ABSTRACT
Dora characterizes the issue of female desire only in that hysteria is a caricature of 'normality'. By including men among hysterical patients, Sigmund Freud joins in the attempt to give scientific status to the proposition of hysteria as a psychiatric diagnosis. The liberation of sexual morality, the loss of a certain 'innocence' in women, the change in the 'feminine ideal', the social acceptance of sexuality, would all have been contributory factors in the disappearance of hysteria as such. But hysteria is always there, defining the Freudian psychoanalytic field, and 'not as a witness to dogmatic orthodoxy, but as a central element of a psychopathology which offers its meaning to the thinking'. Hysteria is considered the neurosis closest to normality, the prototype of the neurotic individual. It is all apparently there, nothing could be clearer: the question of the third one, the Oedipal conflict, the enigma of sexuality through somatizations.
