Studies on Hysteria Revisited

"What a pleasure is in store for you if you can let Melman’s masterful hand guide you from Freud’s signature work on hysteria through to contemporary suffering. Be guided by the prodigious sensitivity and power of Melman’s insights; be guided by the wisdom and warmth of one of the world’s greatest living psychoanalysts as he takes you through the worlds of Freud and Lacan."– C. Edward Robins, Dr. Robins & Associates NYC.

"This work invites a rereading of the symptom, after the discovery by Freud in 1920 of the death drive and its embodiment repetition, by giving to the symptom the status of a ‘fact of structure’. Structure is for Lacan, the effect of there being no sexual rapport between human subjects. As a result, hysteria renews itself by offering the body as a cause of this sexual dissatisfaction. There remains the question of its possible cure – this is the task Dr. Melman sets himself." – Professor Christian Hoffmann, Honorary Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris.

"This English translation offers to those unfamiliar with the French language a foundational text of Lacanian theory and its clinic. By following Freud closely this work restores hysteria to its central place in the structure of neurosis and offers a key to interpreting some of the biggest problems posed by modernity including the phenomena of the leader and the group in populist movements today." – Janja Jerkov, former professor of Southern Slavic Languages and Literature at La Sapienza, University of Rome. Former member of the cartel of the Presidency, L’Association Lacanienne Internationale in Italy. Council member of the Bureau of A.L.I. Paris.