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.
In this important, inspiring book Greg Mogenson takes on Christopher Bollas's book, Hysteria. Bollas, one of the most visible theoreticians of the object relations ‘school’ of psychoanalysis, and one who can be perceived as spint-friendly, maybe even Jung-friendly, is, in this instance, according to Mogenson, deeply infected by his chosen subject and thus moved to construct this irritated manifesto, and enact an ‘interpretive violence’ on the body of his chosen subject. The book contends that Bollas has fallen prey, as did Freud, to a need to subdue the disease (hysteria) by means of a thorough, and very originally conceived, reduction, a fantasy that ties hysteria to the dynamics of mum and dad, to Oedipal desire and to a wish to regress to the womb. Mogenson writes, ‘There is no place to hide under the conditions of such an all-permeating and all-comprehending consciousness; no hiding place except, of course, the one we make for ourselves through neurosis. Mogenson's case is that this falling for this temptation to reduce psyche's ills to outward cause at the expense of its mystery is to engender further neurosis.
The depth psychological endeavour is founded upon hysterical couples: Dora and Freud, Sabina and Jung, so we cannot fault this author; Mogenson says, Bollas with his hysterical patient is like Professor Higgins with Eliza Doolittle, as irritated at her misuse of language and her failure to be civilized, ‘more like a man’ as is the professor with his gutter-snipe. The chapter on ‘My Fair Hysteria’ exemplifies Mogenson's ability to mix some fun with the profundity of his thought, an act which effectively escorts us to