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As Patricia Gherovici (2017) has recently noted, the histories of psychoanalysis and hysteria are intimately connected. Both demonstrate that there is no natural object for the drive; both are testimony to the fact that there is no pre-given “normal” model of sexuality. The imperative to reiterate these two fundamentally Freudian principles is particularly urgent today, in an era of trans-gender/sexuality, in a time when psychoanalysis is more than ever being called upon to demonstrate its relevance. Hence, the urgency of attending to what hysteria might be, and what diverse forms hysteria might take, in today's world.
Anouchka Grose's impressive collection of essays, published by Karnac under the imprint of London's Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, provides an instructive means of comparing varying definitions and descriptions of hysteria in contemporary clinical work.
Grose's opening chapter, which provides a wonderfully succinct overview of historical conceptualizations of hysteria, notes the opprobrium that has been targeted on the diagnostic notion of hysteria by feminism, before asserting that
in the Lacanian clinic, a diagnosis of hysteria is anything but an affront. Dissatisfaction is the motor for desire, and desire drives existence. Hysterics specialise at using dissatisfaction to keep desire spinning, acting against atrophy and ossification. Far from trying to get them to stop fussing and get back in line, one might encourage them to take their questioning further, to use it in their lives and work, and even to attempt to enjoy it. (p. xxx)
Hence, Lacan's terminological choice in the 1970s, when he spoke about the need to “hystericize” neurotic analysands, stressing in this way the importance within clinical work of confronting incongruities and questioning what analysands claim to know about themselves and their history. So,
Far from portraying hysterics as people who foolishly manufacture symptoms in a doomed attempt to buck the syste