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‘Always provocative, rarely less than brilliant’ enthuses the cover note by Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester. Certainly, every page of Mitchell's book presents a dazzling array of challenging clinical observations and thoughts—but brilliance is not the same as clarity. This is an exciting but often profoundly frustrating book. Mitchell might argue in her closing chapter, ‘There is no way in which hysteria cannot exist; it is a particular response to particular aspects of the human condition of life and death’ (p. 317), but nowhere does she state clearly what hysteria is. Since she appears to view almost everything—from Gulf War syndrome to autism, through eating disorders, dissociative states, witchcraft and borderline personality—as ‘hysteria’, the term can appear bewilderingly all encompassing or even meaningless. To add to the complexity of the book, the broad canvas treatment of hysteria is combined with a new theory of sibling rivalry, or ‘lateral relationships’. Indeed Mitchell sees hysteria as the fundamental way in which human beings express their sibling rivalry and the wish to be the special and uniquely loved child. It is, she argues, ‘supremely mimetic’, manifesting in