[Hysteria and psychosomatic disorders in Portuguese immigrants]

Seventy patients presenting symptoms of hysteria (49 women and 21 men) were selected among patients observed at the Institute Minkowska during the year. This work is part of a research work on socio-cultural and environmental factors which can change mental status of immigrants. These are all portugese workers presenting for the first time atypical mental troubles called by the author: "bastard hysterical syndrome of the immigrant" and characterized partly or totally by the following symptoms: fatigue, anxiety, sense of suffocation, dyspnea, coughing, unilateral chills or generalized chil, abdominal or gastric pains, headaches and "diffused pains", paresthesia, aching back, tears and sorrow, fear of dying or having a cancer, asthenia, leg paresthesia and contractions, vomiting, diarrhea, cardiac pains, palpitations, dizziness and collapsing. These troubles appear sometimes without apparent motives but they are almost always due to a precipitating cause expressed by the patient: a delivery, a familial death, a homosexual proposition, a trauma without importance, a working conflict etc... But the most frequent cause invoked is "the french climate" without knowing precisely what the word "climate" means: atmospheric conditions, athmosphere or reception milieu? This latest interpretation seems more likely after months of psychotherapy. Most patients are not french speaking and cannot write; their origin is rural (familial villages well structured regarding their food and sexual economy), and people well "armed" by a system of defense mechanisms and well adopted conditioned reflexes. In this work, hysteria of the portugese immigrant is compared to childhood hysteria. As the hysterical burst of the child is aimed at calling attention, love of the mother, at finding a solution to a familial or social conflict, the hysterical burst of the immigrant is aimed at the absent family or at its substitutes, the bos, social security, the doctor. Furthermore, the attitude of the hosting Country--wanting and rejecting--is very ambivalent; "tenderness" at the time of reception, followed by indifference. Early attentions are followed by constant interdictions (threat of unemployment, false statements on sexual dangers of the immigrant etc;..). The immigrant, like the hysterical child, is periodically controlled (work and visit cards), supervised (supervisors), The narcistic satisfactions of being called a good worker can be followed by threats of firing in economic crisis. The society of the hosting country requires the immigrant to be identical to this society: language, physical appearance, food. The real paradoxical situation to which the immigrant is confronted and the real or hypothetical fears constitute conditions of experimental neurosis, to which portugese immigrants react very often by a bastard symptomatology of hysterical type, characteristic of displaced man. These preliminary studies are the frame for a future epidemiological survey in this specific population.