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.
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"Didi-Huberman composes an absolutely fascinating story about the emergence of modern subjectivity from the netherworld and darkrooms of nineteenth-century medicine. This gorgeously written and provocative landmark study is indispensable for anyone interested in questions of gender, the history of science, photography, and medicine: in short, in how we see ourselves as who we are." Ulrich Baer, Department of German, New York University, author of Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma
"... a significant examination of an often blurred landscape between pain and performance..." Allan Graubard Leonardo Reviews
"This poetic account of the relationship between photography and madness will interest any student of art or mental health." Publishers Weekly Forecasts
"...a significant examination of an often blurred landscape between pain and performance." Allan Graubard Leonardo Reviews
"Van Gogh and hysteria? Proust and catalepsy! Sigmund Freud and theater? Charcot's influence is suddenly registering everywhere, not only in studies of fin-de-siècle medicine and psychology, but also in aesthetics, philosophy, and photographic history. Charcot figures in reexaminations of the "new psychologies" of the 1890s, the birth of Freudian psychology, male and female hysteria, the designs of art nouveau lamp posts, art manifestos of the Symbolists, the novels of Huysmans and Proust, the landscapes of Van Gogh and Gauguin, and the history of flash photography. No wonder. The images of his patients at the infamous Salpêtrière hospital in Paris strike a thoroughly contemporary and postmodern chord, one that is brilliantly brought to life in this remarkable book by Georges Didi-Huberman."--Robert Sobieszek, Curator of Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant cultural and psychological history study.,
By
This review is from: Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Paperback)
This is a must-read and must-have. Beautifully designed and brilliantly written, covering cultural and psychological history and the significance of photography as a new medium and its impact on the emerging modern world. The invention of Hysteria is about new phenomenon being created as performance and recorded in images. An eye-opening book!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating topic, unintelligible style,
This review is from: Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Paperback)
There are some topics that demand a certain élan on the part of the writer. For instance, I relish Gayatri Spivak's bombastic style when she writes about postcolonialism: it's a rather murky concept, and a bit of rapturizing, of dressing up simple concepts in fancy language, is expected. On the other hand, there is nothing worse than adopting a tone that does not suit the subject matter. Didi-Huberman commits this grave fault, and turns what could have been an absorbing, clear study of the etiology of hysteria into mostly unintelligible, post-modern gobbledygook. The real shame is that truly fascinating tidbits are so drowned in verbosity that by the latter half of the book, you stop looking for them. In sum, the author thinks he's being deep, in the best style of Foucault or Deleuze, but he's not: the Emperor is naked (and far too wordy).
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unintelligible...,
By e. verrillo (williamsburg, ma) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Paperback)
The story of how hysterics were "invented" in 19th-century Paris is a fascinating one. All the more so because the staged performances that Freud witnessed at the famous Salpetriere asylum were to form the basis of his theory of hysteria, a theory which had a lasting impact on both psychiatry and medicine. I only wish that someone (anyone) else had written this book. I realize that the text was not intended for a medical audience, but in the light of photographs which clearly demonstrated women in the throes of grand mal seizures, epilepsy, tetanus, and myriad other neurological disorders, some current medical deconstruction of "hysteria" was in order. In fact, a simple historical account would have been useful. Unfortunately, Didi-Huberman contructs an "argument" (it isn't really anything of the sort), in which he mixes some Saussurian semiotics (the "signifier" and the "signified") together with a bit of post-modernist references to the "Other" and stretches what is basically a one-page thesis into a 255-page text. (The execrable translation certainly didn't help.) Given the enormous body of data available on the Salpetriere, I can only hope that someone with greater knowledge and better writing skills eventually covers this tantalizing subject.
(For those who are interested in the topic: Duchenne: Discourses of Aesthetics, Sexuality, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Medical Photography by Hayes Peter Mauro is a short article that can be found online. It is well written and nicely researched. Now, if only Mauro would write a book...)
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