This text is an observation and an offered perspective, not a disparagement. Neither DARVO nor historical hysteria is intended to be ridiculed or trivialised here. Nor does the analogy claim that the phenomena are equivalent.
There is a moment, just before someone would have to admit that they have done something wrong. Sometimes you can see it before it happens – a brief hesitation, a look that lingers on you for a millisecond too long. For a moment, anything would still be possible: asking questions. Pausing. Perhaps even the sentence: That’s true. That wasn’t right.
And then it doesn’t come.
Instead, something else does.
That actually, the other person started it. That they themselves are the one being attacked. That this whole situation is, quite frankly, outrageous. The original question disappears, and suddenly the discussion is about whether it should ever have been asked in the first place.
DARVO is the name given to this pattern: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Jennifer Freyd coined the term in the context of responses to allegations of abuse. That does not mean that every defensive reaction, every counterattack or every angry conversation is automatically DARVO. What matters is the movement: a confrontation with one’s own possible wrongdoing is rejected, the person raising it is attacked, and one’s own position is ultimately presented as that of the person who has actually been wronged. What is interesting is not merely that this reversal happens, but why it is sometimes needed so urgently.
Because a confrontation does not always concern only an action. It can strike at a self-image. Someone who needs to see themselves as controlled, superior, rational or invulnerable may hear something larger in the sentence ‘You did something wrong’: You are not the person you believe yourself to be. Criticism then becomes a threat. At that moment, loudness can take on a function: it creates pressure, forces the other person to react and shifts attention away from the original action and onto the conflict itself. Suddenly, it is no longer the person whose behaviour was raised who has to explain themselves. The other person has to explain why they brought it up, why now, why in that way, why at all. Loudness proves nothing. It merely changes the situation.
At this point, however, we could make things easier for ourselves. Humans have plenty of experience doing that, after all.
The history of hysteria offers an interesting case study. The term is far older than modern medicine and was associated with ideas about the female body for a very long time. In the nineteenth century, ‘hysteria’ became a prominent medical catch-all category for a wide range of physical and psychological phenomena. The explanations were not uniform: they ranged from older uterine theories to neurological models and psychological interpretations. Jean-Martin Charcot explicitly studied hysteria in men as well and attempted to understand it as a functional or dynamic neurological disorder. Nevertheless, the category remained culturally strongly associated with femininity.
And within that lies a remarkably persistent temptation: we observe a behaviour, notice who we seem to see it in particularly often, give it a name – and eventually the name no longer merely describes the behaviour, but seemingly the person themselves.
So we could simply do the same thing today. If men, when confronted, should prove particularly likely to respond with dominance, loudness or counterattack, we could simply turn it into a male disorder. Give it a scientific-sounding name, a few symptoms, perhaps even a scale from one to ten. Problem solved. The man could be treated. Except that we would have quietly turned ‘This behaviour occurs here’ into ‘This person is like this’ – and turned a possible prevalence into its cause. Perhaps socialisation, gender roles, status, shame and differing sanctions for behaviour play a part. Perhaps individual history alters the picture more profoundly than the category of gender allows us to see. That would have to be investigated, not assumed. Otherwise, we would have found a name without having understood anything.
The man would have been treated.
And the pattern would have remained.
But even then, we may already be moving too quickly again.
Because dividing people into men and women initially tells us only whom we are grouping, not why a particular behaviour arises. Even if differences between these groups can be observed, that still does not explain what produces them. Biology, socialisation, gender identity, ascribed gender roles, status, social environment, positions of power and individual history can overlap. A category can make something visible while simultaneously concealing differences within its own boundaries.
Perhaps, then, the logic of status is more interesting than gender itself. Where identity is strongly tied to maintaining control, not appearing weak or avoiding loss of status in relation to others, criticism acquires an additional meaning. This logic can be connected to traditional ideas of masculinity without therefore being tied to a male body or a male identity. People can learn the same rules, adopt them, reject them or use them against others, regardless of which of our broad categories we initially place them in.
And unfortunately, that makes things complicated again. We had just wanted to know why some men react this way. Now we would have to ask under what conditions people learn that attack is a useful response to humiliation, loss of control or threatened status. That is less convenient. But perhaps it is closer to the subject.
What is insidious about a DARVO dynamic, then, is the shifting of the point of reference. The person who originally raised an issue suddenly finds themselves on the defensive. They defend their perception, their tone, their motives. The longer this continues, the further the conversation moves away from the original question. Eventually, both people are discussing only how something was said, rather than what happened. None of this requires a consciously devised plan. A pattern can work without the person enacting it fully understanding what they are doing.
On a larger scale, the same structure can also appear in public or political disputes: a position crosses a boundary, encounters resistance and subsequently presents that very resistance as evidence that it is itself being persecuted or oppressed. Caution is needed here too. Not every counterattack is a reversal of roles, not every self-description as a victim is false, and not every act of resistance is justified. Perhaps, then, the better question is not immediately: Who is the perpetrator and who is the victim? But rather: What is happening to responsibility? Does it remain attached to the original action and get examined there – or does it suddenly migrate to the person who raised it?
Perhaps that is precisely where the connection to hysteria lies. Not in the phenomena being comparable, but in the temptation of the observer. We see something, name it, and because the term works, at some point we forget that there is still a space between the behaviour we observe and our explanation of it. Into that space belong socialisation, situation, biography, power, gender, status, fear and shame. And probably things for which we do not yet have a suitable term.
We can close that space, stick a diagnosis on it and place a person inside. Very tidy. We can also stick a gender category on it and believe that we have understood something more. Or we can keep the space open and endure the less comfortable possibility that a behaviour can simultaneously be something for which a person is responsible, something harmful and something still in need of explanation.
Explanation does not excuse it. Responsibility does not make explanation unnecessary.
Perhaps that is the real difficulty. The simple story would be more comfortable: There is the guilty person. There is their defect. There is the group they belong to. Now we know what is going on.
But a category is, first of all, a tool for organising observations. It is not yet a cause.
Loudness does not prove who is right. And a term certainly does not prove that we have understood what we have named.
Sometimes loudness shows that something, somewhere, has been struck.
The more interesting question begins afterwards:
What exactly?
Written on 21 August 2026 at 7:30. © 2026 Whisper7. All rights reserved.