Few diagnostic categories are as controversial in psychoanalysis as hysteria. Widely held to reflect outmoded cultural prejudices against women, hysteria has virtually disappeared from our theoretical literature, diagnostic manuals, and training programs. However, far from being gender-bound, this book shows that hysteria for 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 companion text to "Introduction the Reading of Lacan" focuses on the concept of the psychic structures of desire. Using case examples, Dor explains the crucial difference between symptomsowhich can be phenomenologically graspedoand the actual psychic structure of the subjectowhich can be revealed only through the discourse of the patient in the psychoanalytic situation. This work brings life and practicality to a psychoanalytic movement that has been misperceived and divorced from the daily vicissitudes of analytic work."