Abstract

The keyword for understanding so-called functional disorders i.e. psychogenic disorders or neurosis is – hysteria. This ancient medical term has its roots back in Old Egypt and stays as the diagnosis in medical nosology since the 17th Century, but in contemporary psychiatric nosology it has been renamed and excluded since 1952. and the first DSM and especially after revolutionary DSM-III (1980) and turned into different diagnostical categories that we consider as „breaking up of hysteria“ as the kind of unifying frame for understanding neurotic suffering. As psychoanalysts and psychodynamic psychiatrists as well, we consider that in this way it has opened the path for the creation of the vast number of behavioral syndromes, so-called disorders without psychogenic etiologies. Psychoanalysis itself has started as psychotherapy of hysteria and did understand this disease better than anyone and anything before or after. Psychoanalysis didn’t answer yet to all the questions concerning the „enigma of hysteria“ and new answers we expect from the neuroscientific fields: neurobiology and neuropsychoanalysis. We think also that we as psychoanalysts should keep hysteria „alive“ in medical disciplines that gave up this ancient term too easily. Also that we should stay in constructive dialogue with hysteria, the protean illness that changes its clinical pictures in every epoch and to continue to treat hysterics whatever diagnosis or ideology they could use as a mask. Although there is a reference to the womb (Hystera), Hysteria is not a „female malady“, is evident in both sexes and in many fashionable „genders“ as well. In this paper, we will use just the medical history of the disease, psychiatric nosology and recent psychoanalytical views on hysteria.