Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière
by Georges Didi-Huberman (Author), Alisa Hartz (Translator). (The MIT Press) Paperback – Illustrated, September 17, 2004
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.
https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Didi_Huberman_Georges_Invention_of_Hysteria_2003.pdf
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.
Chapter 4 – Page 69
Paraclesus called hysteria “chorea lascivia” – the dance or choreography of lechery.
Page 70
Ambroise Paré reports
Inversely, it was advised to “maintain the neck of the womb open with a spring” and then, with the help of an instrument made specially for the purpose, fumigate the vagina with sweet smells (attraction, toward the bottom). Incidentally, they would cry loudly in the patient’s ears during the operation (so she didn’t play the trick of fainting on them), and would “pull the hair on her temples and the back of her neck, or rather the hair on her shameful parts, so that she not only remains awake, but so that the pain experienced on the bottom forces the vapor that is rising up and inducing the suffocation to be withdrawn and pulled back down by revulsion.”
Page 72
“hysterical women are initially tormented by a feeling of heat and acridity in their sexual organs. They often have the whites (drips, flows), their menses are often irregular, the neck of the uterus burns, and if the uterus is lifted with the finger, the feeling of breathlessness is reborn, like a lump rising in the throat.” 21
BOURNEVILLE (Désiré-Magloire)
Chapter 6 – Page 144
“He yields. X. . . lies down, staying to the left side of the bed, showing the place she has made for him beside her. She closes her eyes, her physiognomy denoting possession and satisfied desire; her arms are crossed, as if she were clasping the lover of her dreams to her breast; at other times, she clasps the pillow. Then come little cries, smiles, movements of the pelvis, words of desire or encouragement. After less than a minute—everything goes quickly in a dream— X. . . raises herself up, sits down, looks upwards, joins her hands together like a supplicant (pl. XX) [fig. 61] and says in a plaintive tone: “You don’t want to anymore? Again [encore]. . . !” 83
Page 149
For this loss, exclusion, and dilaceration reciprocally indicate something like a supplementary jouissance, something that seems to exist, over there, in front, violent, and excessive, but very intimate, signaling the witnesses of the scene:something that seems to supplement the real impossibility of a relation—the “sexual relation”—in ecstasy.99 If our Augustine is suffering from the “abolition of the genesial sense,” and notably from total anesthesia of the right side of the vulva, and if nonetheless we all can see her in her attitudes passionnelles enjoying an orgasm [ jouir], discharging and secreting, 100 must this not mean, dear colleague, that her jouissance has some other object?—But of course, dear colleague—Oh, that, dear colleague, that’s how women are. * [Altérée signifies “altered,” but also “thirsty,” a double meaning D.-H. exploits in this section.—Trans.]
Page 176
In 1859, Briquet was still arguing against certain methods for terminating hysterical attacks, meaning that they were still in use. Briquet goes so far as to provide examples of their efficacy (but he was making a slightly different point: he was arguing against a concept of hysteria that was in fact grounded in the efficacy of such methods). Uterine compressions, all kinds of “confrications of the genital areas,”masturbating them—let’s face it—until they could take no more (an extenuated, exuding hysteric is pacified), and even prescriptions for coitus:2 Briquet had tried all of these, of course, but he said they did not work. Perhaps his heart was not really in it. In any case, Briquet admits his disgust for practices that he judges, and rightly so, far from “innocent.” 3
Pierre Briquet