Hysteria’s doing well, in fact she has never had it so good: Reflections starting from Showalter’s Hystories

by | Vol 20 (1) 2002

This is a review of Elaine Showalter’s book concerning the modern appearance of hysteria. We focused mainly on the Incest Recovery Movement and Multiple Personality Disorder, the new way for the hysteric to give shape to the impossible sexual relation. What can properly be defined as the forclusion of the subject and desire in modern trauma therapy, leaves only the option of the Real and its psychotic effects open to the patient.

Related articles

  • Some reflections on urgency, crisis and psychiatry

    Some reflections on urgency, psychiatry and the position of the analyst are the main themes of this article. First of all he takes an historical detour via the figure of Gia¬como Casanova. With his work Ma voisine, la postérité the author compares a medical emergency with the sort of crisis intervention inspired by psychoanalysis. In the second part of the article a crisis is viewed as a place of rime/rhyme – crisis as a frozen discourse of the subject, beyond…

  • Reflections on the structure and finality of psychoanalytic interpretations

    This article differentiates between two forms of interpretation: symbolic and imaginary. It is argued that an analytic interpretation always revisits a symbolic interpretation made by the subject, resulting in the subject also making an imaginary interpretation.. Furthermore, a psychoanalytic interpretation can only be of service to the analytic cure if the analyst makes a cut between the (revisiting of the symbolic) interpretation made by the analyst and the imaginary interpretation made by the analysand.