Hysteria and the birth of the new

This paper takes issue with the way in which female sexuality and sexual repression has been limited by phallocentric position which has largely ignored the very real connection between sex and physical suffering, injury and death in childbirth which might have given women good cause to fear sex. It links the time at which Freud became interested in the subject, and various aspects occurring in the world around him in terms of history. The article suggests looking at hysteria as a phenomenon arising at a point where there is an extreme amalgamation of the life and death drives, and as a discourse that escalates at certain periods of history, when this fusion reaches, for whatever reason, a particularly high concentration. Vienna was such a point during the 19th and early 20th centuries, where the birth of psychoanalysis took place against the backdrop of a steep ‘inexplicable’ increase in female mortality in childbirth and neighboured with stunning discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics and revolution in art.