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.

Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere PDF

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