Books: The Forgotten Malady Lingers on ; `Hysteria' Used to Afflict Silly Women. When Men Suffered Too, It Vanished. Now the Illness Has Returned, Says Darian Leader

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Mad Men and Medusas by Juliet Mitchell Allen Lane, pounds 20, 346pp Mental illnesses, it would seem, breed like rabbits. The standard diagnostic manual lists about 180 in 1968, but today this figure is over 350. Have we got better at recognising discrete maladies, or can we no longer see the wood for the trees? And is it a coincidence that new illnesses so often start to exist at the same time as the drugs supposed to act on them?

Parallel to this proliferation of maladies is a series of casualties: many of the older, robust categories have vanished from psychiatry and, increasingly, from Anglo-American psychoanalysis. Juliet Mitchell's new book is about one of them, the …