Invention of hysteria - Georges Didi-Huberman

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.