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CriticaLink | Freud: On Narcissism | Terms

neurasthenia

One of the most frequently diagnosed "nervous conditions" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, neurasthenia is a broad category including sensations of pain or numbness in parts of the body, chronic fatigue, fainting, and anxiety. Some of its manifestations closley resemble those of hysteria. Medical descriptions of the condition suggested the influence of mental states on the physical body via the nervous system; "neurasthenia" became one of the concepts of disease that strengthened the position of psychiatry (with its focus on the mind) in relation to neurology (with its focus on the biology of the brain and nerves). The diagnosis was developed in the United States by physicians George Beard and Silas Weir Mitchell.