ABSTRACT
Hysteria is once again considered viable at the present time and we have concerned ourselves with its presence in the matrix as both an aspect of one’s personal makeup (intrapsychic) and particular interpersonal (intersubjective) analytic processes. I now wish to review the psychoanalytic thinking on perversion and to consider its co-existence with hysteria. I would like to demonstrate how perversion, like hysteria, should be regarded as encompassing both the intrapsychic and the intersubjective, the two creating a synthesis rather than a dichotomy of the negative and the positive as Freud originally conceived them. In my opinion the current notion of the multiplicity of sexuality (Chodorow, 1994, among others) does not preclude our need for the psychoanalytic configurations of hysteria and perversion and their particular phenomena of transference and countertransference to guide our clinical work.
