What is a Hysterical Yogi?
“Symptomology of an illness is at the same time a natural attempt at healing.”
— (Jung 1927/9131, CW 8, para. 312)
“For the sake of brevity, we adopt the term “conversion” to signify the transformation of psychical energy into chronic somatic symptoms, which is so characteristic of hysteria…
The psychical symptoms in...Hysteria can be divided into alterations of mood (anxiety, melancholic depression), phobias and abulias (inhibitions of will). Psychical disturbances are regarded by the French school of psychiatry...As neurotic degenerengy…For the most part from traumatic origin…It is not possible to assign the same origin to all the somatic symptoms of these patients…We find that the somatic symptoms of a hysteria can arise in a variety of ways.
I will venture ... to include pains among somatic symptoms. Pains in the muscle, tendons, or fascia, which cause much more pain to neurotics than normal people….. It is this characteristic of hysteria that has long stood in it’s way of being recognized as a psychical disorder”
— Studies in Hysteria/ Studien über Hysterie, Breuer & Freud, 1895
“The West is always seeking to uplift, but the East seeks a sinking or deepening. Outer reality, with its bodiliness and weight, appears to make a much stronger and sharper impression on the European than it does on the Indian. The European seeks to raise himself above the world, while the Indian likes to turn back into the maternal depths of Nature.”
— (Jung 1927/9131, CW 8, para. 312)
How I became the Hysterical Yogi
If the use of the word hysterical gives you a strong reaction, then please read on.
I use this word both to explain a direct experience of personal identification within my life, (see bio) a similarity in trends in history and current times, and to provoke. In the history and the archetype of the hysteric, I see the union of psyche and soma, mind and body, I see the unconscious speaking through body, I see our unconscious seeking to establish inner and outer balance with the goal of wholeness.
As yogis know, peace is never static, nor are asana or meditation practices; new challenges always appear in life, body and spirit and this is why we must always practice to maintain resilience, strength, clarity and balance. This is why we call it Practice, because regardless of how many years we have been engaging with yoga, there is never an end point. I created the label Hysterical Yogi for myself.
Hysterical Yogi describes a dedicated yogi, moving back and forth on a spectrum, working their practice to maintain balance. The spectrum has on the far “hysterical end” extreme unbalance, which may manifest, for example, as somatic illnesses, sometimes of unconscious origins, high anxiety, erratic emotions, over engagement with “spiritual materialism” or overreliance on, and over practice with multiple spiritual practices.
On the far end of the “yogi” spectrum we have calm in emotions and spirit, grounded strength, wholeness and unity between body, mind and spirit. No one is perfect, so we are all only traveling back and forth on the spectrum of the Hysterical Yogi. The point of the Hysterical Yogi as a symbol is that maintaining balance is perpetual work, that once our initial wounds (as early 1900’s hysteria was linked to trauma) come to consciousness, we must always engage with healing them bodily and emotionally.
I chose the name Hysterical Yogi several years ago to describe myself, (see bio) during a period of great personal inner and outer transformation. I was spending all my time doing yoga, studying yogic philosophy, studying anatomy, healing my somatic injuries and issues through osteopathy and reading about Freud and Jung’s explorations of the unconscious in the early days of psychoanalysis. Since the early 1800’s into the 1900’s, there was a trend of the females being diagnosed “hysterical” en masse (although Freud once said there were more male hysterics than female).
Hysterics were treated with a variety of treatments ranging from what I would describe as sadistic and ignorant, to the more amusing side, with Mesmerism and Mesmer’s animal magnetism and hypnosis to bourgeois women flocking to psychoanalytical lectures, supposedly suffering, as Freud famously theorized, from hysteria resulting from a sexual repression. Interest in the theories of psychoanalysis and the subconscious.
I felt a similarity in myself and my seeking now through yoga, to those women back in 1900’s Zurich and Vienna seeking answers and modes of self discovery through the new psychoanalysis and analytical psychology.
In the milieu I found myself in, women training in yoga were similarly of a bourgeois class, allowing me to see further similarities in myself and those around me. People who judged and questioned my new life choices, moving from a vibrant international career to hiding away practicing yoga, likewise pathologized such “illogical” life changes; I felt as judged and dismissed by my somatic symptoms as a woman diagnosed with “hysteria.”
The original term hysteria coined by the first physicians in ancient Greece. Misogyny is not new, it merely changes its forms over centuries, subject to such attitudes “hysteria” came to be wielded as an accusatory label taking on its current meaning and use to pathologize, judge, dismiss, alienate and label women and our emotions and behaviors ranging from anger, irrational, illogical, to dramatic, extreme, out of control, foolishly reactive.
In the works of Jungian analysts such as Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Marion Woodman, Anne Baring, Laurie Layton Schapira and Sylvia Brinton Perera, the condition the ancient Greeks labeled hysteria (meaning wandering womb) is identified as “loss of soul” or “loss of instinct” in our current time, which occurs in males and females of all walks. I believe “hysteria” is valid in that it describes a sense of something lost, leaving the “hysterical” wandering and seeking, but it wasn’t a physical uterus! What is being sought, is the self. Loss of soul occurs when we are cut off from our true Self, when we are “split;” this split may have occurred through trauma, through messages from society, family, significant others, or friends. Most often the split off silent part speaks to us through the body, as it did with early “hysterics.”
Hysterical Yogis have recognized this sense of loss of soul and inner division, which may manifest as anxieties, illnesses, pains, lingering injuries, swings of intense emotions, we likely have sought help in Western medicine, psychotherapy or pharmaceuticals but our original symptoms are not “cured” by these alone.
This holds historically, as the first hysterics were often noted by medical doctors as cases of “psychosomatic” illnesses, their doctors not finding any medical explanation for their symptoms. hence today we still dismiss people frequently ill with minor sickness or worried they will become ill, as “hysterics” not recognizing the truth in the insult.
Hysteria has not disappeared, it was just spread out over many diagnoses, varying in severity; but on the less pathological end of the spectrum of its current manifestation, we use words now like psychosomatic illness, persistent pain and anxiety issues, PTSD, and ADHD.
“I have found that it is through regular practice, especially pairing body movement with moments of stillness and “being with ourselves” (such as in meditation or even a good savasana!) that we heal the split, wandering, seeking parts of ourselves, uniting them for yoga means union, and through practicing yoga we reunite with ourself.”
— Katherine Johnstone
Hysterical Yogis find we can regulate and help our issues through regular practices of yoga (Asana, pranayama, meditation, mindfulness and even application of yogic philosophy to our lives) As diverse as the origins of our “split” can be so are the diverse ways that yoga can be practiced, no one yogi knows the way.
The alchemy of reuniting with yourself takes place through the simple practice of regular engagement with body and mind.