Abstract
This paper takes its origin from a problem raised by the complex and much investigated relation between the French neurologist and alienist Jean-Martin Charcot, and the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Charcot and Freud write in the same years about the same psychopathological phenomenon, hysteria. This paper explores two questions: why do they give such a great importance to, respectively, seeing, or eye observation, and hearing, that is, listening to the patient’s account; and how is it possible that Charcot’s texts, lectures and therapeutic practices abound with images and photographs, while Freud’s texts completely lack them. This paper analyzes the writings of Charcot and Freud on hysteria taking into account different forms and practices of scientific objectivity, arguing that as the techniques of the observer changed, new objects for the sciences of the self emerged.
I am grateful to Arnold I. Davidson for precious criticism and advice.
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Notes
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At least two texts which addressed this problem have helped me in isolating it: Gilman 1993; and de Marneffe 1991. Gilman explains the shift from seeing to hearing by giving an account of the scientific interpretations of Jewishness at the turn of the century; de Marneffe focuses on the different importance that Charcot and Freud gave to the patient’s subjective content of their discourses on themselves. While these are certainly both instructive interpretations, the point I would like to make is a different one, although, I hope, not incompatible with them. An interesting discussion and overview on the literature on the topic can be found in Cartwright 1995, 47–80. For a general account of photography and psychiatry in the 19th century see Gilman 1982, 164–213.
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On Charcot’s life and works see Bonduelle et al. 1996.
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On gender and the history of hysteria see Showalter 1993; King 1998, 205–246; Micale 1995; Edelman 2003; Goldstein 2009, 49–55. Charcot was interested in debunking the medical opinion according to which only weak and effeminate boys could be seized by hysteria. He builds on the works of some English and American physicians who diagnosed the so-called “railway spine”, a nervous disorder that followed episodes of trauma caused by accidents that happened to strong and virile workers of the railways. These kind of male subjects served well Charcot’s purpose of making hysteria a universal phenomenon. On this complicated history of traumatism see Micale and Lerner 2001a, b; Harrington 2001; Caplan 2001; Hacking 1995, 183–197; Leys 2000.
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It has been often said that Charcot – unlike Freud – only looked for clinical descriptions and neglected etiological analyses, but there are plenty of references to Claude Bernard’s model of experimental medicine to be found in Freud’s works as well. The difference with Freud is thus less at the level of the opposition between clinic and etiology, than at the level of the one between physiological and psychological causes.
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Like all of his fellow physicians and alienists at the fin-de siècle, Charcot firmly believed that nervous and mental illnesses had a hereditary organic basis, and that trauma was just the episode that could trigger it. On this topic the most complete study is Coffin 2003.
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The Salpêtrière had a well equipped photographic service, and between 1876 and 1880 were published, under Charcot’s direction, the famous photographic atlases of hysteria, under the title of Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière; see Didi-Huberman 2003. For example, Charcot once wrote that “photographs are impartial documents, which place under the medical observer’s eyes a faithful image of the investigated matter” (Londe 1893, viii).
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It is also worth noting that against the background given by mechanical objectivity, we can make a reinterpretation of the famous struggle on suggestion and the artificiality of hypnotic phenomena between the schools of Charcot and Hyppolite Bernheim in Nancy. Bernheim denied the status of experimental tool to hypnosis, and believed that there was no such thing as hysteria, given that all of these phenomena were to be reduced to the physician’s “suggestions” over the patient. And that’s why suggestion was for Bernheim a very effective therapeutic means. Their debate can be seen as the opposition between Bernheim’s refusal to acknowledge the possibility of a mechanical objectivity of the psyche, and Charcot’s vindication of it. For Bernheim there was simply no material to passively record, since states of mind were produced by the physician’s suggestion. Therefore, no mechanical objectivity was possible. See Bernheim 1891; Nicolas 2004; Castel 1998.
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I don’t mean to claim that Freud’s work is a “purely” psychological one, nor that he “discovers” a supposed realm of the psychological. I am referring here only to the psychologization of the concept of trauma (on Freud’s biological background and claims see the classic Sulloway 1979).
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I have started to explore this topic in another context (see Savoia 2010).
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This kind of language has been used by Eisenberg 1986.
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For an accurate epistemological, technical, and cultural analysis of functional brain images see Dumit 2004.
- 18.
See for example Rose and Abi-Rached 2013.
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Savoia, P. (2015). Seeing and Hearing: Charcot, Freud and the Objectivity of Hysteria. In: Padovani, F., Richardson, A., Tsou, J. (eds) Objectivity in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14349-1_7
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