Edited by Anouchka Grose, this collection gathers Lacanian analysts and writers to ask what has become of hysteria now that psychiatry has quietly dropped it from its diagnostic manuals. The contributors treat that disappearance as a puzzle rather than a settled fact: the label has gone, yet the clinical structure it named keeps returning under other names and in other bodies. Reading hysteria as a question the subject puts to desire, the essays trace how it presses on femininity, seduction, sexuality, and the demand to be recognised.
Contributions come from Darian Leader, Colette Soler, Genevieve Morel, Leonardo S. Rodriguez, Vincent Dachy, Anne Worthington, and Grose herself, ranging across clinical theory, cultural criticism, and the history of the diagnosis. Several chapters test the Lacanian account against contemporary material, from popular fiction to shifting sexual identities.
For a practising analyst, the volume offers a way to hear hysterical address in the consulting room without reaching for a discarded category.
About the author
Anouchka Grose
Anouchka Grose is a British psychoanalyst and writer based in south east London. She is a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR), where she also lectures, and works within the Lacanian tradition. She has practised one-to-one psychoanalysis since 2003. Her books include No More Silly Love Songs, a guide to romance; From Anxiety to Zoolander; and A Guide to Eco-Anxiety, and she edited the collection Hysteria Today. She contributes to The Guardian and BBC Radio 4.
Details
- 2016
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 138
- 9781782201045