazyEventsHealthPatientChild AbuseSexual AbuseRapeProjectionHysteriaFreudPedophileAsylumNational Health ServiceDiscredited
Book:Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony
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“The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases – was transformed, through hypnosis, into an artificial hysteric who perfectly simulated the simulations of hysteria. The medical photograph becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a representation so far removed from the original that all duplicitous traits, were easily erased, leaving the deranged and chaotic nature of the original far behind. The photograph succeeded in turning the hysteric into a wholly artificial being, literally a flat, framed, unmoving image.”

WomenPhotographHysteriaImageHysterics
Book:The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
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“It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma. But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently. p9-10”

LiesMental HealthSexismSexual AbusePsychiatryChild Sexual AbuseNeurosisHysteriaFathersSexistIncestNeuronsSociety DenialFreudFamous PeopleCover UpChildhood Sexual AbuseSigmund FreudFather DaughterHysterical DissociationHistory Of PsychologySeduction TheoryAeitologyFamous PsychiatristsHistory Of HysteriaHistory Of IncestHistory Of PsychiatryStudies On HysteriaThe Aetiology Of Hysteria
Book:Father-Daughter Incest
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“There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations. McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.”

LiesCommunismHysteriaConspiraciesAnti CommunismCommunistsJoseph Mccarthy
Book:Fascism: A Warning
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“It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.”

LoveFaithKnowledgePsychologyRespectHatredCrowdsDominationFanaticismHysteriaAversionHitlerNazisHypnosisCrowd ControlMass Suggestion
Book:Mein Kampf
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“[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.”

FearDisasterPanicParanoiaHysteriaOverreaction
Author:Adam Gopnik
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“{On the death of Hale's esteemed friend and fellow scientist, Luther Burbank. Burbank was much beloved by the population unil in an interview he revealed that he was an atheist. After this, the public turned on him and sent him thousands of letters with death threats. This upset the kind-hearted Burbank, who tried to amiably reply to each letter, so much that it ultimately led to his death} . . . he was misled into believing that logic, kindliness, and reason could convince and help the bigoted. He fell sick. The sickness was fated to be his last. What killed Luther Burbank, at just that time and in just that abrupt and tragic fashion, was his baffled, yearning, desperate effort to make people understand. His desire to help them, to clarify their minds, and to induce them to substitute fact for hysteria drove him beyond his strength. He grew suddenly old attempting to make reasonable a people which had been unreasonable through twenty stiff-necked generations. . . He died, not a martyr to truth, but a victim of the fatuity of blasting dogged falsehood.”

ReasonDeathDesireUnderstandingFriendshipLogicTragedyVictimDesperateTragicHelpFalsehoodMartyrHysteriaKindlinessBigotedLuther BurbankBurbank
Author:Wilbur Hale
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“When the hysteria subsides, this video is destined to be another relic that we will never truly understand. A new tragedy presents itself before we can make sense of the last. Why does this keep happening, and who keeps doing this to us? I wish I could strangle their collective necks and be done with it, so we could hail our utopia in peace. Maybe some advanced being will sift through this junk when we’re gone, and wonder how siblings could be so cruel to each other.”

Human NatureTragedyCrueltyUtopiaMurder MysteryHysteriaSnuffTragedy QuotesSibling RelationshipHuman Conflict
Book:Sabrina
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“Talkatives complain, cry, shout, brag, and are more hysterical about their lives than something else; don’t be a part of that tragedy! Perhaps it's been a while now that you have been complaining, crying and shouting about your "labour pains". It's time to show us your baby!”

TalkingCryBabyTragedyFood For ThoughtIsraelmore AyivorLabourDeliveryTalkHysteriaBragHystericalTalkativeComplainShoutDeliverGive BirthLabour PainsTalkativesTalkertives
Book:The Great Hand Book of Quotes
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“It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions.”

ObsessionSympathyInfatuationHysteriaOlivia Sudjic
Book:Sympathy
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“I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ' bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so:...”

FeminismIndependenceHysteria
Book:The Yellow Wall-paper
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“We are always distant in some way, in some particular, from our sorrow. Only hysteria can create total sorrow, but even this, once it is articulated, is no longer so bad as it was before. For the same reason, absolute happiness is impossible and those who speak of it must be regarded as hypocrites. In the wretchedness of his New Delhi room, weeping hot tears (no doubt more for the personal offence he had suffered than for the lost object), S . still finds the strength to photograph his telephone. Since it is the main virtue of the sexual act to raise the body to that exceptional state which is nudity, it is superfluous if that nudity has now become something obvious. That is why love is only beautiful with a shy body, a sex which makes a play of its shyness. That is why it is only really beautiful the first time. A negative judgement gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”

SexJealousyJudgementVirginityHysteria
Book:Cool memories
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“In this hysterical phase, it was, so to speak, the femininity of man which projected itself on to woman and shaped her as an ideal figure in his image. In Romantic love, the aim was not now to conquer the woman, to seduce her, but to create her from the inside, to invent her, in some cases as achieved Utopian vision, as idealized woman , in others as femme fatale, as star - another hysterical, supernatural metaphor. The Romantic Eros can be credited with having invented this ideal of harmony, of loving fusion, this ideal of an almost incestuous form of twin beings — the woman as projective resurrection of the same, who assumes her supernatural form only as ideal of the same, an artefact doomed henceforth to l'amour or, in other words, to a pathos of the ideal resemblance of beings and sexes - a pathetic confusion which substitutes for the dual otherness of seduction. The whole mechanics of the erotic changes meaning, for the erotic attraction which previously arose out of otherness, out of the strangeness of the Other, now finds its stimulus in sameness - in similarity and resemblance. Auto-eroticism, incest? No . Rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same eyeing up the other, investing itself in the other, alienating itself in the other - but the other is only ever the ephemeral form of a difference which brings me closer to me. This indeed is why, with Romantic love and all its current spin-offs, sexuality becomes connected with death: it is because it becomes connected with incest and its destiny - even in banalized form (for we are no longer speaking of mythic, tragic incest here; with modern eroticism we are dealing with a secondary incestuous form - of the protection of the same in the image of the other - which amounts to a confusion and corruption of all images). We have here then, in the end, the invention of a femininity which renders woman superfluous. The invention of a difference which is merely a roundabout copulation with its double. And which, at bottom, renders any encounter with otherness impossible (it would be interesting to know whether there was not any hysterical quid pro quo from the feminine in the construction of a virile, phallic mythology; feminism being one such example of the hystericization of the masculine in woman, of the hysterical projection of her masculinity in the exact image of the hysterical projection by man of his femininity into a mythical image of woman).”

FeminismRomanticismHysteriaSameness
Book:Screened Out
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“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them." In the midst of two or three hundred, the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of every individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of an excited crowd (and every crowd is automatically self-excited) that, where two or three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not merely of deity, but even of common humanity.”

HumorPsychologySociologyHysteriaIntroversion
Book:The Devils of Loudun
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“This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).”

LawUnderstandingJusticeMediaCrimeTrustHorrorAuthorityEvidenceVictimSocial JusticeBlameMental HealthInjusticeMemoryTraumaKarmaDebateInnocenceDenialToxicChild AbuseInvestigationFairnessBeliefsCultTestimonyMisunderstandingSexual AbuseScornDefenceDisbeliefTherapistsHysteriaWorld ViewLegalRitual AbuseAttackSociety DenialProsecutionSexual ViolenceSatanic Ritual AbuseCover UpPedophileVictim BlamingChild ProtectionAccusationsRecovered MemoriesTraumaticOrganized AbusePaedophilesOrganised AbuseCoverupMoral PanicCult AbuseMillerSocial WorkersPedophile RingsConfabulationChild SexEpsteinJust WorldRitualised AbuseDiscreditingSense Of SafetyMiscarriages Of JusticeGaltonMinimisationSachsSafe WorldSelf Efficiacy
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
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“Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.”

LawUnderstandingJusticeFantasyMediaCrimeTrustHorrorAuthorityEvidenceVictimSocial JusticeBlameMental HealthInjusticeMemoryTraumaKarmaDebateInnocenceDenialToxicChild AbuseInvestigationFairnessBeliefsCultLieTestimonyMisunderstandingSexual AbuseScornDefenceDisbeliefTherapistsHysteriaAmnesiaWorld ViewLegalRitual AbuseAttackSociety DenialProsecutionSexual ViolenceSatanic Ritual AbuseCover UpPedophileVictim BlamingChild ProtectionAccusationsRecovered MemoriesTraumaticOrganized AbusePaedophilesOrganised AbuseCoverupMoral PanicCult AbuseMillerRossSocial WorkersPedophile RingsConfabulationChild SexEpsteinJust WorldRitualised AbuseDiscreditingSense Of SafetyMiscarriages Of JusticeEye WitnessGaltonMinimisationSachsSafe WorldSelf EfficiacyChuMemory Error
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
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“Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.”

LawJusticeMediaCrimeHorrorAuthorityEvidenceBlameMemoryDebateInnocenceDenialChild AbuseInvestigationCultTestimonySexual AbuseDisbeliefTherapistsHysteriaLegalRitual AbuseAttackSociety DenialProsecutionSatanic Ritual AbuseCover UpPedophileVictim BlamingChild ProtectionAccusationsRecovered MemoriesOrganized AbusePaedophilesOrganised AbuseCoverupMoral PanicCult AbuseSocial WorkersPedophile RingsConfabulationChild SexRitualised AbuseDiscreditingMiscarriages Of JusticeMulti PerpetratorMulti Victim
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
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“The history of hysteria is a history of the relation between the colonizing father and the colonized devalued other.”

SexismSexual AbuseHysteriaBiasedHystericalDiscreditMental Health StigmaDevalueMental Illness StigmaMental Health BiasMelodramaticStigmatizedDehumanizeColonizedDevaluedPerjorative
Book:Sexual Abuse Recalled: Treating Trauma in the Era of the Recovered Memory Debate
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“Disclosures of childhood sexual abuse have frequently been discredited through the diagnosis of hysteria. In this view, women/female children were seen either as culpable seducers who were not really damaged by the sex abuse or as dramatic fantasizers projecting their own incestuous wishes onto the father. I will argue that this view pervades the false-memory movement and can be found, for example, in Gardner's work (1992).”

FantasySexismSexual AbuseChild Sexual AbuseHysteriaBiasedHystericalIncestDiscreditMental Health StigmaFalse MemoriesChildhood Sexual AbuseMental Illness StigmaFalse Memory SyndromeMental Health BiasMelodramaticStigmatizedFantasizingFalse Memory Syndrome MythPerjorative
Book:Sexual Abuse Recalled: Treating Trauma in the Era of the Recovered Memory Debate
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“As Mollie said to Dailey in the 1890s: "I am told that there are five other Mollie Fanchers, who together, make the whole of the one Mollie Fancher, known to the world; who they are and what they are I cannot tell or explain, I can only conjecture." Dailey described five distinct Mollies, each with a different name, each of whom he met (as did Aunt Susan and a family friend, George Sargent). According to Susan Crosby, the first additional personality appeared some three years after the after the nine-year trance, or around 1878. The dominant Mollie, the one who functioned most of the time and was known to everyone as Mollie Fancher, was designated Sunbeam (the names were devised by Sargent, as he met each of the personalities). The four other personalities came out only at night, after eleven, when Mollie would have her usual spasm and trance. The first to appear was always Idol, who shared Sunbeam's memories of childhood and adolescence but had no memory of the horsecar accident. Idol was very jealous of Sunbeam's accomplishments, and would sometimes unravel her embroidery or hide her work. Idol and Sunbeam wrote with different handwriting, and at times penned letters to each other. The next personality Sargent named Rosebud: "It was the sweetest little child's face," he described, "the voice and accent that of a little child." Rosebud said she was seven years old, and had Mollie's memories of early childhood: her first teacher's name, the streets on which she had lived, children's songs. She wrote with a child's handwriting, upper- and lowercase letters mixed. When Dailey questioned Rosebud about her mother, she answered that she was sick and had gone away, and that she did not know when she would be coming back. As to where she lived, she answered "Fulton Street," where the Fanchers had lived before moving to Gates Avenue. Pearl, the fourth personality, was evidently in her late teens. Sargent described her as very spiritual, sweet in expression, cultured and agreeable: "She remembers Professor West [principal of Brooklyn Heights Seminary], and her school days and friends up to about the sixteenth year in the life of Mollie Fancher. She pronounces her words with an accent peculiar to young ladies of about 1865." Ruby, the last Mollie, was vivacious, humorous, bright, witty. "She does everything with a dash," said Sargent. "What mystifies me about 'Ruby,' and distinguishes her from the others, is that she does not, in her conversations with me, go much into the life of Mollie Fancher. She has the air of knowing a good deal more than she tells.”

ScienceHistoryPsychologyMedicineDissociative Identity DisorderDissociationHysteriaAmnesiaMultiple Personality DisorderMultiple PersonalitiesSplit PersonalityPersonalitiesMpdConversion DisorderMollie FancherSpasm
Book:The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery
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“When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.”

TraumaMental IllnessBlindnessDissociationNeurosisHysteriaTraumatic ExperiencesMental DisorderTraumatizedDissociativeTrauma SurvivorsTraumatic StressPsychosomaticConversion DisorderHysterical DissociationNeuroticismPol PotNeuorosesPsychogenic
Book:Fredy Neptune
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“The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics..." "The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head..." "One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle — and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse. She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.”

ScienceHistoryPsychologyAbuseMedicineMental HealthMental IllnessPsychologicalDissociative Identity DisorderFrenchEating DisorderHysteriaAmnesiaVictorianMultiple Personality DisorderParalysisTranceMpdConversion DisorderConvulsionsMollie FancherFancherInvoluntary MovementsPierre JanetPsychosomatic IllnessCharcotJean Marie CharcotSpasmsVictorian Medicine
Book:The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery
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“Instead of being experienced consciously (either diffusely or displaced, as in phobias) the impulse causing the anxiety is "converted" into functional symptoms in organs or parts of the body, usually those that are mainly under voluntary control. The symptoms serve to lessen conscious (felt) anxiety and ordinarily are symbolic of the underlying mental conflict. Such reactions usually meet immediate needs of the patient and are, therefore, associated with more or less obvious "secondary gain." They are to be differentiated from psychophysiologic autonomic and visceral disorders. The term "conversion reaction" is synonymous with "conversion hysteria." Dissociative reactions are not included in this diagnosis. In recording such reactions the symptomatic manifestations will be specified as anesthesia (anosmia, blindness, deafness), paralysis (paresis, aphonia, monoplegia, or hemiplegia), dyskinesis (tic, tremor, posturing, catalepsy).”

PsychiatryHysteriaDsmConversion DisorderConversion HysteriaDyskinesisPsychogenic Blindness
Book:DSM I: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Mental Disorders
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“In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organised abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?”

MediaDenialBritainContemptChild AbuseSexual AbuseHypeTherapistsChild Sexual AbuseHysteriaMisinformationMass MediaRitual AbuseNazisSociety DenialEpidemicSatanic Ritual AbuseJournalistsAllegationsHyperboleDisinformationSensationalismReportScapegoatingOrganized AbuseRitualistic AbuseMoral PanicSatanic PanicFalse AllegationsSocial WorkersSkepticsConfabulationRitual Abuse MythScepticsJean La FontaineMisrepresentations
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
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“I couldn't read, and it had almost killed me. I hadn't even won properly. I sank to my knees, letting the platform carry me, and covered my face in my shaking hands. Tears burned just before pain seared through my left arm. I would never beat the third task. I would never free Tamlin, or his people. The pain shot through my bones again, and through my increasing hysteria, I heard words inside my head that stopped me short. Don't let her see you cry. Put your hands at your sides and stand up. I couldn't. I couldn't move. Stand. Don't give her the satisfaction of seeing you break. My knees and spine, not entirely of my own will, forced me upright, and when the ground at last stopped moving, I looked at Amarantha with tearless eyes. Good, Rhysand told me. Stare her down. No tears- wait until you're back in your cell. Amarantha's face was drawn and white, her black eyes like onyx as she beheld me. I had won, but I should be dead. I should be squashed, my blood oozing everywhere. Count to ten. Don't look at Tamlin. Just stare at her. I obeyed. It was the only thing that kept me from giving in to the sobs trapped within my chest, thundering to get out. I willed myself to meet Amarantha's gaze. It was cold and vast and full of ancient malice, but I held it. I counted to ten. Good girl. Now walk away. Turn on your heel- good. Walk toward the door. Keep your chin high. Let the crowd part. One step after another. I listened to him, let him keep me tethered to sanity as I was escorted back to my cell by the guards-who still kept their distance. Rhysand's words echoed through my mind, holding me together. But when my cell door closed, he went silent, and I dropped to the floor and wept.”

SupportSarah J MaasFeyreFeyre ArcheronCryingRhysandRhysBreaking DownA Court Of Thorns And RosesHysteria
Book:A Court of Thorns and Roses
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“In order to establish the narrative that innocent men have been the victims of an epidemic of false allegations, “moral panic” advocates have misrepresented child protection interventions and legal cases in significant ways (R. Cheit, 2014; Kitzinger, 2004; Michael Salter, 2016). This has included championing the cause of convicted sex offenders despite overwhelming evidence of guilt (R. Cheit, 2014; R. E. Cheit, 2001; Olio & Cornell, 1998).”

Sexual AbuseChild Sexual AbuseHysteriaRitual AbusePseudoscienceChild ProtectionMoral PanicFalse AllegationsMiscarriages Of Justice
Book:The History of Surrealist Painting
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“Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.”

SexPowerMediaCrimePoliceCrisisJournalismTherapyControlChild AbuseSexual AbusePsychiatryTherapistsHysteriaLegalIncestRitual AbuseSadisticSatanic Ritual AbusePedophileChild ProtectionRapistsSex OffendersOrganized AbusePaedophilesPaedophileRitualistic AbuseMoral PanicSatanic PanicSocial WorkersPedophile NetworkPedophilicSex RingsChild Protection LawSensationalist
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
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“As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Hechler 1988). Adults in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had previously associated organised abuse with the dangerous, external ‘Other’ had been breached, and the incendiary debate that followed is an illustration of the depth of the collective desire to see them restored. Campbell (1988) noted the paradox that, whilst journalists and politicians often demand that the authorities respond more decisively in response to a ‘crisis’ of sexual abuse, the action that is taken is then subsequently construed as a ‘crisis’. There has been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations of organised abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclosures of organised abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of organised abuse, police investigations of allegations of organised abuse and the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organised abuse have all generated their own controversies. These were disagreements that were cloaked in the vocabulary of science and objectivity but nonetheless were played out in sensationalised fashion on primetime television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of testimony of abuse and trauma. in particular, has come under sustained postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation.”

SexPowerMediaCrimePoliceCrisisControlChild AbuseSexual AbusePsychiatryHysteriaLegalIncestRitual AbuseSadisticSatanic Ritual AbusePedophileChild ProtectionRapistsSex OffendersOrganized AbusePaedophilesPaedophileRitualistic AbuseMoral PanicSatanic PanicSocial WorkersPedophile NetworkPedophilicSex RingsChild Protection Law
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
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“Roache's statement after his acquittal was dignified but his supporters were angry. They demanded to know why the case was ever brought, claiming that the actor was a victim of the "hysteria" created by revelations about Jimmy Savile. It's a curious conclusion to draw from a "not guilty" verdict; there are courtrooms where the conviction rate is 100 per cent but they tend to be in totalitarian states. In serious criminal cases in England and Wales, the rate is around 82 per cent, and I would be seriously worried if every defendant were to be found guilty. The Independent, 9 February 2014”

LawJusticeCourtInjusticeConvictionHistoricRapeChild Sexual AbuseHysteriaLegalRape CultureTrialNot GuiltyPedophileWitch HuntPaedophilesHystericsAllegedHistoric Child AbuseHistoric CrimeWitchunts
Author:Joan Smith
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