ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some general developments in hysterical psychosis. The rise and fall of hysteria as a clinical concept is more manifest in France than in Germany. Yet the trend towards less hysteria and more schizophrenia generally persists. Eugen Bleuler, who tends to sail under the psychoanalytical flag, follows after Emil Kraepelin's international breakthrough. Harry Stack Sullivan's dynamic-cultural psychoanalytical school will be the first in the United States to set up an institutional psychotherapeutical treatment for schizophrenics. And so the study of schizophrenia reigns supreme. By 1940, psychoanalysis is very popular in America. The promotion of the ego-deficiency and the maladjustment to reality are the major indicative factors for the theory and the praxis of the psychoses. The successive slackening of the diagnosis hysterical conversion runs parallel with an increase of psychosomatic syndromes in the diagnostic field. Conversion hysteria is kept out of the field of the psychoses but is drawn into the new capacious field of the psychosomatic syndromes.
