Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and
the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere
by George Didi-Huberman. MIT Press,
Cambridge MA 2003
375 pp., illus. Trade $34.95
ISBN: 0-262-04215-0
Reviewed by Allan Graubard
2900 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20008, USA
a.graubard@starpower.net
"What the hysterics of the Salpetriere could exhibit with their
bodies betokens an extraordinary complicity between patients and doctors,
a relationship of desires, gazes, and knowledge. This relationship
is interrogated here." (p. xi)
With this, George Didi-Huberman opens his work on the rediscovery
of hysteria by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, founder of neurology and a
major influence on Freud. First published in France in 1982, we still
cannot avoid its poignant reflections on the history of medical diagnosis
and the doctor-patient relationship. For in the shadow thrown by this
book, there are still questions worth asking. They are not about how
far have we come, which is evident, but what we have overlooked or
refused to admit along the way. In effect, where do epistemological
issues intrude upon medical science, and how within medical practice
can we fail to recognize that meaning is an applied value? That these
issues then had about them an erotic and sexual significance, hysteria
being predominantly a "woman’s" disorder treated by
men in a large institution where control presided over cure or release
to excess, reveals something else about late 19th century
medicine at the Saltpetriere: its exclusionary function and its theatrical
context; the latter, I suggest, still not having left us, however
radically its terms have altered.
In another sense, this work is as much a study of a transitional moment
in medical analysis — when the search for the biophysical "lesion"
turned to the characterization of a psychological "disorder"
-- as a study of the limitations of that analysis, and the critical
need to understand its cultural and technological context; the advent
of photography legitimating Charcot’s work with a cutting irony
that Didi-Huberman captures from the start. The visual identification
of the "seat of the illness," along with all its lexical
derivations, deprives the patient of an essential indeterminacy; the
individual uniqueness she desperately searches for through her symptoms,
and, if called on, her appearances at Charcot’s Tuesday lectures.
There is little hope for a way out, however efficiently the patient
satisfies her doctor’s expectations in terms of symptom type
or kind, and the resulting constriction of space, both internal and
external, even perhaps of hope, cannot mask a violation, which, for
Didi-Huberman, turned to "hatred."
The medical science we know, or wish we knew, seems far afield here.
But then the title of this book, with its stress on invention,
carries the point throughout with a vivacity often lacking in other
historical works. For Didi-Huberman, the argument evolves not only
through the eye, and his analysis of the photographic oeuvre on hysteria,
but in response to how poignantly that oeuvre touched him. Indeed,
it is difficult at times not to recoil from the therapies inflicted
on these women by their doctors, whether performed to alleviate suffering
or in pursuit of a specialized bit of knowledge.
Here again I take the author’s tack and style as a strategic
difference that distances him from the kind of "confirmation"
that the photograph provided then, and which in our visual culture
also raises the stakes to a critical breaking point, where voices
such as Artaud and Bataille’s resonate, especially in regard
to the hysterical body, the body dispossessed of itself. A retrospective
examination of "Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the
Salpetriere," as the subtitle to the book terms it — yes,
of course, but this retrospection, intense, sustained and supple,
approaches us without the usual cautions, laying bare an invidious
passion that the hysteric’s cry, at last, contravenes: the theatricalization
of a diagnosis, the staging of the body of disease.
Structured in two sections — "Spectacular Evidence"
and "Charming Augustine," referring to Charcot’s prize
hysteric, whose photos in extremis would later captivate the surrealists
— the work concludes with important appendices of source documents,
including Augustine’s account of a delirium that her doctor(s)
provoked by ether.
Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography
of the Salpetriere is a significant examination of an often blurred
landscape between pain and performance that we, in the twenty-first
century, continue to build our households in, all wish full thinking
aside.
