You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As it was at the previous turn of the century, hysteria is once again a hot topic. Celebrating the centennial of Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud 1893-1895), Muriel Dimen and Adrienne Harris have compiled a collection of sixteen papers, with a preface and introduction that are themselves substantive contributions. The editors, in introducing the volume, skillfully interweave the richly diverse themes elaborated by the contributors regarding the nature of the therapeutic dialogue, authority in doctor-patient roles, and the power of transference and counter-transference. Authors were given the task of reacting to any of the six women patients represented in the Studies, and the result is an interdisciplinary project including not only psychoanalysts of various orientations, but historians, philosophers, and literary critics. The essays are well-written, wide-ranging, and intellectually challenging.
They offer a strong historical perspective, and present “a complex Freud, neither hero nor villain” (Michael Roth, p. 170). With regard to the impact of the female protagonists, Dimen and Harris express the theme that echoes throughout the volume: “the patients, in struggling with their doctors, force their doctors to change, and, in changing, they