[Illness as effect of cultural construction in the enlightenment. The example of hypochondria].

The relationship between hypochondria--a fashionable disease in the late 18th c.--on the one hand and some of the most important social and cultural developments during the same period on the other, are approached through the correspondence of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, merchant, court councilor and author, during a lifetime of residence in Düsseldorf, between 1762 and 1794. Different points are broached in this chapter: The nervous disease called hypochondria fulfilled different functions in the formation of bourgeois ideology, especially regarding the principle of achievement. An effect of autonomy was the main phantasm of the enlightened subject: the body was experienced as an enemy of the most fundamental and almost "holy" grounds of bourgeois social life. Therefore each bodily experience was in itself pathological. The progression of literacy must be seen as one of the most profound changes of the society in the late eighteenth century. Some evidence suggests that this process has an impact on the somatic malfunctions associated with hypochondria.