Distinguishing the Drama from the Histrionics in a Case of Hysteria with Multiple Tics

The author describes a clinical experience with a hysterical patient with multiple tics, an upper-middle class, married woman, who when she started analysis at the age of 30 was in a state of profound tension and anxiety. The first eight years of this analysis are presented in order to describe how the analyst came to identify the dynamics of unconscious phantasies in a situation where analyst and patient found themselves involved in several roles of a drama dominated by theatrics. The insights and therapeutic benefits suggested that this patient unconsciously experienced her oral needs as intensely destructive and cruel, an experience she felt to have been exacerbated by her mother's lack of response to her emotional needs. This primitive cruel orality was accompanied by a split-off experience of a secret, mystical union with the primitive idealised mother. The author considers that this split experience of cruel and idealised orality suffused the patient's genital sexuality, hindering the evolution and realisation of her adult sexuality, giving her a distorted view of the primal scene as an impenetrable fused amalgam acting as an omnipotent, self-sufficient, excluding phallus. Gradually analysis enabled the patient to transform her bodily theatrics into thoughts and to broach the difficult task of relating to others instead of being either fused with them or totally excluded by them.