Briquet and Briquet's syndrome viewed from France.

Abstract

Briquet's contributions to the description of hysteria have been almost completely forgotten in France. One may wonder how he, as well as contemporary French psychiatrists, would react to the approach to hysteria introduced and officialized by DSM III. In particular, its fragmentation into syndromes without apparent link to each other (psychogenic amnesia, conversion disorders, histrionic personality disorder, etc.) and its psychological causation, unbalanced by the consideration of organic factors in etiology, may raise questions. The correlation of conversion disorders with hysterical personality remains a feature of the WHO classification (ICD 9), as well as a feature of French contemporary texts, although it is no longer viewed as a regular association by American psychiatry. It may be that cultural factors lead, as suggested by Brisset, to a repression of conversion phenomena and of hyperexpressivity of affects replaced by more psychosomatic disorders in many contemporary societies. Finally, one may question whether the choice of the term "Briquet Syndrome" is appropriate, as many of the patients described by him did not have the chronic and malignant course described by Guze: It tends to limit hysteria to one end (the most severe one) of a spectrum of disorders.