[New Forms of Hysteria: Globalization, Market and the Comeback of Hysteria]

Hysterical disorder has had different interpretations and therapeutic approaches according to the different cultural contexts. In the Middle Ages, hysteria was conceived as devilish possessions whose symptoms became a sort of veracity certificate for the era's cultural pillar: the Bible. During Renaissance, hysteria obeys a new master: Science, dramatizing the neurological degenerative injuries to give reputation to physicians of the time. There is a kind of consensus: hysteria is an ever less observable disorder in consultation. It has practically disappeared in the North American Diagnosis Manual, DSM-IV. We wonder, has hysteria as such disappeared? Has it gotten new expressions?

Psychoanalytic review of hysteria, followed by a qualitative, historical and hermeneutic study.

In these days of globalization, science is not the master anymore; instead, science is at the service of computing and market. The market biggest sellers are: depressive and anxious disorders, bulimia, anorexia, fibromyalgia, sexual drawbacks, somatoform disorders and extreme exhaustion disorder. Hysteria, raising bewilderment in modern medicine, comes back, cut up into pieces, in the form of these multiple disorders. Not only hysteria has not disappeared, but it has increased in consultation, almost perfect simulation of the disorders most promoted by capitalistic markets, granting power to the new master. Subsequently, its powerlessness is denounced, nothing alleviates said disorders. As Freud stated, the problem lies in the fact that this word does not have a receiver to decipher it.