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This work by Sarantis Thanopulos, which has a very appealing title, comes across as a sort of passionate defence of some new perspectives that could make psychoanalysis itself an object of desire if they were to deal bravely with illusion and loss. The discipline of psychoanalysis owes its vitality to research and the awareness that it is degraded and demeaned by clinging to dogma.
It is a short book; rich and original, which is articulated around the theme of lack, understood as the guarantor of all difference. Thanopulos delves into the theoretical core of identification and, in particular, hysterical identification, which he distinguishes from and compares with narcissistic identification. These are some of the central themes concerning the intersection and connection between hysteria and identification that I found in my reading. Beyond Freud, but starting from Freud, Thanopulos focuses on the theme of desire and its object. Freud describes desire as a drive, different from the satisfaction of a need, searching in vain for the primary object that has been lost forever. The source of desire can thus be traced back to a replacement of the original satisfaction at the breast, which is no longer present in the perception of the real primary object but is achieved instead through a hallucinatory retention of it. This transition allows for its recovery and, through the first perception, its reappearance.
The author highlights that hysterical identification involves a connection with the other, which implies a turning outwards of the desire. That follows the original self-referential condition of the psyche and therefore of the desire. This can be seen in the considerations that had already been expressed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Examining this issue leads the author to provide a series of fertile and complex hypotheses on the nature and function of hysterical identification.
Freud considers hysteria predominantly as an alteration of the body's functio