The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (10 page)

My own observations have led me to concede the usefulness, at least for a while, of the hysterical crisis, so I suggest that Briquet has replaced a spontaneous crisis with one that is clinically induced, similar if not identical, in order to achieve remission of the disease.
⁷²

Nineteenth-century physicians noted that their hysterical and neurasthenic women patients experienced traditional androcentric intercourse mainly as a disappointment. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who thought that “woman … if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire,” nevertheless considered the failure of his female patients to enjoy sex a pathological condition. He notes both that neurasthenic and hysterical women thus fail in their duty to their husbands and also that sexual “anesthesia,” again in the context of penetration, was widespread among supposedly normal women.
⁷³
The French physician Jules Philippe Falret was completely unsympathetic to his female patients on these grounds, asserting that their failure to respond to marital intercourse predisposed them to seek immoral satisfaction elsewhere.
⁷⁴
His colleague Gilles de la Tourette, whose book is illustrated with drawings of nude females in the throes of “hysterical convulsions,” stresses the role of sexual disappointment in the etiology
and symptomatology of hysteria: “The sexual act is for a hysteric nothing but a disappointment: she does not understand it; inspires in her an insurmountable repugnance.” It is unclear from his account whether her lack of pleasure in marital sex is a cause or an effect of the supposed disease.
⁷⁵
Like many others, he notes the characteristic “muqueuse vulvovaginale” of the active hysteric. These fascinations with fluids and with photography seem to have been fairly common in the French neurological community of the late nineteenth century. La Tourette’s colleague at the Salpêtrière, Désiré Magloire Bourneville, had in 1878 published a massive three-volume medical work in which voyeuristic photographs of women stimulating their own nipples or arched in ecstatic paroxysms (with captions like “Lubricité”) illustrate texts such as Bourneville’s observations of “Th.,” an eighteen-year-old diagnosed as hysterochlorotic. The physician notes with interest that she cries out “Oue! Oue!” tosses her head back and forth, and then rocks and flexes her torso very rapidly. “Then, her body curves into an arc and holds this position for several seconds. One then observes some slight movements of the pelvis.” Shortly thereafter, “she raises herself, lies flat again, utters cries of pleasure, laughs, makes several lubricious movements and sinks down onto the vulva and right hip.” The state of vaginal lubrication of these patients is noted at frequent intervals: “La vulve est humide” or “La sécretion vaginale est tres abondante.”
⁷⁶
The vocalizations of these women and their
bavardage
(babble) during “les sensations volupteuses” were duly transcribed as well.

The American gynecologist William Goodell endorsed massage and electrotherapy in hysteria, “to promote the secretions” necessary to relieve the pelvic congestion that was, he said, one of the sequelae of unsatisfactory intercourse, particularly withdrawal. His patients reported a desire to sleep after treatment.
⁷⁷
Another electrotherapist, Franklin Martin, noted that women are often exhausted from childbearing and from “excessive cohabitation,” resulting in neurasthenia, one of the symptoms of which is that “the vagina is often sensitive, bathed with mucus frequently.”
⁷⁸
This preoccupation with lubrication appears also in the works of Friedrich Bilz, a European writer on natural healing, who noted that during hysterical attacks “the sexual parts secrete a slimy fluid.” Bilz was of the opinion that sexual desire was increased, not decreased, in hysterical
women, but that its expression was unwholesome, resulting in “self-abuse,” a tendency toward erotic fantasies or “exciting literature,” and seductive behavior toward males.
⁷⁹
Pelvic massage and thigh affusions (of water) were recommended.

William Dieffenbach, a hydrotherapist of the turn of the century, wrote that the etiology of neurasthenia could include sexual excesses of any kind, whether of chastity or of indulgence, as well as unsatisfying marital sex: “Conjugal incompatibility, sexual excess, masturbation, sexual continence, habits of over-indulgence in coffee, tea, tobacco and alcoholic beverages.”
⁸⁰
In his opinion, vibratory and hydromassage treatments of the abdomen were indicated.

At the same period when Freud was publishing his new theories about the etiology of hysteria, others were struggling with the ancient problem of how the disease paradigm conformed (or did not) to prevailing hypotheses about sexuality. A.F.A. King, an obstetrician, set forth in the
American Journal of Obstetrics
in 1891 a theory that sexual hysteria in women was

not, strictly speaking, a disease at all
, but rather a mere modification in the physiological government of the body, executed by the automatic action of the ruling nervous system,
for some definite, natural purpose
. The ultimate objects that underlie all the functions of the body as they are determined by the government of the nervous system, are mainly two, viz., the
preservation of the life of the individual
, which comes first and is of first importance; and, second, the
preservation or perpetuation of the species
. From what we already know of hysteria, there is much to suggest that the hysteric process would be more nearly allied with the second object than with the first. [Emphasis in the original]

His thesis is that women fall into hysterical “fits” in order to attract the advances of men and to overcome their supposed natural reticence. In support of this, King makes twelve arguments, of which the following are notable:

4. Every woman who exhibits the phenomena of a hysteric attack is always
ashamed of it
afterwards—instinctively ashamed. She will always deny, never acknowledge it; and when accused or told of it will become offended and angry. This is an inherited and fundamental feature of the process.

5. It occurs most often in single women, or rather in those, whether single or married, whose sexual wants remain ungratified.”

He goes on to refer to the controversy over whether marriage is a suitable cure. He then adds, “The hysterical paroxysm is a
temporary and short affair
. The helpless creature, who seems to have lost all her senses and sensations, is in a few minutes up and about, apparently as well as ever.” King postulates a situation in which some “aboriginal Venus” is found in a hysterical state by some “youthful Apollo of the woods,” who then

touches, moves and handles her at his pleasure; she makes no resistance. What will this primitive Apollo do next? He will cure the fit and bring the woman back to consciousness, satisfy her
“emotion,”
and restore her
“volition”
—not by delicate touches that might be “agonizing” to her hyperesthetic skin, but by vigorous massage, passive motion, and succussion that would be painless. The emotional process, on the part of the woman, would end, perhaps, with mingled laughter, tears and
shame
; and when accused afterwards of the part which the ancestrally acquired properties of her nervous system had compelled her to act, as a preliminary to the event, what woman would not deny it and be angry? But the course of Nature having been followed, the natural purpose of the hysteric paroxysm accomplished, there would remain as a result of the treatment—instead of one pining, discontented woman—two happy people and the probable beginning of a third.
⁸¹

In this male fantasy thinly disguised as medical speculation, hysteria is a natural process intended to promote coitus and pregnancy, even in the context of rape if necessary.

THE FREUDIAN REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

Sigmund Freud’s clinical training in hysteria took place mainly at the Salpêtrière under the tutelage of the prevailing “master” of French neurology
and psychiatry, Jean-Martin Charcot. Freud greatly admired and revered Charcot, and many of the teacher’s ideas found their way into Freud’s conceptual frameworks.
⁸²
As I show in
chapter 4
, the Salpêtrière was an internationally famous center of experimentation with physical therapies for hysteria, including the use of vibratory mechanisms. In his later years Freud recounted a conversation between Charcot and P. Paul Brouardel that was to shape Freud’s eventual theories of hysteria:

At one of Charcot’s evening receptions, I happened to be standing near the great teacher at a moment when he appeared to be telling Brouardel a very interesting story about something that had happened during his day’s work. I hardly heard the beginning, but gradually my attention was seized by what he was talking of: a young married couple from a distant country in the East—the woman a severe sufferer, the man either impotent or exceedingly awkward. “Tâchez donc,” I heard Charcot repeating, “je vous assure, vous y arriverez.” Brouardel, who spoke less loudly, must have expressed his astonishment that symptoms like the wife’s could have been produced by such circumstances. For Charcot suddenly broke out with great animation: “Mais, dans ces cas pareils c’est toujours la chose génitale, toujours … toujours … toujours”; and he crossed his arms over his stomach, hugging himself and jumping up and down in his own characteristic lively way. I know that for a moment I was almost paralysed with amazement and said to myself: “Well, but if he knows that, why does he never say so?” But the impression was soon forgotten; brain anatomy and the experimental induction of hysterical paralyses absorbed all my interest.
⁸³

Charcot’s unwillingness to publish this hypothesis, and his admonition of “Tâchez donc” struck Michel Foucault as significant: “One must not speak of these ‘genital causes’: so went the phrase—muttered in a muted voice—which the most famous ears of our time overheard one day in 1886, from the mouth of Charcot.”
⁸⁴
There is certainly no mention of this concept in the
Clinical Lectures
of 1888.
⁸⁵
Charcot’s reticence about the sexual etiology of hysteria apparently fooled his biographer Georges Guillain, who denies that his subject ever considered any such hypothesis.
⁸⁶

In any case, the “most famous ears of our time” retained the information, and Freud was to rework it into a new conception of hysteria
that completely altered the disease paradigm. In his
Autobiographical Study
he very nearly paraphrases Charcot’s observation: “I do not think I am exaggerating when I assert that the great majority of severe neuroses in women have their origin in the marriage bed.”
⁸⁷
The editors of the Standard Edition of Freud’s works note that Freud studied hysteria under Charcot before setting up his practice in Vienna in 1886, where “he relied on such currently recommended methods of treatment as hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, massage and the Weir-Mitchell rest-cure. But when these proved unsatisfactory his thoughts turned elsewhere.”
⁸⁸
One wonders whether it was the physician or the patient or both who found the results of Freud’s experiments with physical therapies “unsatisfactory,” but it hardly seems surprising that the man who, notoriously, did not know what women wanted was less than successful as a gynecological masseur.

Freud’s article “The Aetiology of Hysteria” took the position that hysterics suffered not from sexual deprivation but from “lesions in consciousness” caused by childhood trauma. In the 1896 essay Freud assumes that the experiences of sexual molestation reported as childhood traumas were real; later he was to abandon this position and assert that it was the child’s thoughts and fantasies of sexuality that caused the “lesions.”
⁸⁹
The hysterical disorder supposedly prevented the female patient from enjoying sex in the “normal” way, that is, in the form of heterosexual coitus. Fritz Wittels, in a strikingly misogynist account of Freud’s theories on hysteria, said that “hosts of hysterical women reject sexuality in the form of coitus. Others manifest that hysterically heightened sex life which is, nevertheless, mere show and self-deception.”
⁹⁰
According to Havelock Ellis, Freud equated hysterical paroxysms with masturbation and thought them “an equivalent of coitus.”
⁹¹
Clearly, the founder of modern psychoanalysis wanted to retain some of the sexual nuances of hysteria, including its traditional (but not exclusive) association with women, while at the same time propounding a new hypothesis about its origin. For Freud, as for his mentor Charcot, hysteria in both sexes was associated with contractures and functional paralysis.
⁹²