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[[Hysterical ]] [[paralysis ]] designates various forms of [[loss ]] of mobility of the upper or lower limbs that are [[present ]] in certain [[patients ]] without any indication of a direct neurological [[cause]].

Even before the Studies on [[Hysteria ]] (1895d), the problems that hysterical paralysis posed for the medical diagnostic [[model ]] led [[Freud ]] to introduce the first elements of [[psychoanalysis ]] in a [[work ]] called, "Some Points for a Comparative Study of [[Organic ]] and Hysterical Motor Paralyses" (1893c).

To Freud, hysterical paralyses seemed too precisely delimited in relation to their "excessive intensity" (1893c, p. 164), and they appeared to be related more to the way patients imagined their bodies than to any distribution of lesions in [[real ]] anatomy. Based as it was on the fact that peripheral points on the [[body ]] are grouped at the level of the nerves that [[represent ]] the medullary centers of the cortex, Freud's neurological conception of "[[representation ]] paralysis" went far beyond what Charcot himself (1880-1893) called a "disease of representation." Freud was in effect seeking "permission to move on to [[psychological ]] ground" (1893c, p. 170), and he crossed that border on the basis of the [[difference ]] between [[organ ]] and function.

This amounted also to placing paralysis on the level representing both [[fantasy ]] and [[action]]. By defining the hysterical paralysis of the arm as "the abolition of the associative accessibility of the conception of the arm" (1893c, p. 170), he raised both the question of [[trauma ]] and that of the [[affective ]] [[value ]] of a function, so anticipating what would later be known as associative [[links ]] and breaks, [[isolation ]] and [[repression]].

We see here too that what would later become the "innervation" of the [[repressed ]] idea—"[[psychical ]] [[excitation ]] that takes a wrong path," as Freud wrote in 1894 (1950a, p. 195)—did not restrict the [[notion ]] of conversion to a single [[idea ]] of [[discharge]], but installed it within conflictual [[ambivalence]], and this whether it was muscular contraction, paralysis, or anesthesia that was at issue. Thus the [[symptom ]] achieves the repression of the representation and the [[return ]] of the related [[affect ]] to its original innocent status as action. This disconnection between affect and symptom is what Charcot referred to as the "belle indifférence" of [[hysterics ]] (cf. Freud, 1915d, pp. 155-56).

Thus conversion holds a precise [[position ]] between [[hypochondria]], which seeks to mentalize the unrepresentable depths of the body's interior, and, at the [[other ]] extreme, [[psychosomatic ]] disturbances where improvement or somatic recovery dispense with the [[symbolic ]] level entirely. Between the two, conversion involves the striated musculature in [[order ]] to play out a drama at the level closest to the body. The involvement of the vegetative level is not excluded here, so long as it is introduced into a fantasy, the [[desire ]] of which was expressed in its [[negative ]] [[form ]] as a paralysis (Jeanneau, 1985).

See also: Charcot, Jean Martin; Conversion; Elisabeth von R., [[case ]] of; Hysteria; Innervation; [[Psychic ]] [[causality]]; Psychic [[reality]]; [[Psychotic]]/neurotic; Somatic compliance; [[Studies on Hysteria]]; Symptom-[[formation]].[[Bibliography]]