Invention of Hysteria - Georges Didi-Huberman
Subtitled 'Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière', this book investigates the intimate connection between psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. First published in 1982, for many years the book has been unavailable in English translation.
The author's lyrical writing - which at times resembles poetic prose - may be bewildering, even unpleasing, to readers who expect non-fiction writing to be crsip, efficient, and impersonal.
Added to that, Didi-Huberman assumes the reader knows the background details of Jean-Martin Charcot, an instructor at Salpêtrière, the Paris asylum for the insane and incurable. Charcot began working at Salpêtrière in 1862, his primary focus neurology. He believed that hysteria was a neurological disorder caused by hereditary problems in the nervous system. He realised that photography - still in its infancy - was a valuable medium to demonstrate the signs and symptoms of hysterical attacks, and hired professional photographers to take pictures of his patients (almost exclusively women) during the different stages of their attacks. Many of these photographs were published in a multi-volume work, 'Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière' (1877-1880). These photographs, Charcot believed, provided the 'proof' for his theories about hysterical attacks.
Didi-Huberman's book is lavishly illustrated with photographs, many of which feature Charcot's favourite, Augustine. At the age of fifteen, apparently after being raped by her mother's lover, she was admitted to Salpêtrière suffering from hysterical paralysis. She was also extremely photogenic.
The Salpêtrière photographs illustrate not hysteria, but the skewed relationship between patient and clinician. '[T]the physician made the attitudes passionnelles of 'his' hysteric into a masterpiece, the living image of a nosological* concept, and he practically glorified it, as an image.'
The patients who were photographed were awarded a special status, and were quite literally star performers. But Charcot did more than simply gaze - he used techniques including hypnotism, electric shock, and genital manipulation to trigger hysterical symptoms. As Didi-Huberman suggests, patients became essentially art objects, expected to perform, 'punished' (by being put back into a cell) if they did not. The author goes so far as to suggest that what the photographs represent is 'hatred made into art'. The physicians wanted the madwomen to stay mad - or at least aesthetically mad enough to produce good photographs. Augustine eventually relapsed. Perhaps she'd had enough of being the star turn. Disguised as a man, she escaped from the hospital. What happened to her afterwards is unknown - a Google search revealed nothing about her life post-Salpêtrière.
*nosology: the science of the classification of diseases
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
toomanybooks,
