Berta y el goce de ser mirada.

Abstract

Berta is a woman who decided to go to psychological therapy due to several problems with her children, but after a few sessions she began to express various discomforts in relation to a series of events throughout her life, which made her continue with her sessions. After describing her bad experiences from both her childhood and her adult life as both a wife and a mother, it became clear that Berta suffers from hysteria, which is manifested through her symptom of being paralyzed when she’s in situations where she’s being watched, or rather confronted by an Other, furthermore, she constantly expresses her frustration of having an unsuccessful social life, and is ashamed to admit that she heavily relies on her husband to maintain a social life, she herself believes it is impossible to achieve due to her insecurity, which in turn has also made her unappreciative of her own talents, and is hindering her relationship with her oldest son. However, while she expresses all of this, it also makes her hysteria apparent since she doesn’t seem to want a solution where she has to make a decision, this is a key aspect of a hysteric structure, since hysteric people need to complain about something and need the Other to give them validation, and in Berta’s case, she expresses a desire to be admired by others. The main factor in Berta’s hysteric structure is when she describes her worst life experiences, in which without realizing, she was also watched by others, which causes her pleasure, and it justifies her complaints of an unsatisfied desire.