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One must feel, to the depths of one's being, what an utter blessing is woman. (Nietzsche)
Hysteria, so long forgotten—not to say repressed—in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, has at last become a legitimate subject for reflection again. This is one of the merits of the collection of texts here translated into Italian and edited by Franco Scalzone and Gemma Zontini. In his foreword, André Green notes that, whereas in psychoanalysis ‘everything began with hysteria …
everything is now again proceeding from it’. In addition to the introduction, by Dr Scalzone himself, the volume contains many of the principal international contributions on the subject—including the classical studies of Marmor and Zetzel (from the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies), the later essays by Laplanche, Khan and Brenman (dating from the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties), and recent papers by Rupprecht-Schampera, Halberstadt-Freud and Green (from the nineteen nineties). It is no coincidence that the title of the chapter that includes the last group also contains the term ‘borderline’, indicating a boundary area of pathology in which, however, narcissism plays a much more important part than hysteria with its ‘erotic’ basis.
The book had already recalled Fairbairn's designation of the ‘hysterical’ personality trend as the first ‘(meta)-historical’ level of organisation of psychic development. Along the same lines, I personally was particularly impressed by Dr Scalzone's emphasis on the importance of hysteria as a primary mental state and its relation to bisexuality in the context of an integrated unitary model.
In my view, hysteria can indeed be seen not only as the pathology of the origins of psychoanalysis, but also as a mode of functioning of the primal psyche. Again, hysteria commonly tends to be seen today as the psychic disease of ‘femininity’, not so much in the biological sense as in that of psychic bisexuality and of relational modes of experience. For, as Dr Sc