In the English-speaking psychoanalytic world, few diagnostic categories are as controversial as hysteria. This concept, widely held to reflect outmoded cultural prejudices aganist women, has virtually disappeared from our theoretical literature, diagnostic manuals, and traning programs. However far from being gender-bound, hysteria from Jacques Lacan represents a psychic strategy that bears on one of the most fundamental preoccupations of existence: What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man?

This book describes how Freud attempted to chart hysteria, yet came to a standstill at the problem of woman and her desire, and of how Lacan continued along this road by creating new conceptual tools. The difficulties and upsets encountered by both men are examined. This lucid presentation of the dialectical process that carries Lacan through the evolution of Freud's thought offers profound insights into the place of the "feminine mystique" in our social fabric. Patiently and carefully, Verhaeghe applies the Lacanian grid to Freud's text and succeeds in explaining Lacan's formulations without merely recapitulating his theories. The reader is informed, along the way, not only of Lacan's take on Freudian ideas, but also of the array of interpretations emerging from other trends in post-Freudian literature, including feminist revisionism.

The different psychopathologic syndromes show in an exaggerated and caricatural manner the basic structures of human existence. These structures not only characterize psychopathology, but they also determine the highest forms of culture. This is the credo of Freud's anthropology. This anthropology implies that humans are beings of the in-between. The human being is essentially tied up between pathology and culture, and 'normativity' cannot be defined in a theoretically convincing manner. The authors of this book call this Freudian anthropology a patho-analysis of existence or a clinical anthropology. This anthropology gives a new meaning to the Nietzschean dictum that the human being is a 'sick animal'. Freud, and later Lacan, first developed this anthropological insight in relation to hysteria (in its relation to literature).This patho-analytic perspective progressively disappears in Freud's texts after 1905. This book reveals the crucial moments of that development. In doing so, it shows clearly not only that Freud introduced the Oedipus complex much later than is usually assumed, but also that the theory of the Oedipus complex is irreconcilable with the project of a clinical anthropology.The authors not only examine the philosophical meaning of this thesis in the work of Freud. They also examine its avatars in the texts of Jacques Lacan and show how this project of a patho-analysis of existence inevitably obliges us to formulate a non-oedipal psychoanalytic anthropology.

Steeped in Lacanian theory, this book is the first of its kind to present a longitudinal approach to the study of hysteria. In these 21 seminars Dr Melman leads us from the first records of hysteria to Freud’s major discovery of the principal concepts of trauma, incompatibility, repression and the unconscious. Peppered with invaluable clinical examples, the author guides readers through difficult concepts as he links hysteria to the birth of psychoanalysis itself, and demonstrates how the reader may become implicated in this discourse. Capturing Melman’s indomitable spirit, Studies on Hysteria Revisited will be an important read for graduate students, clinicians, and those in psychoanalytic formation.

Hysteria, one of the most diagnosed conditions in human history, is also one of the most problematic. Can it even be said to exist at all? Since the earliest medical texts people have had something to say about 'feminine complaints'. Over the centuries, theorisations of the root causes have lurched from the physiological to the psychological to the socio-political. Thanks to its dual association with femininity and with fakery, the notion of hysteria inevitably provokes questions about women, men, sex, bodies, minds, culture, happiness and unhappiness. To some, it may seem extraordinary that such a contested diagnosis could continue to merit any mention whatsoever. Hysteria Today is a collection of essays whose purpose is to reopen the case for hysteria and to see what relevance, if any, the term may have within contemporary clinical practice.