ABSTRACT
Many psychoanalysts believe it is useful to employ the counter-transference towards a reconstruction of the patient's early infantile object world. Hysterical patients believe that the only way they will ever be known by anyone is if they can compel the other to witness them because of their unconscious conviction – based on cumulative experiences of the mother – that no one thinks about them. Hysterics do not believe in using language for the reciprocal exchange of feeling and meaning because the mother did not give the hysteric a continuous experience of finding through language adequate transformation of unintegrated affective and instinctual states. Hysteria is the creation of at least two persons – originally mother and child – and what was previously presented in hysterical symptomatology as a neurotic creation, the afflictions of one person, now becomes the illness of two persons in the analytical situation.
