Psychosomatic Quotes

“The injection of a dimorphic sexuality into this field need not have the effect of arresting divergent neurological pathways.”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“chiasmatic formulations (deconstructionXbiology; geneXome; episte molo gyX stock options; maniaXfundamentals; open futureXsafe harbor; promisingXgenomics; pre- sumedXconsent; speculationXspeculation), and for each of these paired formulations, he offers a diagram of "irreducible complexities”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“Morphological analysis of the brains from humans with different sexual orientations and identities ... may lead to further deductions concerning the possible influences of sex hormones on the structure and function of the human brain" (Allen”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“In this respect, the ENS is analogous to a microcomputer with its own independent software, whereas the brain is like a larger mainframe with extended memory and processing circuits that receive information from and issue commands to the enteric computer. (117-118)”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“Post is particularly interested in manic-depressive (bipolar) patients who have become "rapid cyclers." These are patients in whom "mood seems to have lost its attachment to any psychological stimulus whatsoever" and "affect has become utterly dissociated from their experience of the everyday world" (ro8).”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“inhibition of the psyche, instinctual impoverishment, and pain.
Figure i. Schematic picture of sexuality. Reprinted with the permission of the Institute of Psychoanalysis from Freud 1895a, 202.
Freud's treatment of neurology in this model is interesting in two regards.”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“Neurasthenic symptoms are somatic or bodily rather than psychic in origin, and are not amenable to psychoanalytic intervention: "The essence of the theories about the `actual neuroses' which I have put forward in the past and am defending to-day lies in my assertion, based on experiment, that their symptoms, unlike psychoneurotic ones, cannot be analyzed.”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“The medical notion of hysteria as a wandering womb has long been considered a violence against the female body. However, before such an etiology is dismissed altogether, the question of organic wandering demands closer examination. The notion of a roaming uterus contains within it a sense of organic matter that disseminates, strays, and deviates from its proper place.”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“In 1894 Freud placed biology at the very heart of hysterical etiology: "The characteristic factor in hysteria is not splitting of consciousness but the capacity for conversion, and we may adduce as an important part of the disposition to hysteria-a disposition which in other respects is still unknown-a psychophysical aptitude for transposing very large sums of excitation into the somatic innervation" (1899b, 50).”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“Rather, my point is that the cultural, social, linguistic, literary, and historical analyses that now dominate the scene of feminist theory typically seek to seal themselves off from-or constitute themselves against-the domain of the biological. Curiously enough, feminist theories of the body are often exemplary in this regard. Despite the intensive scrutiny of the body in feminist theory and in the humanities in general over the past two decades, certain fundamental aspects of the body, biology, and materiality have been foreclosed.”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body

“hysteria-the corporeal revelation of psychic and cultural conflict-retains its hold on our political and critical imagination.
However, it is not just hysteria in general that has been of interest to feminist theorists of the body.”
― Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body