“Of course, what is lost in this conception of hysteria is precisely one of its most fundamental characteristics; hysteria moves and grows beyond the confines of whatever conceptual grid we try to fit it into. If it’s not here, now, it’s there; wherever we have made there out to be (Victorian era, “pain clinics”, fibromyalgia, eating disorders). To listen to and for hysteria is to move, with our analysands, with our bodies, moving psychoanalytically, thereby comprising a psychoanalytic movement. Which is to say that hysteria lives in the light of metaphor, and yes, the drift of metonymy.
So where does hysteria move now? Where does it threaten to break the surface? The essays in this issue speak directly to this question. They investigate, they analyze a linguistic-logical domain opened up by hysteria. Instead of idly sitting by as psychiatry, psychology, and political ideologies attempt to suture up this realm, this wound or thorn in the side of conscious rationality, each of the following articles makes a move on this fissure in knowledge that gave and continues to give birth to psychoanalysis and the question of sexual difference that is at the heart of hysteria.”
Feminine Pathologies: An EJP Special Edition edited by Fernando Castrillon and Jamieson Webster
