Freud Concept Of Hysteria Essay

The concept of hysteria was described in many ways by Freud in his book, one of which being that people who were hysterical, or showed symptoms of hysteria, had gone through psychological trauma in their lives, and they often relive it in their dreams (Freud, p. 26). Freud explains how hysteria can turn into general anxiety which is the repetition of old traumatic experiences. He says that the person’s reaction of this situation can become so bad that their moods becoming literally paralyzing (Freud, p. 73). It is reported that symptoms of classical hysteria are paralysis of the limbs, disturbances of sight and speech, nausea, and anesthesias (S. Lopater, personal communication, November, 2014). With that little information on the symptoms

288). Luckily, Freud gave many examples of how dreams were about our deepest desire, wishes, and about the things in our subconscious and discusses the importance of analyzing our dreams because it could contain important information about what we can’t access in consciousness (Freud, p. 9). In Freud’s revision of dream theory, he discusses a child of the night which is supposed to act as the thought that connects the conscious mind to the unconscious mind during someones dreams, or in other words, this is the window through which we can see the dynamics of our subconscious (Freud, p. 17). In his dream theory, Freud discusses many symbols that represent our wishes and he actually describes how we came to figure out some symbols. Some symbols come from an experiment done on hypnotized women who were instructed to dream of sex, particularly with a female, and then when the women would wake up they would describe their dreams and then the scientists would find the ‘symbol’ of the dream. The symbol of that dream was a sticker that had a “Ladies Only” written on it and another symbol for sex was discovered and that is the staircase (Freud, p.