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The “mad man” is the paradoxical hero of Juliet Mitchell's last book: he is the disappeared or disavowed hysterical man, who is given to us first and foremost through his eloquent absence from both psychoanalytic and psychiatric discourse. This missing hero is not simply described or “represented” in this book, but is “reclaimed” by this book, as stated in the title, and he is reclaimed through a very complex plot, which is not always easy to follow. Indeed we are confronted with a piece of writing, which proceeds simultaneously along many fronts, with no precise hierarchy, as if the different arguments were siblings. In a way, it is a book written according to the very principle of “laterality” which is also reclaimed in it. Unfortunately, in order to review it, I cannot avoid a tentative conversion of this parallelism into a sequential rendition of it — i.e. I could not avoid selecting one among the many possible pathways, which are still awaiting “recognition”.
First of all we find the horizon of history. Here the disappearance of male hysteria is duplicated by the disappearance of hysteria at large. It is a well-known fact that hysteria became rare after World War I and that it was later demised from the diagnostic manuals (where it was replaced by the notion of “histrionic personality disorder”). However, the author find this vanishing unacceptable; she considers it as “nonsensical” as saying that “love” or “hate” have vanished (p. 6). Once assumed that “there is no way in which hysteria cannot exist”1, the question becomes: “Where did hysteria go to?” And we find two possible answers. One, which has became rather common nowadays, assumes that, if the symptoms of hysteria are not recognized, it is because they are hidden behind other diagnostic categories, which have been used to “encapsulate acute hysteria” in both women and men2. A second response is that the symptomatic expressions of hysteria are changeable according to some principle. Wha