Neurosis and Modernity. The Age of Nervousness in Sweden

Abstract

During his research for this book, the author was struck by the tragedy in the lives of the hysterical, neurasthenic and neurotic patients of old. As he was studying the patients' records from the Nervpoliklinik in Stockholm, the oldest treatment institution (1888) for neurotics in Sweden, he realised that these people were not suffering from existential malaise or a ‘lack of deeper meaning in their lives’ like the self-indulgent neurotics in Woody Allen movies. In these old records, neurosis was a loser's diagnosis. The clients of the Nervpoliklinik were on the receiving end of maltreatment, brutality, terror, poverty. They were often grieving because their child or spouse had died, or because they feared an alcoholic husband. Many were exhausted with financial worries or guilty feelings over masturbation. As a result they had ‘lost their very zest for life’. The neurotics suffered from sleeplessness, headache, tiredness, anxiety, sorrow, disappointment, frustration, anger. Neurosis was an aspect of the human condition, Pietikainen argues, and recent diagnoses such as burn-out, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome are new expressions of the same ‘symptom pool’ that characterised neurotic patients a century ago.