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Fin de Siècle Europe during focused on European cultural, intellectual, social, and political history from the last decade of the nineteenth century through the First World War. In this period, sometimes later called la belle époque, Europeans enjoyed unparalleled power, prosperity, and cultural creativity. Yet beneath the vertiginous surface and the promise of unlimited progress, many experienced a mounting sense of crisis, a sense that European culture was degenerating and perhaps coming to an end. Moreover, cultural approaches to history can provide new insights in political, social, and intellectual history. That is exactly what happened during the nineteenth century on the culture of hysteria and the beginnings of psychoanalysis. As we read nineteenth century medical, literary, and cultural texts with contemporary analogues, one may ask why hysteria flourished in that time and place. Thus, this essay will focus primarily on the culture of hysteria and provide explicit detail on it as well as tracing the diagnosis to the beginnings of psychoanalysis.
The nineteenth century was an era of great advances on medicine and public health. Hysteria became one of the centralized illnesses in Europe during that era. Many questioned hysteria and through time answers became available. So, what exactly is hysteria and where did it derive from? Jan Goldstein in “The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France” describes how hysteria is one of the oldest disease entities in the canon of Western medicine. The term originated from ancient Greek physician Hippocrates who associated the symptoms with the movement of a women's uterus. Its chief symptoms, from classical antiquity on, were always c...

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...e way that spectators reacted to certain performance styles. Hysteria become apparent in art as well as theatre. Many shows and spectacles were put on giving a popular notion to culture in Europe.
Nonetheless, the American Psychiatric Association did not drop the term until the early 1950s. Though it had taken on a very different meaning from its early roots, "hysterical neurosis" didn't disappear from the DSM until 1980. However, hysteria became a cultural phenomenon during the nineteenth century but decreased as the years went on. Now hysteria is no longer diagnosed as a mental disorder. Its symptoms now belong to a variety of other conditions, including conversion disorder and anxiety. Despite the turn away from hysteria, there is scientific evidence to suggest that the disorder may still exist and that unconscious emotions may prevent proper brain function.