ABSTRACT
In these pages we have provided a “supplement of reading” for many aspects of Bollas’s theory of hysteria. That it has been possible to do so with such vigor, I believe, owes something to the fact that his account of the ways in which the hysteric resists analysis, even while seeming to take to it so well, is a very compelling one. To my mind, however, what is compelling about his account is not to be found in its literal meaning, but in the suspending or seeing through of this. Bollas’s Hysteria, I submit, is not the clinical book it purports to be. Not at all an analysis of hysteria as a positively existing malady. On the contrary, if read from the more radical perspective that it carries within itself, it is a writerly enactment of the unthought known that psychoanalysis has itself become within the culture of the Western soul, a psychoanalysis (or nearly so) of analysis itself at its centenary.
