ABSTRACT

Freud’s earliest patients were drawn from Viennese middle-class and upper-class women (and some men as well) suffering from diseases of the nerves. These difficult-to-diagnose diseases, prevalent in both Europe and America at the time, were often connected with, on the one hand, the female sex and, on the other, the stresses of modern urban life. As one British commentator noted of the apparent rise in the level of neurosis, ‘the stir in neurotic problems first began with the womankind’; by the 1890s ‘daily we see neurotics, neurasthenics, hysterics and the like … every large city [is] filled with nerve-specialists and their chambers with patients’ (Showalter 1985: 121). Neurosis was a slippery category throughout the nineteenth century. Labelling an illness a disease of the nerves often simply meant that a physical cause was not forthcoming.