Books, Arts & Manners: Hysteria, His and Hers

Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, by Elaine Showalter (Columbia, 244 pp., $24.95)

SOMETIMES you get what you ask for. Back in 1985 Elaine Showalter, a Princeton English professor specializing in the social history of mental health, concluded her critique of the traditional psychotherapy profession by proclaiming: “The best hope for the future is the feminist therapy movement.” By 1997, the mental-health industry has become thoroughly feminized, but Professor Showalter has had second thoughts: “The therapist’s role is more and more to affirm, support, and endorse the patient’s narrative, . . . and not to challenge the truth or historical reality of the patient’s assertions.” This credulous atmosphere, she believes, has helped unleash “hysterical epidemics,” such as the disgraceful witchhunts for satanic cults running day-care centers. Mrs. Showalter cites five other “hysterical” outbreaks: the booms in recovered memory of incestuous abuse, multiple-personality disorders, alien abductions, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Gulf War Syndrome. For an academic treatise with a first printing of only 7,500 copies, Hystories has already generated quite a backlash. In hounding the author, Chronic Fatigue sufferers have proved especially energetic.

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Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, by Elaine Showalter (Columbia, 244 pp., $24.95)

SOMETIMES you get what you ask for. Back in 1985 Elaine Showalter, a Princeton English professor specializing in the social history of mental health, concluded her critique of the traditional psychotherapy profession by proclaiming: “The best hope for the future is the feminist therapy movement.” By 1997, the mental-health industry has become thoroughly feminized, but Professor Showalter has had second thoughts: “The therapist’s role is more and more to affirm, support, and endorse the patient’s narrative, . . . and not to challenge the truth or historical reality of the patient’s assertions.” This credulous atmosphere, she believes, has helped unleash “hysterical epidemics,” such as the disgraceful witchhunts for satanic cults running day-care centers. Mrs. Showalter cites five other “hysterical” outbreaks: the booms in recovered memory of incestuous abuse, multiple-personality disorders, alien abductions, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Gulf War Syndrome. For an academic treatise with a first printing of only 7,500 copies, Hystories has already generated quite a backlash. In hounding the author, Chronic Fatigue sufferers have proved especially energetic.