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Hysteria is Christopher Bollas's meditation on the etiology and clinical configuration of the muse of psychoanalysis. The book is organized into fourteen chapters, which outline and develop his theory on the many faces of the hysteric. Bollas begins with Freud's conceptualization of the hysteric malady and refines it through the lens of British Object Relations theory (mainly Klein and Winnicott), adding a decidedly French Lacanian twist. What we are left with is a complex mixture of theory, clinical acumen, and poetic representation. This small book, which Bollas refers to as an essay, is packed with ideas and images which arouse the senses of the reader, acting as a refractory object which reflects, breaks down and re-creates the internal world of the hysteric for us.
The main thesis of the book centers around the notion that the hysteric is grounded by a physical body which must be re-created in the imaginary in order to express its internal distress. Thus, sexuality, the grounding force of our existence, must remain repressed for the hysteric, appearing only in dress up clothes for the ball. Thus far, Freud and Bollas speak of the same muse. But Bollas moves quickly beyond this description, into the realm of the internal world; the world which commands the hysteric into privileging performance. We are now looking at our muse as a derivative of the maternal character, the original theater of the primary object and its relational configurations.
For Bollas, the hysteric has experienced a maternal narrative of love and passion. It is the maternal desire for the child's sexual body (particularly the genitals) which is excluded from her narrative, so that although the hysteric has experienced maternal love and investment in other areas, sexuality remains circumspect. Because the self seeks out the maternal object of desire in order to (re)present it to the mother, the hysteric's ailment is the suspension of her sexuality so as not to imperil the primary object tie. The