Invention of hysteria : Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière

In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere.As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"--they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures."Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries. The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere . As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie . Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria.

Publishers Weekly

This poetic account of the relationship between photography and madness will interest any student of art or mental health, for seldom have these fields been so definitively intertwined. Published 20 or so years ago in France but appearing here in English for the first time, the book is concerned with Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), teacher of Freud and master of the Saltpetiere women's asylum in 19th-century Paris. Charcot set out to show that women's madness, or "hysteria," was not due to ancient superstitions of traveling wombs or other nonsense, but had an organic cause. But his famed Tuesday lectures in which he would trigger attacks in his patients, and the project of photographing women in various sad states, by now seem little better than the myths he was demolishing. Didi-Huberman shows how theatrical these women were as they performed their attacks and resisted the rationalistic medicine that was trying to place them in new categories of the insane. He focuses in particular on one patient, Augustine, who, like Manet's Olympia, forced spectators and doctors alike to confront their own desire as they contemplated her now-beautiful, now-anguished body. As clinicians used every wacky technology of the day, from hypnosis to magnetic plates, from sniffing opium to ovarian massage, Augustine and her sister patients acted out fantasies and memories of unbearable trauma. Beyond Freud, Charcot's most lasting influence may be art historical; among the 107 photos and illustrations here, there is a well-known lithograph (treasured by Freud) of Charcot giving a lecture while a patient swoons in an assistant's arms, an enduring symbol of 19th-century spectacles of madness. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

"In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of the Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere."--Jacket.