Hysteria at the time of the DSM-5: an obsolete diagnosis or a resource for the clinic?

The author retraces the main steps of the historical path taken by the diagnosis of hysteria in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, describing its vicissitudes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from DSM-II (1968) to DSM-5 (2013). In the last editions (DSM-IV and DSM-5) the term "hysteria" has been abandoned and, with it, also the unitary conception of this pathology, present instead in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic tradition starting from the first modern theories formulated since the end of the 19th century (Briquet, Babinski, Bernheim, Charcot, Janet and Freud). The current nosological derivatives, in the DSM, can be found in some distinct categories, such as Conversion Disorder, Pseudocyesi and Dissociative Disorders, as well as Histrionic Personality Disorder. Referring to the contributions of psychoanalysis, the author identifies the tendency to communicate discomfort through indirect channels (body, states of consciousness, emotionality) as the common denominator of hysterical functioning, which justifies the maintenance of this diagnosis as a conceptually unitary category.