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The Lacanian Clinical Field is a series designed with a twofold aim: to introduce Lacanian psychoanalysis as it is practiced in the clinic to the American psychotherapeutic community, and to bring the insights of the clinic to bear on the more academic uses of Lacanian theory. Juan-David Nasio's contribution to the series, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis, translated by Susan Fairfield, presents a thorough, readable account of the paradigmatic neurosis of psychoanalysis—hysteria. Not only does he give a view of hysteria from today's couch, outlining its symptoms, causes, and possible cure, but he also provides an encapsulated history of the subject by tracing the phenomenon of hysterical blindness as it has been understood from Charcot to Lacan. Along the way, he delicately introduces the non-clinician to the processes undergone by the analyst on the path to understanding and helping analysands to “pass through the ordeal of anxiety” and accept and mourn the loss of the fiction that had heretofore defined their hystericized relations with the others in their world.
Nasio emphasizes that there are two ways of looking at hysteria, one that is based on specifically observable somatic and mental disturbances, such as unexplained