Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of Saltptire

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 Saltpêtière 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)