How can a girl become a woman today without being either a victim or a manipulator? Reflecting on this question, MacCannell takes us for the first time beyond the flawed models for becoming a woman left to us by Freud and Sade.

In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling. More than a portrait of an affair gone wrong, Hysteric is a chronicle of life among the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structured by text messages, missed cell phone calls, the latest DJs and Internet porn. When the writer's aunt read her tarot cards, no predictionsfor her future ever appeared. This tale, an astounding feat of literary realism, shares the story of a woman who loses her identity in a man in hopes of finding love. Told in the same voice that made her first novel Whore an international success, Nelly Arcan manages to answer the challenges she set down for herself in her previous books.

Brings into relief a critical relationship between the female mind and body that is essential to understanding the discursive position of the turn-of-the-century woman writer. This book includes novels that confront this mind/body problem through a wide variety of styles and genres that challenge conventional fin-de-siecle notions of femininity.

Hysteria as a neurosis seems to have disappeared altogether from the psychiatric manuals; but there are articles here and there, particularly in the United States and France, which advocate the existence of hysteria as a psychosis. Hysterical psychosis is the clinical combination of a hysterical personality with a seemingly psychotic state. Looking back to nineteenth-century psychiatry, Katrien Libbrecht attempts to answer the question: Is there such a thing as a hysterical psychosis or are we dealing with hysteria exhibiting psychotic features? Hysterical Psychosis is divided into three sections. The first part of the book carries the reader back to the second half of the nineteenth century, the heyday of the study of hysteria on the eve of the discovery of psychonanalysis. The second part of the book discusses the implications of the generalized impact of Bleuler's concept of schizophrenia during the interbellum period. The last section of the book deals with the current reemergence of hysterical psychosis from the 1960s to the 1990s. Libbrecht provides a historical survey of the most important psychiatric and psychoanalytic references on hysterical psychosis, as well as a review of current research on the matter. She sheds new light on reasons for the disappearance of the diagnosis of hysteria rn the 1950s and the emergence of the notion of hysterical psychosis during the 1960s. Hysterical Psychosis is a landmark study that is essential for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, medical practitioners, and historians of psychology.

Hysteria is alive and well in our present time and is apparently spreading contagiously: especially the second decade of the twenty-first century has displayed an ever-increasing interest in the term. A quick Google search opens the gates to sheer endless swathes of discussions on hysteria, covering almost every aspect of public discourses. The arts—as it is often in such cases—seem conspicuously involved in and engaged with this hysterical discourse. Surprisingly, while the strong academic interest in hysteria throughout the twentieth century and most prominently at the turn of the century is well known and much discussed, the study of how these discourses have continued well into twenty-first-century art practices, is largely pressing on a blind spot. It is the aim of this volume to illustrate how hysteria was already well established within the arts alongside and at times even separately from the much-covered medical studies, and reveal how those current artistic practices very much continue a century spanning cross-fertilization between hysteria and the arts.

Part medical mystery, cultural criticism, and rallying cry, Editor of the Funny Women column at The Rumpus shares her journey to reclaim her authentic voice in a culture that doesn't want to hear or understand women. Throughout the first half of President [BLEEP]'s term, Elissa Bassist saw seventeen medical professionals, joining millions of American women who suffer from indescribable chronic pain. She consulted a psychologist, psychiatrist, ophthalmologist, neurologist, radiologist, psychopharmacologist, allergist, Ear/Nose/Throat specialist, gastroenterologist, orthopedic hand surgeon, occupational therapist, physical therapist, massage therapist, acupuncturist, herbalist, and an obsessive-compulsive disorder specialist. It was the acupuncturist who inquired about caged fury as a contributing factor of the physical maladies, as if the problem had something to do with her voice and what she hadn't expressed. As if treating the voice would treat the problem. Turns out, it did. In sharing her story, Elissa explains how women and girls internalize and perpetuate directives about what to do with their voice, making it hard to "just speak up" and "burn down the patriarchy." Today's mind-body doctors theorize that some physical pain is, in fact, repressed emotional pain finding expression, that emotions pile up in the unconscious, going unarticulated until they hit max capacity and tell the brain to create physical symptoms. When the mind denies itself language, it gives the body pain. If you don't share your story, your pain will tell it for you. Hysterical is inspired by Elissa's own journey to reclaim her authentic voice in a culture that weaponizes silence, noise, and language against women. She offers new ways to think about the female voice and calls on other women to unleash their unheard cry, which was theirs before the world intervened, the one they can learn to hear above all others and use again without regret.

What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and psychoanalysis? What do we know that isn't a platitude that we've heard a thousand times - or a self-satisfied certainty? Through his brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek - one of the most provocative and widely-read thinkers of our time - upends our traditional understanding, dynamites every cliché and undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for new ways of answering these questions. When Lacan described Hegel as the ‘most sublime hysteric’, he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the Other's desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution - his own, and the one to come. This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought.