Effects of a One-Gender Dominated Field of Psychology
By:
THEODORE MILLON and
Seth Grossman
Carrie Millon
Sarah Meagher
Rowena Ramnath
The origins of
hysteria reach deeply into both history and human nature. As all women and most
men know, men do not understand women. Worse, men cannot understand why they
cannot understand women. Rather than keep trying, men have instead created
diagnostic syndromes to contain aspects of female behavior they find
particularly perplexing.
Because the
history of humankind has thus far been dominated by males, perhaps it is not
surprising that hysteria was one of the first mental disorders to be discussed.
For the ancient Greeks, hysteria was caused by a wandering uterus that could
become detached, tour the body, and settle in the brain, thus producing the
behavioral excesses that most men naturally fear, such as wild emotion and
female lust. Hysteria thus embodies the male belief that all women are crazy or
at least constitute sub-threshold cases easily exacerbated into a frenzy by
some stray comment or unintended oversight. The “bad hair day” crystallizes
this notion.
Eventually, the
glory of ancient Greece and Rome disappeared. In the Middle Ages, the world was
viewed through a religious paradigm. Faith in God offset hard times for
humanity, including mass starvation, disease, pestilence, and war. By some
estimates, a third of the population of Europe was killed by the Black Death
alone. Humans naturally sought explanations to such paradoxical calamities. How
could such horrors occur if God were just and loving? Again, women were to
blame. Those who ran afoul of social standards became natural scapegoats, being
“diagnosed” according to the standard of the times as witches, in league with
Satan. Through their sorcery, these evil beings could summon famine, plague,
bad luck, and worst of all, impotence. Eventually, the widespread dread of witches
found religious sanction in the Malleus
Maleficarum, or Witches’Hammer,
written by two German monks in 1496, a
kind of Stephen King version of our modern DSM,
complete with its own form of therapy:
burning at the stake.
Though the
witch hunts would eventually subside, it seems that every era unveils some new
syndrome for which only women are at risk. The contemporary premenstrual
dysphoric disorder may be seen as a modern parallel, the idea that women’s
natural cycles naturally cause them psychological problems.
Although many
would admit to emotional and behavioral changes related to their period, women
might also argue that these changes occupy only a few days a month, whereas a
penis distorts behavior most of the time. Strangely, history holds no such
wandering member that might become detached, take up residence in the brain,
and distort perception in order to explain antisocial behavior among males.
References
Personality Disorders in Modern Life, second edition, 2000, 2004 by John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.
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