90

This article sets out to problematize the question of the hysterical patient’s demand, which confronts the psychoanalyst with the pitfalls of a desire for dissatisfaction. Based on the account of a treatment, the author highlights the paradoxes of the hysterical patient’s demand, which constantly struggles between what is made visible through her symptoms and what is invisible and circumvented. Based on the study of transference/counter-transference issues and the phenomenology of hysterical identifications, this article seeks to understand the hysteric’s clinging to dissatisfaction as a need to preserve a state of tension that arouses effects of recognition in and by the other that can respond to the need to represent. The consubstantial mismatch between the offer and the demand in the analyses of hysterical patients thus re-actualizes the impossible quest for a primordial relationship conveying the plenitude and recognition that the hysterical patient never ceases to seek in the gaze of the other.