TOWARDS the end of her examination of hysteria and the attraction of the irrational, Elaine Showalter asks why so many intelligent people believe bizarre stories. She is referring particularly to tales of satanic abuse, but the question nevertheless informs the whole of her thought-provoking book.

In attempting an answer, she has, in the past, incurred the wrath of all those, and they are legion, who accept the invariable validity of recovered memory, believe that three or four different personalities may inhabit one body, and take as gospel truth children's devil-worship fantasies. She has been, she writes, "booed, hissed, denounced and accused of disloyalty to women".

Yet she is at pains to insist that she is not calling Chronic Fatigue Syndrome "imaginary", only that it is psychologically caused. Its symptoms are as real as any physiological illness. Sufferers from ME are seriously ill, just as sufferers from MS are. But a century after Freud, enormous prejudice still exists against any imputation that one's mind might not be an entirely rational and balanced organ. In spite of our obsession with all things psychological - the popular use of the expression "psychosomatic" is an example - mental infirmity is often still seen as moral weakness. We are apparently unable to acknowledge the mind's ability to convert powerful emotions into bodily sickness.

"Hystory" is the word she proposes to describe her hysterical case histories. Before Charcot and Freud, hysteria was believed to have a uterine cause and therefore denied to the wombless male. But the First World War brought with it an epidemic of something doctors scarcely dared to call male hysteria and dubbed it "shell shock". Men had it too and ever since, in its manifold forms, it has swept the world.

The most compelling part to the detached reader of Professor Showalter's Hystories deals with the epidemics: Chronic Fatigue, Gulf War, Recovered Memory and Multiple Personality Syndromes, and with satanic abuse and alien abduction. It is here that she is most politically incorrect and sticks most courageously to her guns.

On the subject of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, she comments that the "acronym ME also ironically emphasises the patient's self-absorption"; and she quotes Ian Hacking's shrewd and sensitive assessment of multiple personality as "a new way to be an unhappy person". In the case of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, help from mental health specialists is seldom sought and suggestions that it should be are met with accusations of government cover-ups and world conspiracies against sufferers. Multiple Personality Syndrome, meanwhile, may be in part an iatrogenic disorder, brought about by therapeutic intervention and rewarded by attention.

[People] in this country have had our share of satanic ritual stories, but serious acceptance of kidnapping by little green men is less familiar. In his The Demon-Haunted World Carl Sagan calls it a peculiarly American manifestation - we have ghosts and crop circles - of a preoccupation with the occult. With quiet irony Professor Showalter says that alien abduction seems a little over the top and has formulated what she calls Showalter's Law: "As the hystories get more bizarre, the experts get more impressive." Ufologists dismiss matters inconsistent with material reality as "mysteries", and the old, apparently unanswerable, question is asked: if this isn't happening, what is?

Her considered and level-headed reply is that we must try to understand the psychological dynamics of hysteria. We must realise and accept what the mind can do.