Understanding Hysteria: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment
Conversion Hysteria
Important: The conversion symptom focuses on a body part, and the symptomatology has a social function. There are three types of symptoms expressed at the body level:
- Conversion Hysteria: Symptoms are expressed in the body, and that sector is not causal. It aims to say something.
- Psychosomatic: The body responds to the type of somatization, which can be inherited from the family. When the person is unable to develop, the body responds, and the general body area affected is more fragile.
- Hypochondriasis: There is no organ damage in the body, but there is a delusional belief of having an ailment at the body level.
Clinical Hysteria
- Symptoms of Permanent Conversion: Permanent paralysis, impaired sensation (low cognitive ability because it is suffering), sensory disturbances (smell and taste), and muscle contractions.
- Symptoms of Paroxysmal Conversion: Acute, hysteria gives the feeling of simulation, but the person really suffers a demand for love. Shyness is a symptom. It can be confused with epilepsy, and there are changes in consciousness that lead to fainting.
- Other Symptoms: Memory impairment, sexual dysfunction, depressive response due to lack of external recognition and reward. It seems that everything is done to get attention. The number one risk is suicide when depressed.
Character and Hysterical Personality
- Theatricality: Mobilization of hands, facing the terror of not being rewarded by the external world.
- Mythomania: With full awareness to seduce with their speech, provided in order to obtain external recognition and reward.
- Falsification of Existence: Puts color to the facts, is not always the same way, being inconsistent.
- Inconsistency of the Self: To respond to what supposedly is the desire of the other, fits the other.
- Suggestibility
Evolution of the Disease
- Chronic condition is lifelong.
- Relational conflicts: Parents should share their love with the siblings, claiming permanent recognition on the part of parents.
- Neurosis dormant for a long period caused by the lack of gratification, mental level regressions (jealousy with siblings), infantile regression in the way of perceiving reality (everything is tiny).
- Disappearance of symptoms.
- Serious evolution: There is a poverty of bonuses, major depression, chronic depressed mood, suicide attempts, depressive changes, and/or symptoms similar to those of schizophrenia (projection).
Psychology of Hysteria
- Imaginary: Dreams at night and fantasizes during the day (the function is to escape and stay away from a reality perceived as painful). The role of the imaginary is a compromise between desire and reality.
- Triangular Relations: Wishes of love, desire, and death; completion of the Oedipal stage.
- Identifications: Labile and superficial (yet identified) are multiple, partial, and unstable.
- Unsatisfied sexual desire.
- Indifference.
- Symptom of a compromise between desire and reality.
Diagnosis and Treatment
- The differential diagnosis depends on the structure, and any organic basis should be taken into account.
- Other neuroses (anxiety, obsessive, phobic).
- Tranquilizers and antidepressants. Psychotherapy initially lasts three years, depending on demand.
- Referral to ensure that there is no organic basis for the symptoms.