Lecture 1: Doctors Attitude Towards Hysterical Patients 

In the first lecture, Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, talks about the first time he witnessed his first case of a patient suffering from hysteria with another doctor, a Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer. The young patient was experiencing physical and psychological disturbances such as; paralysis, loss of sensation, of both the right side of her body and left side, trouble with her speech and vision, and for weeks she also suffered from hydrophobia, lastly she suffered from absence. where she didn’t know the difference between reality and her fantasies…all symptoms that needed to be taken seriously by a doctor and needed to be treated urgently. But, unfortunately that wasn’t the case for most of the patients getting treated by doctors at the time. This type of negligence was both shown throughout lecture 1 and in the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” where Freud points out that doctors didn’t really care for patients with hysteria.

In lecture 1 Freud witnesses patients not getting treated as seriously as they should’ve been. When you hear such symptoms as these previously stated, that might lead to the patient’s death you would think the doctors would take actions as soon as possible. But that simply did not happen, because the patient didn’t have enough physical symptoms of their disease, and doctors didn’t really understand how to treat patients like these, doctors would see it as not an organic disease of the brain. Freud continues to say that in ancient Greek medicine this disease was known as “hysteria”. In the lecture he also continues to say “they consider that there is then no risk to life but that a return to health – even a complete one – is probable” (Freud 2200), Which comes to show doctors would ignore their Symptoms.

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator also experienced the same type of treatment from her husband, who is also her doctor. Throughout the story the narrator seems to get really obsessive over the yellow wallpaper that was the room that her husband trapped her in. The husband ignores her and just repeatedly tells her to get better while she’s going insane in that room. From the very beginning of the story the narrator complains about her husband John and how he belittles both her illness and ignores her opinions and thoughts in general, quickly shutting her down. She continues to give an example of how John doesn’t really care for her work, ” It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work.” (The Yellow Wallpaper 649) It gets to the point where she starts getting scared of John because he just kept ignoring her remarks on the wallpaper and thinks she’s going crazy. Another example that is shown is that the husband belittles her when he starts referring to her as a “little girl.” Whenever he would start getting irritated by her or annoyed he would in a way forget he is speaking to his wife and talks to her as if she was a child.

Throughout the story in “The Yellow Wallpaper” the husband has proved Freud’s point in the lecture where he talks about how doctors don’t really care for or pay attention to patients with hysteria or symptoms with hysteria. Doctors would only usually pay attention to people with physical symptoms of a disease simply because it took too much time and they didn’t understand it completely.