The psychologization of hysteria, arriving just as medicine increasingly defined “real” diseases as those it could see with its current technologies and explain by a known physiological mechanism, introduced the idea that any symptoms it couldn’t yet see and explain—particularly those that occurred in women—could be blamed on the unknowable “unconscious mind,” a theory that medicine has liberally utilized whenever it comes up against the limits of its knowledge. It has led to the persistent distrust of women’s subjective reports of their own bodies—until those reports are backed up by
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