<p>Mass hysteria in Malaysian schools expose a paradoxical duality of power and powerlessness, manifesting as raw emotional outbursts or relentless defiance against oppressive structures. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic framework, this article reinterprets hysteria as a plea for recognition amid symbolic loss and thus may serve as an unconscious political act. In Malaysia’s rigid and regimented boarding schools (soaked through with high stress, vivid cultural beliefs in the supernatural, and intense peer-group dynamics), these episodes reveal ruptures in social interpolation. Integrating empirical data with Žižekian concepts, I argue that these psychic “explosions” reflect a failure of authenticity within the symbolic order. Instead, mass hysteria suggests that authentic political acts of <i>jouissance</i> (far beyond traditional remedies like exorcism or stress relief) offer not only a subtle subversion of said order and but also a transfiguration of the subjects involved.</p>