Freud’s Hysteria Theory Backed by Patients’ Brain Scans

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-17/freud-s-hysteria-theory-backed-by-patients-brain-scans.html


Sigmund Freud may have been right about repressed memories causing hysteria.

Scientists at King’s College London and the University of Melbourne have found, using brain scans, that psychological stress may be to blame for unexplained physical symptoms, including paralysis and seizures.

Patients showed differences in brain activity when they recalled traumatic memories compared with healthy volunteers in a study published in last month’s edition of JAMA Psychiatry. Besides supporting Freud’s theory and helping to explain one of the most common complaints seen by neurologists, the research may lead to new treatment approaches for patients whose symptoms were often written off by doctors in the past.

“This is the first paper that I’m aware of that really shows that previous traumatic events can definitely trigger this kind of motor response,” said John Speed, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It’s very exciting.”

[cbayer]

1. While not at all surprising, it is nice to see some actual data

being accumulated on this.

Hysteria is a fascinating mixture of brain/mind interaction.

[xchrom]

2. agreed. nt

[bemildred]

3. I agree with Cbayer. For a long time I've considered mind-body duality to be bullshit.

We are one and the same, and it is no mystery when one affects the other.

[xchrom]

4. the brain comes with the body and vice versa.

i've been uncertain about trauma and physical reactions -- but am becoming very much less so these days.

[bemildred]

5. You get to be my age, you have no doubts about who is the boss.

There are, so to speak, purely mental things, but they always occur in the context of some physical process, there are not mental processes without some physical process that "implements" them. And it appears to me (conjecturally, but I can drive you nuts with arguments) that really fancy brains like mammals have pretty much have to be grown, you cannot just lay them out and fire it up like a robot. They have to learn, they are adaptive to particular cases.