Yarom, Nitza. The Matrix of Hysteria. Psychoanalysis of the Struggle between the Sexes as Enacted in the Body. London & New York:  Routledge, 2005. Pp.  243. Hbk. £29.95.

Hysteria is firmly ensconced in the public consciousness as a pejorative description of female behaviour characterized by uncontrolled morbid excitements and unpredictable displays of emotional fireworks and in addition, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘disturbances of moral and intellectual faculties’. Hysteria has never man­aged to discard its early Greek origin in the vagaries of the migrating womb and taboos surrounding sexuality and fertility. The literature is bursting with tragicomic, neuras­thenic ladies suffering from the vapours and harbouring unconsummated desires and sexual traumas as in Sheridanapos;s stage instruction that the heroine always goes mad in white satin or Dickens’ monstrously egotistical Miss Havisham caught in the time warp of her fossilized wedding breakfast. The origins of hysteria in infantile sexual trauma have also become a post-Freudian truism. In Terry Johnsonapos;s burlesque comedy Hysteria from 1993, a dying Freud sedated by morphine is haunted by the apparition of the daughter of a former patient accusing him of treachery for abandoning the seduction