Sexuality as inner drama. On the psychodynamics of hysteria

In this article, hysteria is seen as a pathological form of organization on the threshold of symbolic order, in which fantasmas centering around the "invisible" primal scene serve to deny the separation of the unity between mother and child. In this process, the child alternately engages in projective identification with father and mother as protagonists of the primal scene. The feeling of arousal associated with this masks the catastrophic anxieties produced by the absence of the mother. As conflictual pressure mounts, this "inner drama" takes the form of enactment, both in child-hood and later. The onset of this development is marked by the internalization of a both arousing and rejecting mother, combined with a promise relating to an undetermined future. Against this background, hysterical defense can also be understood as a dual negation with which both symbolic castration and the hysteric's own sexuality are denied. From this point of view, the author discusses subjective bodily experience, hysterical confusion games, sexualization, demonstrative asceticism, and the ongoing idealization of the father.