He Stendhal's syndrome Is a psychosomatic picture that manifests itself in the person transiently when he observes works of art of great beauty. It was not conceived as such until 1979 by the psychiatrist Graziella Magherini.
It could be defined as a psychosomatic process that causes with high heart rate, with dizziness and even in some cases hallucinations when the person is overwhelmed by beauty. They are intense reactions that surpass the emotions that can be described as normal.
Generally, it happens when there is a great amount of artistic beauty in short periods of time and they are all concentrated in the same place.
It is an experience that the subject lives as unpleasant, that relates to the panic attack .
This syndrome is also known as the Florence Syndrome, because it has been in this city where a greater number of cases have been known. Although there is great controversy about this and although some qualify as true this syndrome, others think that it is promoted by the city itself for economic purposes.
The Stendhal Syndrome is also known as the evil of the romantic traveler.
History of Stendhal's syndrome
Stendhal
The Stendhal Syndrome owes its name to a French novelist, Henri-Marie Beyle , Pseudonym Stendhal, who described the syndrome for the first time in a travel book to Rome, Naples and Florence around the year 1817.
He published it in his book"Naples and Florence: A Trip from Milan to Reggio??".
In the book, when writing his visit to Florence, in the Basilica of Santa Croce the author describes what he felt.
He indicates that he spent all day visiting works of art, strolling through churches, museums and admiring statues, frescoes and facades.
Everything happened when he entered the Church of Santa Croce, where he feels stunned. It indicates experiencing unique sensations when contemplating the Sibyls of Volterano. For example, he felt a lot of emotion, his heart was racing and he was dizzy.
Stendhal described it this way: "I was in a kind of ecstasy, of the idea of being in Florence, near the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Oh, if I could forget. He had heart palpitations, which in Berlin they call"nerves." Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling."
He began to feel dizzy, anguish And feelings of suffocation that forced him to go outside to recover.
They say that the doctor is diagnosed for an"excess of beauty"? And it is since then when this picture is known as the Stendhal syndrome.
However, it was described by a psychiatrist and university professor of Florence, Graziella Megherini, in the year 1979.
Although previously there were many people who had also suffered dizziness and fainting when observing artistic works in Florence, it is not until this moment when it is described.
It was she who in the late seventies and after attending different visitors in Florence with these symptoms, labeled it with the name Stendhal syndrome.
She observes and describes 106 similar cases in tourists in Florence and in addition to being considered a syndrome with clinical consideration, has also been taken into account as the highest level of artistic beauty to which a person is subjected.
Amongst this hundred cases, both Nordic and North American tourists predominate, who also arrive in Florence after having visited other cities in Italy such as Rome or Venice.
This psychiatrist is the author who has observed more cases and the person who has written a book about this syndrome, offering also different explanations of psychoanalytic character, since it is a follower of Freud Y Lacan .
Dr. Grazieala Magherini, who has given possible hypotheses about the origin of this syndrome, has therefore found it in foreign patients who visit Florence and those who are attacked? During the contemplation of artistic works.
The book she writes is published and distributed throughout Europe a decade later, in the late 1980s, where she recounts in a clinical way the cases she has attended in Florence.
In his book, in addition to his own cases, he also refers to the same effects experienced by visitors to Italian art in the nineteenth century.
Symptoms and Characteristics
This syndrome is caused by the fact that the subject contemplates a great amount of beauty, so that it reaches a species of ecstasy with different symptoms.
Most of the cases that Magherini observed at the observatory of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in the center of Florence were pictures of psychic discomfort, brief pictures, with an acute and unexpected beginning.
Symptoms found by people with Stendhal syndrome include both physical and psychological symptoms, including:
- Perceptual disorders, especially in terms of sounds and colors
- Anxiety states
- Feeling depressed
- States of euphoria
- Confusion
- Spatio-temporal disorientation
Sweat
- Tachycardia
Dizziness
Fading
- Feeling of shortness of breath
- Persecuting Feelings
- Feelings of guilt
- Omnipotent Thought
- Dissociative phenomena such as"levitation sensation"?
- Psychotic disorganizations and / or hallucinations
- Destructive impulses directed at the works contemplated
- Fear of losing control and doing damage to works
- persistent dissociation states
- Amnesia
These last five symptoms more exceptionally. Even so, there are large individual differences, since it can range from simple dizziness in mild cases, to psychotic pictures in the most serious cases.
The symptoms are grouped into three groups, depending on perceptual disorders, mood disorders and anxiety states.
From the study of different people who have experienced Stendhal syndrome, it is suggested that the symptoms are different according to the individual, but they end up coinciding in some points.
For example, they often coincide in the fact that it takes place in a city characterized by its artistic beauty.
In addition, it usually occurs in foreign people and in front of a specific work or a specific artist.
One of the characteristics is, therefore, the fact that people are foreign. Some data points to the fact that a hospital in Florence, the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, welcomes a few cases of Stendhal syndrome each year and all patients are foreigners.
Causes
One of the earliest attributions about the origin of Stendhal's syndrome comes from an excess of beauty.
One of the explanations that have been offered for the syndrome of Stendhal, of psychoanalytic cut, comes from part of Dr. Magherini, that indicates that arises by the fact of being before the original work.
It is a subjective sensation on the part of the subject that does not have to do with any phylogenetic explanation, but is produced by the fact of being the subject before a creative work created by another congener, to find before the original and real work that we have seen previously in pictures.
There is a bewilderment caused by the maximum pleasure in observing a work created by the human being. This maximum pleasure surpasses, to put it somehow, its limit, and becomes an unpleasant and annoying sensation for the person.
It would be a situation between ecstasy and anxiety.
Other authors give different explanations. For example, another explanation for the syndrome has to do with expectations.
The person, before traveling and contemplating the work, has created some expectations. Therefore, when arriving and posing before the work, he experiences a surprise to see his expectations surpassed.
We all create expectations or schemes about what will happen according to the knowledge we have.
When we are slightly surprised, we feel pleasure. But when they are overcome and linked to the characteristics of the situation, a violation of expectations can lead to a situation where control is lost.
In this way, when you see the same work of art in repeated conditions, habituation would occur, producing less and less pleasure or surprise for the work of art.
It would be an explanation of why this syndrome only appears in foreigners and not in autochton.
The symptoms are described as experiences of a psychosomatic nature lived in an egodistonic (unpleasant) way on the part of the patient.
Epidemiology
People who have experienced this syndrome are usually tourists, between the ages of 20 and 40 and who do not know the language.
The majority are women, who travel alone or at the most accompanied by a friend and who usually come from cities where there are not many artistic stimuli.
They are people who are not specialists in art, but who know the value of the works of art they are admiring.
They are victims of emotion, which leads them to a different clinical picture according to each of the people in which it manifests.
There are not many epidemiological data on Stendhal syndrome; However, some data indicate that, for example, the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital located in Florence serves about 12 cases per year of Stendhal's syndrome.
Of the patients treated by Magherini, he distinguished three types of syndromes: in about 66% of patients attended, the predominant problems were thought (alterations in the perception of sounds or colors, persecutory feelings, guilt and anxiety).
On the other hand, in 29% of the cases, affections predominated (anxiety, feelings of inferiority, euphoria, omnipotent thinking) and in a remaining 5%, panic attacks or somatizations of distress (sweating, fainting, Epigastric discomfort).
Magherini also attempted to identify factors predisposing to the syndrome by comparing, on the one hand, the demographic and sociocultural characteristics of patients with Stendhal's syndrome and other tourists who had not been affected by it.
He saw that tourists with Stendhal syndrome had a higher average age and also a lower educational level.
In addition, there was a higher percentage of students, single and unoccupied people and less entrepreneurs or people with liberal professions.
Most were women who traveled alone, as we had already mentioned and were traveling on an unorganized trip.
Treatment
There is not much scientific information on the treatment of Stendhal syndrome, given that it is a minority occurrence in a very small population and also in very specific places.
Given its low prevalence and the few implications of it, the treatment is not specific for the syndrome.
In addition, taking into account the individual differences experienced in Stendhal's syndrome, each patient is treated in a specific way.
More than 20 years ago, a group of psychiatrists who are led by Dr. Gabriella Magherini, the psychiatrist who has seen and treated the syndrome in Florence, organized a personalized program.
Thus, the medical team specialized in tourists who came presenting these characteristic clinical symptoms.
Depending on the case, they attended to each patient. In those with mild symptoms, attention was probably simple, with patient stabilization and remission of symptoms, since some patients had only tachycardia or dizziness.
However, in other, more serious cases, entry may be required (for example, in psychotic cases).
Is there really Stendhal's syndrome?
Other authors have also wondered whether this syndrome really exists or whether the sensations Henri Beyle actually described in his diary were actually symptoms of a syndrome.
Many wonder if they really could not be part of the exhaustion and not so much of the beauty before the works.
In addition, they also indicate whether it should not be doubted that it is almost undeniably associated with Florence, where the cases have been described.
Some authors indicate that it also seems similar to the Paris syndrome, which occurs in Japanese tourists of the XXI century and that happens to them after watching live and in three dimensions what they had seen before in images.
These authors also criticize the fact of denominating it syndrome, treating it as if it were a disease, when we are faced with the maximum enjoyment by the beauty of works, feelings of positive emotion and happiness, contrary to unpleasant emotions.
Some also think that it can be a marketing strategy to turn it into an attractive place for onlookers who come to experience it.
At present it seems to be observed more in Asian tourists, especially Japanese. Probably because of the difference in cultures and because of the greater excitement of seeing the live art they had admired in pictures and photographs.
On the other hand, one could say that when contemplating works of art the same brain regions related to emotions are activated, although it can not be defined with certainty that it is a psychiatric disorder.
And you, what do you think about the existence of Stendhal syndrome? Did you know him?
References
- Bamforth, I. (2010). Stendhal's syndrome. British Journal of General Practice.
- Guerrero, A.L., Barceló Rosselló, A. and Ezpeleta, D. (2010). Stendhal's syndrome: origin, nature and presentation in a group of neurologists. Neurology , 25 (6), 349-356.
- Mangieri, R. Paralysis, trauma and crisis in esthetic experience: Stendhal's syndrome. FELS-IASS. Laboratory of Semiotics of the Arts. University of Los Andes.
- Morales García, P. J. Stendhal's syndrome.
- O Callaghan, P. (2003). Stendhal's syndrome. 10th Annual Congress of APPI.
- Quirosa García, V., Luque Rodrigo, L. and Amaro Martos, I. (2014). The Painful Contemplation of Beauty: Analysis and Review of Stendhal's Syndrome. Journal of humanities and social sciences.
- Teive, H., Munhoz, R. and Cardoso, F. (2013). Proust, Neurology and Stendhal's Syndrome. European Neurology, 71, 296-298.
- Traver Torras, F. Brain, beauty and Stendhal syndrome. Provincial Hospital Consortium of Castellón.
- Valenteña Borque, O. (2009). Is Stendhal syndrome really there? Annals of the Royal National Academy of Medicine.