The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the
relationship between the development of photography and of the medical
category of hysteria.
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.
