Hysteria is a very complex subject and requires viewing from multiple perspectives to be really revealed. Bollas explores many frames and guides the reader around sexuality, conversion, seduction, the mother, the father and the family. All this is in a context of returning to Freud and, in particular, his early papers on hysteria and the development of sexuality. References from different theoretical perspectives wind around these primary themes. Clinical vignettes, which allow patients their own vivid descriptive voice, root the subject in clinical psychoanalysis and enable the various theoretical frames to be understood. The complexity of the task of examining a multiheaded hydra that is hysteria is written in a criss-cross of thoughts on