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The importance of this book is that it brings alive, once again, the extraordinary complexity of the hysteria that resides within more of us than most of us care to think. For many, hysteria may have lost its place in contemporary psychoanalytic preoccupation, consigned for the most part to memories of the tribulations of ladies of a certain type, now long gone. Considering, however, the ever-increasing waves of public hysteria that seem to awash our contemporary experience, this in some ways is surprising. Prevailing interest in borderline phenomena, the influence of infancy and attachment theory sit curiously in a world seemingly caught up in the fray of frenetic sexual display. Could it be that psychoanalysis has chosen, like the hysteric, to repress sexuality? As Christopher Bollas suggests in this fascinating book, ‘it is arguable that the rise of the borderline personality in the 1950s drawing psychoanalysts’ interests towards the “primitive” and the “pre-oedipal”, constituted an hysterical movement within the psychoanalytic community itself’.
Taking to heart Laplanche's protest against the ‘desexualization’ of psychoanalysis, Bollas has written a book that powerfully reminds us of the force of sexuality in personality development and of its vicissitudes in the many forms of hysteria. He builds substantially on Freud's Studies on Hysteria and takes us much further, not merely leaving us with a variation of the ordained view. Rather, he weaves a web of thought and ‘imaginary’ into a fresh level of theory that is inventive and elucidatory in helping us make sense of the subtlety of the hysterical personality.
The key issue in Bollas’ study is the hysteric's sheer inability to integrate the reality of the sexual body and in particular the genitals. He or she (for, unlike the traditional view, Bollas believes that hysteria resides equally within both genders) is at odds with the body. He or she is terrified of physical and mental intimacy. Sexuality is seen as essen