Customer Reviews

Hysteria

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the book to consult. rich, complex. and best savored in small, delicate bites, Bollas offers some insights about hysterics you simply won't find anywhere else. For example, he delineates the intricacies of exactly why the hysteric tries to find him-herself in the desire of the other. Bollas also explains why the hysteric eschews the physical and the sexual( the mother denied the infant's body). Further, Bollas makes such lucid sense of the hysteric's array of physical maladies. (She is offering her body to medical professionals to care for, attend, touch, and love, the way her mother never did.)

If after much clinical reading on the topic of hysteria, you are still feeling as if the fragments don't solidify into some concrete theory of your patient's psychic structure, this book will provide you with imaginative possibilities, many you probably have not conceived of before.

Goodness! Reading this book, I can't help but wonder how we've gotten along without it for so long, or for as long as hysteria as a working clinical-theoretical construct has been banished from our vernacular. Bollas depicts with great creativity and clarity just what hysteria is, and gives us a working sense of how to differentiate it from other psychic structures, especially the borderline, with which it has most commonly been misunderstood. True to classical and object relations thinking, the author also extends our understanding of this most complex patient. His differential descriptions of various structures is done through not only what the patient struggles with, but also how both the transference and the countertransference vary. A must-read! for any psychotherapist serious about working the depths of our patients.