Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

by Allan H. Ropper

The majority of hysterical symptoms—symptoms that have no basis in disease and are subject to suggestibility—look like real neurological diseases. These include paralysis, inability to walk or speak, blindness, deafness, seizures, and weakness. All are manifestations of an organ that sometimes fabricates problems. But it gets even crazier. People who cannot feel on one side of the body will say they are deaf on that side, or blind on that side, unaware that this is an anatomical impossibility. The hardwiring of the human nervous system cannot produce these defects. This is not disease doing something to the nervous system, but rather the brain doing something to itself. The stomach doesn’t have a mind of its own to create stomach problems, nor do the colon, the lungs, or the skin. Ulcers, asthma, psoriasis, eczema, once thought (incorrectly) to be psychosomatic, or originating in the mind, were all shown to have tangible causes, and have been reclassified as nonpsychological diseases. Only one organ has a mind of its own, and it is constantly causing problems for itself. These problems, once termed “hysterical” and “psychosomatic,” are now called “functional” or “somatoform.” The conditions themselves are referred to as conversion disorders, implying the conversion of psychic distress into physical symptoms. It is one of the last vestiges of Sigmund Freud’s legacy still lurking in mainstream medicine.