A Family and Marital Study of Hysteria

This paper reports the results of a psychiatric study of the families and husbands of patients with hysteria. In a series of previous publications designed to clarify the diagnosis of hysteria, it was shown that certain clinical criteria will define a group of patients with a highly uniform clinical course and prognosis (3, 4, 5, 9). It was also suggested that the same clinical picture is seen among first-degree female relatives more frequently than among the general female population, and that alcoholism and sociopathy are seen more frequently among first-degree male relatives than among the general male population (1). We decided to extend the investigation to more cases, and to study the husbands of the index cases as well.