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Hysteria, is as such, always a historical formation; it reacts to the predominant mode of ideological interpellation (identification). This historical approach also allows us to refute the standard argument according to which, in today's permissive era, we no longer get hysterical patients whose symptoms are caused by oppressed sexuality. What is usually referred to as borderline is precisely hysteria in our time of permissiveness and when the traditional figure of the master is more often replaced by the neutral expert legitimized by his (scientific) knowledge:
Thankfully, the social order no longer explicitly backs women so completely into a corner as in the age of the housewife. Yet women still face conflicting pressures, such as those that Carrie feverishly attempts to navigate in her quest to avoid being "that girl" in ''Sex and the City''. Indeed, some of the contradictions have even been intensified and complicated as, for example, women are expected to excel in profes sional professional life while still meeting traditional requirements of motherhood. If anything, women suffer from having ''too many ''mutually contradictory outlets for their desire. Hence the contemporary manifestation of hysteria is not the psychosomatic intrusion of the body into the social order—in the face of the impossible demand to "have it all," the hysteric effectively goes on strike, refusing desire altogether. [''C, ''p. 108]
The borderline subject is thus ''a hysteric without a master, ''a hysteric who is not oppressed by the master but solicited by some expert-advisor figure to realize all his or her potentials and have it all, leading a full life. Such a solicitation, of course, immediately acquires the superego dimension of an inexorable pressure to which the subject can only respond by withdrawing from desire. Is this desire on strike not a perfect formula for the borderline as the contemporary form of hysteria?
