Customer Reviews

Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière

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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!

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).

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...)

as a practicing neurologist, i had a hard time deciding whether this was simply a case of an inadequate translation or whether the underlying material was in fact the problem Certainly there are tidbits of interesting history contained in this work, but they are buried under a torrent of self-indulgent interpretation and meaningless verbiosity.

Thank goodness that someone finally translated this book! It came out in France more than two decades ago. It's analysis of photography at Salpetriere is extremely important. Didi-Huberman argues that photography helped to invent hysteria. There are tons of wonderful photographs included. My only criticism is that Didi-Huberman's writing is often too convoluted and unclear. That said, Alisa Hartz does a fabulous job translating.