Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
Medical tag
Hysteria
Hysteria, 'nerves', fainting fits, vapours, gendered nervous disorders.
Works
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Experimental Researches in Electricity gathers the numbered papers that Michael Faraday read to the Royal Society and printed in its Philosophical Transactions, in which he discovered electromagnetic induction, showed that all kinds of electricity are one, and found the quantitative laws of electrolysis. Volume 1, first published in London in 1839, collects the first fourteen Series, written between 1831 and 1838, in 1,748 numbered paragraphs, with a preface, an index and plates; the library text is the 1849 second edition reprint.
Charcot's lectures show clinical neurology becoming a public method: observe signs, localize lesions, correlate symptoms with anatomy, and teach by cases. The English volumes gather Salpetriere lectures on spinal cord disease, paralysis, tremor, sclerosis, locomotor ataxia, hysteria, epilepsy, and related nervous disorders.
This volume gathers comic pieces that Jane Austen wrote as a teenager at Steventon rectory, between about 1790 and 1793, and copied into the notebook she called Volume the Second. The title work, 'Love and Freindship', dated 13 June 1790 when she was fourteen, is a novel in fifteen letters parodying the sentimental fiction of the day.
Notes from Underground is a short novel in two parts, presented as the private notes of an unnamed retired civil servant of forty who lives in a shabby room on the edge of St. Petersburg. A footnote signed by the author explains that the writer of the notes is imaginary but represents a type produced by Russian society of the time.
The Poetics is Aristotle's short treatise on the art of poetry, chiefly tragedy and epic, and the oldest surviving work of literary theory in the West. It opens by defining all poetry, together with music and dance, as imitation (mimesis), and by distinguishing the arts according to the medium of imitation (rhythm, language, melody), the objects imitated (people better than us, worse, or like us), and the manner (narration or enactment).
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement. The saint layer is late antique and medieval.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. It opens with the preliminary communication on hysterical symptoms, then presents case histories including Anna O., Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, and Elisabeth von R., followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
The Wise Woman is George MacDonald's fairy-tale parable of two spoiled little girls in an odd country where everyone wants what he has not got. Princess Rosamond, whose name means Rose of the World, has been given everything she cried for, including a silver disc to stand in for the moon, and has grown into a raging, greedy child who beats her pets and has nearly killed her nurse.
Passages
- Carmilla, Chapter IV, Her Habits—A Saunter
Laura reports the deaths of peasant women after dreams of being seized by the throat; her father attributes such fancies to fever; Carmilla suffers a convulsive fit at the funeral hymn.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- Dracula, Ch. 14
Van Helsing invokes Charcot and hypnotism to persuade Seward to open his mind to the inexplicable.
- Dracula, Ch. 23–26
Van Helsing hypnotises Mina at sunrise and sunset to track Dracula through her psychic link.
- Effi Briest, Berlin chapters (c. Ch. 23–24)
Effi feigns illness and Dr Rummschüttel, seeing through it, prescribes accordingly.
- Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1, First Series, paragraphs 6-33
The interwound coils and the welded iron ring (paragraph 27) whose interrupted secondary current later became the basis of medical faradization.
- Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Hysteria material
Charcot treats hysteria as a neurological and clinical problem, not simply a moral failing or fraud.
- Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Seizure and convulsion discussions
The comparison of hysterical attack, epilepsy, and other convulsive states shows nineteenth-century diagnostic sorting.
- Love and Freindship and Other Early Works, Love and Freindship, Letter the 13th
Finding their husbands dying by the overturned phaeton, Sophia faints and Laura runs mad, alternately, for over an hour.
- Love and Freindship and Other Early Works, Love and Freindship, Letter the 14th
Sophia's fatal illness from fainting in the night air and her deathbed warning against swoons.
- Notes from Underground, Part II, Chapters I–II
The young narrator's fevers, delirium and hysterical rages during his campaign against the officer.
- Notes from Underground, Part II, Chapter IX
The narrator collapses on the sofa in sobbing hysterics while Liza comforts him.
- St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania, Hecker, Strasbourg dancing plague
Crowd dancing is routed toward chapels, masses, musicians, and civic management, a setting relevant to mass psychogenic illness and social stress.
- Studies on Hysteria, Preliminary communication
The opening essay links symptoms to memory, affect, trauma, and altered states of consciousness.
- Studies on Hysteria, Anna O. case
Breuer's case history centers on catharsis, speech, dissociation, and the making of a therapeutic legend.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §1
Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter II, the dream of Irma's injection
A patient with hysterical symptoms, a throat examination revealing white patches, colleagues diagnosing infection and blaming an injection given with an unclean syringe; Freud's analysis of his own professional guilt.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VII, sections on regression and wish-fulfilment
The model of the psychic apparatus, regression to perception in hallucinatory dreams, and the relation of dreams to the psychoneuroses, hysterical symptoms and psychosis.
- The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Lectures I-II
Janet defines hysteria through psychological dissociation and lowered integrative capacity.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter VIII: The Relations of Minds to Other Things
Hysterical anaesthesia and blindness, Janet's and Binet's experiments, automatic writing and the secondary or subconscious self.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self
Mutations of the self: insane delusions, alternating personalities, Janet's patient Lucie, the boy Louis V., the fugue of the Rev. Ansel Bourne, and mediumship.
- The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Comparative chapters
Jung compares dementia praecox with hysteria, dreams, and psychoanalytic mechanisms.
- The Subjection of Women, Chapter III
Nervous susceptibility as an objection to women's fitness for business; hysterics and fainting fits disappearing with fashion; the hot-house upbringing of upper-class girls.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, early Bly chapters
The governess's isolation, attraction to the absent employer and first apparition establish an anxious perceptual field.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture I: Religion and Neurology
Critique of medical materialism; acknowledgement that religious leaders often show nervous instability, and the argument that origin does not determine value.
- The Wise Woman (A Double Story), Chapter I
Rosamond's rages, the fit after she loses her silver moon, and the narrator's note that she had nearly killed her nurse and all but hanged herself.
Quotes
“There! That comes of strangling people with hymns!”
“It is certain my disorder was in a great measure hypochondriacal”
Frequently cited
“It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself—We fainted alternately on a sofa.”
Frequently cited
“Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”
“Strasburg was visited by the "Dancing Plague" in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there, as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine”
“Paracelsus divides the St. Vitus's dance into three kinds. First, that which arises from imagination (Vitista, Chorea imaginativa, aestimativa), by which the original Dancing Plague was to be understood”
“Our business here is only with that morbid sympathy by the aid of which the dancing mania of the Middle Ages grew into a real epidemic”
“There are some, who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such phenomena as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the consciousness of their own health”
“I say to her: “If you still have pains, it is really only your own fault”
“I think that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection”
“Hamlet can do everything but take vengeance upon the man who has put his father out of the way, and has taken his father’s place with his mother”
“An hysterical woman abandons part of her consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold it together”
“the almost total disappearance of "hysterics" and fainting fits, since they have gone out of fashion”
“Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic”