The Hysteric and the HSP

AbstractThis paper examines twenty-first-century research on sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) alongside mid-nineteenth-century research on hysteria. Doing so sheds light on how we have long thought of sensorial-emotional experience as progressing along a medical narrative fromcause tocure. Today ’s rhetoric around the highly sensitive person (HSP) begins to diverge from the rhetoric around hysteria through the theorized cause and the dismissal of the need for a cure. When current perspectives remove the emphasis on a cure, the narrative emphasizes a broader need for social-emotional learn ing and cultural revision to stigma around sensitivity.
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research