Researchers feel stymied.
With a bluntness some readers will no doubt find glib, Showalter insists that our refusal to confront the reality of psychosomatic illness only prolongs suffering and encourages the spread of new hysterias. She simply feels that nothing good can come from fruitlessly searching for medical explanations of psychosomatic maladies. As a literary critic, Showalter finds that hysterical epidemics rely on stock narrative conventions. By analogy, suggests Showalter, vulnerable people learn the recovered-memory script by watching carefully choreographed victims on Jenny Jones. In fact, her project is more in line with Susan Sontag, whose Illness as Metaphor aimed to strip cancer and tuberculosis of their moral freight.