You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis began with hysteria, with the dramatically afflicted women of Charcot's Salpetriere and with the meticulously described vignettes in Breuer and Freud's Studies in Hysteria. Our field has literally been built on the fanciful symptoms and transferential relationships implicit in this characterologic style. As Christopher Bollas describes them in this book, these are the patients “who are troubled by their bodies” sexual demands and repress sexual ideas; who are indifferent to conversion; who are overidentified with the other; who express themselves in a theatrical manner; who daydream existence rather than engage it; who prefer the illusion of childlike innocence to the worldliness of the adult” (p. 1).
According to Bollas, psychoanalysis has turned away from these patients toward a fascination with “borderlines” among others, and his intention is to return us to a new hysteria and, I gather, to the intimate connection between psychoanalytic understanding of character and its origins in the body and in sexuality. That Bollas feels he is bringing psychoanalysis back to an important origin is clear in his summary paragraphs.
As the reader will note, this dynamic—repression, perversion, indifference, transcendence, histrionics, transmission—is a complex that remembers the hysteric self's psychic history. No other character suffers this particular psychic