Hysteria: Where has it Gone?: A Review of Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria by Juliet Mitchell. New York:  Basic Books, 2000.  xii + 381 pp. Hysteria by Christopher Bollas. New York:  Routledge, 2000.  192 pp. Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis by Juan-David Nasio, Translated by Susan Fairfield. New York:  Other Press, 1998.  xxii + 151 pp. Storms in Her Head: Freud and the Construction of Hysteria edited by Muriel Dimen and Adrienne Harris. New York:  Other Press, 2001.  xvii + 358 pp.

Language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’

Most of the essays in Studies on Hysteria by Breuer and Freud were published in 1895. Thus, 1995 was its unofficial centennial and a chance for psychoanalysts to wonder, not for the first time, “whatever

happened to hysteria?” The quotation above is from the “Preliminary Communication” (p. 8), the 1893 essay that was the opening chapter of their joint publication. They are brave words, but also costly ones. They became the basis for a stereotype of analytic technique that turned out to be problematic; new qualifications had to be made, which the lay public did not always know about. In the last essay of the book, dated two years later, Freud was already beginning to introduce such concepts as defence, therapeutic alliance, and transference. Nevertheless, there are still patients who start analysis hoping that their problems will be over once they verbally recapture con brio something they once had, but then lost. It would probably have helped if they had been told that these brave words were written about cases of hysterical amnesia. Treatment of hysteria once represented what little psychoanalysis there was. Hysteria was taken on board first, it might be said, but was gradually lost in the ship's hold. Lacan, as we shall see, seems to have carried forward the trend of generalizing hysteria into much of psychoanalysis, but others tried to bury hysteria like a dead grandfather, honored but irrelevant. Many feminists, understandably, skipped the funeral. Two of the books under review ask, in effect, did hysteria really just wander off into the night, or does it “return” like a ghost when least expected? If so, where is it now?

One way to answer the question about where hysteria went is to say, “We have met hysteria and it is us.” This is the view of Christopher Bollas's new book, Hysteria. He states that in New York City over a decade ago, he supervised analyst