It was through his early encounters with women in distress that Freud began to develop radically new understandings of symptoms and the relationship between doctor and patient. A century after it was written as a founding document of psychoanalysis, Breuer"s and Freud"s Studies on Hysteria still challenges us with questions about the location of psychic pain in the body and about the role of culture in the ways that such pain is located, understood, and treated.In this volume, many of today"s most renowned psychoanalysts and cultural theorists come together to reread these case reports with modern eyes. They reflect on how six women, different in character and social situation yet alike in their experience of suffering, continue to engage us with problems of theory and practice: the workings of analytic authority and power; the changing definitions of sexuality, gender roles, and psychopathology; the self-experience of women in the patriarchal settings of culture and classical psychoanalysis; the controversies over sexual abuse and the effects of trauma; the recognition of homosexuality and bisexuality; the role of speech and its relation to the experience of the body; the modes of listening and responding to the patient that relieve psychic pain or perpetuate it, and the ways in which the treatment process offers the possibility of change not only to the patient but also to the analyst and to psychoanalysis itself.