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The Life Story Perspective of Histrionic Behaviour
Childhood
Inconsistent parenting style: alternation between insensitive non-involvement and rewards for exhibitionist behavior.
The HISTRIONIC PERSONALITY DISORDER is identified by the following morphological and constitutional features in the hand. The manifestations of this disorder with regard to patterns of behavior and patterns of attitude would be as outlined in the DSM lll and DSM lV.
Please note: a diagnosis of Histrionic Personality Diagnosis of an individual whose hands are not one with the above photographs, or with the features as detailed below, will, in all instances, be an erroneous diagnosis.
1. The texture of the skin at the back of the hand is particularly coarse and unrefined. This feature is always very pronounced.
2. The dermal texture of the palm itself is very fine. The ridges and furrows that make up the surface of the palmar skin would be relatively difficult to distinguish. The smoothness of the palmar skin would be in inverse proportion to the coarseness of the skin at the back of the hand. This feature is always very pronounced.
3. The knuckles are always pronounced.
4. A certain rigidity describes the constitution of the fingers.
5. The hands are of a generally hard and muscular constitution.
6. The tip phalanges of the fingers would tend to be rounded and mildly tapering. (This feature may be considered a variable).
All authentic instances of Histrionic Personality Disorder will display these features. A diagnosis of this disorder in a male subject would invariably include an additional diagnosis relating to gender uncertainty.
Erroneous Value-judgments
Histrionic personality disorder is a typological representation of bad character, of a vicious disposition formed by habitual passion. Passions are, or are the results of, erroneous value-judgments. The objects of passion listed below (derived mostly from Beck, Freeman, and associates, 1990, pp. 50-51) are external, indifferent things that the Histrionic personality incorrectly judges to be good or bad .. (Evolutionary Psychology and Behavio r Genetics provide adequate scientific explanations of the origins of these impulses.) The cure of Histrionic personality disorder will require correcting these habitual, erroneous value-judgments by making proper use of impressions.
Feelings. Dramatic men and women live in an emotional world. They are sensation oriented, emotionally demonstrative, and physically affectionate, They react emotionally to events and can shift quickly from mood to mood.
Color. They experience life vividly and expansively. They have rich imaginations, they tell entertaining stories, and they are drawn to romance and melodrama.
Attention. Dramatic people like to be seen and noticed. They are often the center of attention, and they rise to the occasion when all eyes are on them.
Appearance. They pay a lot of attention to grooming, and they enjoy clothes, style, and fashion.
Sexual attraction. In appearance and behavior, Dramatic individuals enjoy their sexuality. They are seductive, engaging, charming tempters and temptresses.
Engagement. Easily putting their trust in others, they are able to become quickly involved in relationships.
The spirit is willing. People with Dramatic personality style eagerly respond to new ideas and suggestions from others.
Madame Bovary
In an essay about the novel, Madame Bovary, Erica Jong says that the heroine "dies because she has attempted to make her life into a novel":
Emma Bovary is deluded by literature. Because she is in search of ecstasy and transcendence, she falls madly in love with a cad, then with a coward, ignoring the plodding husband and child who both adore her. She is looking for a higher, more spiritual life than the one available to her as the wife of a bourgeois country doctor, and in this quest she finds only self-destruction. We identify with her because we too look to fantasy for salvation. If Emma Bovary, with all her self-delusion, still stirs our hearts, it is because she wants something authentic and important: for her life to have meaning, for her life to bring transcendence.
A lengthy excerpt, compiled by Mark S. Micale in Approaching Hysteria (pg. 226) from a number of passages in the first half of Madame Bovary, supports this idea:
Emma was becoming capricious, hard to please. She would order special dishes for herself and then not touch them; one day she would drink nothing but fresh milk; the next, cups of tea by the dozen. Often she refused absolutely to go out; then she would feel stifled, open the windows, change to a light dress....She no longer hid her scorn for anything or anyone; and she was beginning now and then to express peculiar opinions, condemning what everyone else approved and approving things that were perverse and immoral--a way of talking that made her husband stare at her wide-eyed....She grew pale and developed palpitations....Some days she chattered endlessly, almost feverishly; and such a period of overexcitement would suddenly be followed by a torpor in which she neither spoke nor moved....Her carnal desires, her cravings for money, and the fits of depression engendered by her love gradually merged into a single torment....She reacted to the drabness of her home by indulging in daydreams of luxury and to matrimonial caresses by adulterous desires....Such a crisis always left her shattered, gasping, prostrate, sobbing to herself, tears streaming down her face....A woman who had assumed such a burden of sacrifice was certainly entitled to indulge herself a little. She bought herself a Gothic prie-dieu and in a month spent fourteen francs on lemons to blanch her fingernails; she wrote to Rouen for a blue cashmere dress; and at Lheureux's she chose the finest of his scarves....She decided to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, a supply of paper. She went in for serious reading--history and philosophy....But her books were like her many pieces of needlepoint: barely begun, they were tossed into the cupboard; she started them, abandoned them, discarded them in favor of new ones...."I have a lover! I have a lover!" she kept repeating to herself, reveling in the thought as though she were beginning a second puberty. At la st she was going to know the joys of love, the fever of the happiness she had despaired of. She was entering a marvelous realm where all would be passion, ectasy [sic], rapture....She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her .. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true.
This need to have another life, an ideal life--the need to be other than what one is--is a manifestation of Histrionic perfectionism.
This list represents careers and jobs people of the Histrionic type tend to enjoy doing -
information-graphics...
designer/ college professor /researcher /legal mediator /social worker /holistic health practitioner /occupational therapist /diversity manager /human resource development specialist/ employment development specialist /minister/priest/rabbi/missionary/ psychologist /writer / poet/novelist /journalist/ editor/art director/ oganizational development specialist
Interesting....
My bit: Often, these are the galls you hook up with, when you hook up with galls who stand from the crowd and come up to you easily, in Sydney bars late at night and eventually it all goes pair shaped, because there so darn agressive and easily impressed at the same time...
