“It’s one of those woolly areas, and it has this pejorative association,” said Peter W. Halligan, a professor of neuropsychology at Cardiff University in Wales and the director of Cardiff’s new brain imaging center. “Some people say, ‘That’s a Freudian throwback, let’s go into real science.’ ”

Hysteria actually predates Freud. The word itself derives from “hystera,” Greek for uterus, and ancient doctors attributed a number of female maladies to a starved or misplaced womb. Hippocrates built on the uterine theory; marriage was among his recommended treatments.

Then came the saints, the shamans and the demon-possessed. In the 17th century, hysteria was said to be the second most common disease, after fever. In the 19th century, the French neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to the disease. Then Charcot’s student, a young neurologist named Sigmund Freud, radically changed the landscape and, some argue, popularized hysteria.

Freud’s innovation was to explain why hysterics swooned and seized. He coined the term “conversion” to describe the mechanism by which unresolved, unconscious conflict might be transformed into symbolic physical symptoms. His fundamental insight — that the body might be playing out the dramas of the mind — has yet to be supplanted.

“Scores of European doctors for generations had thought hysteria was something wrong with the physical body: an unhappy uterus, nerves that were too thin, black bile from the liver,” said Mark S. Micale, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of “Approaching Hysteria” (Princeton University Press, 1994). “Something somatic rooted in the body is giving rise to fits, spells of crying, strange aches and pains. Freud reverses that direction of causality. He says what the cases on his couch in Vienna are about is something in the psyche or the mind being expressed physically in the body.”

For neuroscientists now, there is no such division between the physical brain and the mind. The techniques allow scientists to see disruptions in brain function, which lets them sketch a physical map of what might be going on in the minds of modern-day hysterics. Many questions remain unanswered, but the results have begun to suggest ways in which emotional structures in the brain might modulate the function of normal sensory and motor neural circuits.

Image The trial of George Jacobs for witchcraft at the Essex Institute in Salem, Mass. Credit... MPI/Getty Images

In the last decade, a number of brain imaging studies have been done on patients suffering from hysterical paralysis. Patients with hysterical paralysis have healthy nerves and muscles. Their problem is not structural but functional: something has apparently gone wrong in the higher reaches of the human mind that govern the conception of movement and the will to move. The dumb actors in this dance are fine; it’s the brilliant but complex director that has a problem.