Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis

"Where have they gone, the hysterics of the past, these marvelous women--the Anna O's, the Doras . . ." ( Lacan 1977b, p. 64), all those women who provided the womb from which psychoanalysis was born? It is owing to their words that Freud, as he listened to them, discovered an entirely new kind of human relationship. But the hysteria of those early years did not only give birth to psychoanalysis; it left an indelible stamp on the theory and practice of the discipline today. For above and beyond the changes that have inevitably taken place, the thinking of analysts nowadays and the techniques they utilize continue to be closely connected to the treatment of hysterical suffering. Psychoanalysis and hysteria are so inextricably linked that the governing principle of analytic therapy is this: to treat and cure hysteria, we have to create another hysteria artificially. The psychoanalysis of any neurosis, when all is said and done, is just the artificial setting up of a hysterical neurosis and its final resolution. If, by the end of the analysis, we have overcome this new, artificial neurosis--one that was entirely created between patient

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