aradoxical sexual
instinct" in the hysterical, by which, for instance, sexual frigidity is
combined with intense sexual pre-occupations; and they also pointed out
the significant fact that the crimes of the hysterical nearly always
revolve around the sexual sphere.[261] Thus, even up to the time when the
conception of hysteria which absolutely ignored and excluded any sexual
relationship whatever had reached its height, independent views favoring
such a relationship still found expression.

Of recent years, however, such views usually aroused violent antagonism.
The main current of opinion was with Briquet (1859), who, treating the
matter with considerable ability and a wide induction of facts,
indignantly repelled the idea that there is any connection between
hysteria and the sexual facts of life, physical or psychic. As he himself
admitted, Briquet was moved to deny a sexual causation of hysteria by the
thought that such an origin would be degrading for women ("_a quelque
chose de degradant pour les femmes_").

It was, however, the genius of Charcot, and the influence of his able
pupils, which finally secured the overthrow of the sexual theory of
hysteria. Charcot emphatically anathematized the visceral origin of
hysteria; he declared that it is a psychic disorder, and to leave no
loop-hole of escape for those who maintained a sexual causation he
asserted that there are no varieties of hysteria, that the disease is one
and indivisible. Charcot recognized no primordial cause of hysteria beyond
heredity, which here plays a more important part than in any other
neuropathic condition. Such heredity is either direct or more occasionally
by transformation, any deviation of nutrition found in the ancestors
(gout, diabetes, arthritis) being a possible cause of hysteria in the
descendants. "We do not know anything about the nature of hysteria,"
Charcot wrote in 1892; "we must make it objective in order to recognize
it. The dominant idea for us in the etiology of hysteria is, in the widest
sense, its hereditary predisposition. The greater number of those
suffering from this affection are simply born _hysterisables_, and on them
the occasional causes act directly, either through autosuggestion or by
causing derangement of general nutrition, and more particularly of the
nutrition of the nervous system."[262] These views were ably and
decisively stated in Gilles de la Tourette's _Traite de l'Hysterie_,
written under the inspirati