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To talk about hysteria today is to return to the foundations of the Freudian discovery and, at the same time, to stand at the cutting edge of what we see going on today both in our daily clinical practice and in the current discontents of civilization. If it is only psychoanalysis that can recognize (or provide) a place in the world to the hysteric today and can accompany her in her contemporary forms, we must keep in mind that her hysteria is not simply “in the spirit our times”; rather, it “made and makes the spirit of our times,” as she has always known how to do.
One hears lately that hysteria might not exist any longer. We read that neurosis is finished, and hysteria, gone. The term has all but disappeared from recent psychiatric nomenclature. I emphasize “lately” because, compared to the 4000 years during which medical discourse has sheltered, classified, and tried repeatedly to give meaning to hysterical symptoms, the brief decades of the DSM, which have suppressed hysteria, are actually quite short. Nevertheless, one can still say that there is nothing more enigmatic and paradoxical for medical science than hysterical symptoms.
With hysteria, the body is, from the very first, exposed. It is revealed in an aberrant symptomatic geography, without regard for physiology, anatomy, or the prodigious medical knowledge that has been developed over the ages. Moreover, we could say that the body of the hysteric constitutes a defiance of established knowledge, whether it is the knowledge of the physician, the priest, the guru, or indeed, more recently, the knowledge of the analyst.
At the same time, one is struck by the fact that all physicians, even the so-called physicians “of the soul,” have wanted to see in these symptoms the manifestation of a requirement for sexual satisfaction. A requirement, moreover, that is seen as coming from an organ, rather than a subject, whence the physicians' enthusiastic quest to eradicate the hysterical symptoms. Indeed, over the course