[The hysterical 'truth strike' and the questions it addresses to the contemporary master]

Today's hysteria, contemporary with its clinical disappearance from current nomenclatures relayed by neuroscience, is scattered in the 'catch-all' categories of conversion disorders, histrionic personality, etc. These approaches convey what Jacques Lacan called the foreclosure of the subject, or what amounts to saying, its rejection or oblivion, in particular in the relationship to knowledge and to the jouissance of the symptom. The Freudian discovery of the unconscious, and its studies on hysteria, which made hysterical conversion a message to be deciphered, is reduced in the contemporary clinic to the dimension of a disorder to be and no longer to be interpreted, because interpretation implies the subject, its word. Fortunately for the clinic, hysteria has other strings to its bow in which the subject ultimately finds his word.