Hysteria: Few Historical Remarks

3According to Hippocrates, and the entire ancient tradition following his line of reasoning, hysteria was an affliction tied to movements of a dried uterus around a woman’s body in order to moisten itself, while attacking neighboring organs, or even the brain. That is where we have the term “uterus dyspnea.” What is interesting is that uterus was perceived as an autonomous organ living in a woman’s body, possessing a vital force and an ability to move around freely, as well as to influence her behavior. It did not remain without influence on the perception of women by men who possessed logos:

• 4 Trillat, Historia histerii, 14-15.

A woman differs from a man in that she breeds an animal within her, which does not possess a soul. Close proximity to animality is caused also by the fact that a woman is not a man’s equal. In contrast to man, she is not God’s creation; she is merely a result of metempsychosis, a transformation of the most vile kind of man into the female species.4

The uterus was thought to be the reason behind woman’s maternal urge to produce progeny; an instinct which was independent from her free will. As a remedy for the above-mentioned dyspnea, regular and frequent intercourse was recommended, among other solutions. That is how the connection between the illness that affected mostly widows and women in puberty, and the sphere of erotic experiences was established early on in the course of interest in hysteria.

4The uterus theory continued to describe, in one way or another, the phenomenon of hysteria until its final disappearance from the medical diagnostic map in the second half of the 20th century. Even if hysteria were not to be connected directly to some form of illness of the reproductive organs (uterus contractions, ovarian tumors, fermentation of female sperm, animal spirit poisoning, vapors, etc.), it would remain perceived as a strictly female illness. Even though there were those who wanted to make hysteria gender-neutral, researchers who proclaimed such ideas were in the minority. It was more popular to label male patients as “hypochondriacs” while women suffered from hysteria. End of discussion.

6Thomas Sydenham was the first one to turn everybody’s attention to analogies between hysteria and simulation. He observed that hysteria does not produce its own symptoms, but rather borrows them from a variety of different illnesses, often imitating them. He also questioned the influence of the uterus on the creation of the symptoms, ascribing them to vapors and the irregular distribution of animal ghosts in one’s body which was caused by blood. The discovery of the circulatory system negated those theories and helped transfer the vapor theory onto the sphere of morals:

• 6 “Vapeurs,” Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert (1722-1761), 65.

Vapors attack especially those who are idle, who do not tire themselves with manual labor, but think a lot and dream […]. Many people assume that this illness attacks the mind, rather than the body, and that the evil lies in imagination. Indeed, we have to admit that the primary reason is boredom and wild passion, which through the disturbance of mental powers, forces the body to participate: it could be the imagination, or reality, but the afflicted body suffers in a real manner.6

Charcot and Salpêtrière

8The development of clinical neurology and medical practices in hospitals in the context of research on hysteria reached its apex in the work of doctor Charcot, conducted on the patients at Salpêtrière Hospital. Jean-Martin Charcot, born in Paris in 1825, who was talented in the visual arts, but also a very diligent and inquisitive student, began studies at the medical school when he was 19 years old. Already in 1856, he became a hospital doctor, and four years later he was a professor’s assistant. He was also the private doctor of the French minister of finance, as well as many other prominent figures of Paris of that time. He specialized in treating many different illnesses, including multiple sclerosis, joint debilitation, rheumatism, and syphilis. He was also a founder of the neurology clinic for women at Salpêtrière. Charcot’s encounter with hysterical women was a pure coincidence. One of the hospital’s buildings – luck would have it to be a psychiatric and epileptic ward – desperately needed renovation due to its poor condition. As a result, patients had been moved to other buildings, and an opportunity arose to separate the epileptic patients from the rest as well. A new unit was formed – a Common Epilepsy Ward, with Charcot as its head. Ettiene Trillat cites one of the accounts from that transition:

• 8 Pierre Marie, “Discours à l’occasion du centenaire de Charcot,” Revue Neurologique, 1 (6) (1925): 7 (...)

Many women, some of whom had arrived at Salpêtrière years before, were placed there. They experienced frequent attacks, because they felt such repulsion to bromine that they preferred to suffer from their illness than to accept any form of treatment. Next to them, directly in contact, in the same bedrooms and dining rooms, in the same backyards, a number of young girls suffering from hysteria were placed. Their families, tired of those attacks and their peculiarities, committed them to Salpêtrière. Results of that mutual existence could not be ignored. Of course, the attacks of the epileptic patients remained unchanged; however patients with hysteria exhibited a shift in their patterns. Young, hysterical women, living among epileptic patients, were forced to hold them whenever they collapsed, and take care of them when sickness-struck. The impact of those experiences was so strong that – taking into consideration the mimetic tendencies of their neurosis – their attacks began to faithfully imitate attacks of pure epilepsy.8

9It should not come as a surprise that Charcot named the affliction “hysterio-epilepsy.” These two groups of patients did not have general injuries and convulsion attacks in common. Hysterical patients, however, had, what Charcot diagnosed as an ovarian hyperesthesia – a pain in the area of the ovaries, which disappeared under applied pressure. It is worth remembering that by the 1870s, the uterus hysteria theory had been compromised, and Charcot’s return to those concepts was a noticeable feat. Even though it was never expressed directly, hysteria once again entered into the realm of female sexuality.

• 10 Tomasz Majewski, “Produkcja wizualna i kryzys przedstawienia. Ikonografia histerii Charcota,” Przeg (...)

A classic hysteria attack, devised in that manner, would develop through four stages in a clear, syntagmatic order: 1) during an epileptoid phase the body imitates, or “reproduces” a standard epileptic attack; 2) during the clown-like muscle contortions, other illogical movements occur; 3) during the “plastic pose” phase, also described as attitudes passionelles (passionate poses), the body assumes an expressive form, suggesting affection and physical desire, which concludes in 4) a painful phase of delirium, during which the hysterical patient “begins to speak again,” which is when doctors attempt to stop the attack with all means available. This classification (more on this later), visualized in a series of photographs and synoptic, sketched tables, refers, as a figurative discourse, directly back to the artistic conventions of the 19th century: theater, narrative academic painting, and romantic themes.10

11Exactly. And this was visualized in the form of photographs. When in 1875 Charcot became the director of the Salpêtrière hospital, he ordered for the arrangement of a photographic laboratory, as well as atelier, and a museum of plaster castings. Paul Regnard and Albert Londé became the photographers working with Charcot over the course of the following years. Their works have been published in albums entitled Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, which were released in the following order: vol. I (1875), vol. II (1876-77), vol. III (1878), and vol. IV (1879-80).

12Photographs from these volumes constitute the main subject of this essay, or more specifically: photographs of a particular model – Augustine – which appear in them the most often. She was admitted to Charcot’s clinic in October of 1875, at the age of 15.

• 11 Ibid., 92.

In figurative and taxonomic productions of Salpêtrière Hospital, Augustine was a “masterpiece.” Charcot referred to her as a “very regular, and classic case,” while Richter would go a step farther, claiming that she is “the one among our patients, whose plastic poses and attitudes passionelles have the most regularity and plastic expression.” It was mostly Augustine’s face and body, which illustrate and summarize the hysterical type in Richter’s great comparative table.11

• 15 Ibid., 157.

And in this case as well, one had to persistently watch the boundary between the scientific and moral undertaking, and frivolous text, insinuation, or excitation. Requirements of objectivity and seriousness were supposed to be met by statistical charts and tables abundantly placed within the text, which also differentiated between a sociological study of immortality from immoral behavior itself. These texts, through an unending repetition of assurances of their social usefulness, as well as the calm stature of their authors, reminded readers of another, more frivolous reaction to presented materials.15

• 17 Ibid., 43.

At least until the times of Freud, discourse on the subject of sex – discourse of scientists and theoreticians – was supposed to hide its actual questions. In all kinds of statements, scrupulous provisions, and detailed analyses, one could spot an attempt to avoid the unbearable, too dangerous, truth about sex. The very fact that there was an attempt to talk about it from a purified, and neutral point of view of science is telling. And the science itself was created as a result of unspoken facts, and the unwillingness, or lack of ability to speak about sex as such; it reached, primarily, for aberration, perversion, peculiar exceptions, pathological lackings, and clinical exaggerations. It was also a science fundamentally subordinated to imperatives of morality, the divisions of which it repeated in the form of medical norms.17

• 19 Ibid., 256.

Augustine went through the ordeal of this theatrical distress on the day when, from among the spectators of the clinical lecture who had come to watch her reiteration and pantomime of an antiquated but always present rape, she recognized the rapist in person, who had come to eye something he might very well have considered, for a moment, to be his “own work.” Augustine was utterly terrified, and had one hundred and fifty four attacks in a single day.19

Hysteria on Canvas and in Photographs

• 22 Elaine Showalter, “Przedstawiające Ofelię: kobiety, szaleństwo i zadania krytyki feministycznej” (...)

Tracing the iconography of Ophelia in English and French painting, photography, psychiatry, and literature, as well as in theatrical production, I will be showing first of all the representational bonds between female insanity and female sexuality. Secondly, I want to demonstrate the twoway transaction between psychiatric theory and cultural representation. As one medical historian has observed, we could provide a manual of female insanity by chronicling the illustrations of Ophelia; this is so because the illustrations of Ophelia have played a major role in the theoretical construction of female insanity.22

17In the case of two paintings, however, there are no doubts. I am thinking about paintings painted slightly before the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. The first one, by André Brouilleta entitled A Clinical Lesson with Doctor Charcot at the Salpêtrière, shows a lecture hall, doctor Charcot, and a fainting Blanche Wittman – an English patient of the clinic, also known as the “Queen of Hysterical Patients.” The scene shows one of the Tuesday lectures, open to the public, which Charcot organized at the clinic. Blanche assumes a well-known pose, which can be found in photographs of monsieur Regnard. Her shoulders are naked, her shirt slips from under an undone corset, and the upper part of her dress is lowered. Looks of gathered men express scientific interest, some of them hastily sketch the scene. While few gazes reveal astonishment, there are ironic smirks, and doubtful smiles present as well. Few faces reveal traces of fascination, but it seems however, it has very little to do with the art of medicine. Brouillet captured the essence of Charcot’s lectures, as well as Regnard’s photography – of exposing a female body and its hysterical spasms to the judging and controlling gaze of men. The only difference being that in Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière that gaze is outside of the frame.

18The second painting, entitled Pinel at the Salpêtrière, was authored by Tony Robert Fleury. The work refers to the famous undoing of the clinic’s chains, which had bound patients of the clinic up to that point. One can see a woman wearing a white, torn underskirt in the foreground; her corset is also loose, as if it constituted a symbol of madness, of “loose” morality. Her, seemingly random, body composition is supposed to reflect a pathological asymmetry of her posture. However, if one were to look closely at the placement of her feet, her bent knee, or the extended index finger of her left hand, and her bowed head – it would turn out that nothing about that composition is random. Venus could be presented in such a pose as well, or any other Greek goddess for that matter. Especially her slightly bent knees, and gently swaying body seem characteristic of representing female gestures in painting. Little farther in the background, there is another woman who seems to blend into the background at first sight. I am thinking about that figure on the ground, right behind the man undoing the chains which bound the figure in the foreground. From underneath her open shirt one can spot a naked breast, her body twisted, hands clutched, and her face reflecting erotic ecstasy. It is nothing else but a hysterical patient having an attack. Similar representations can be found outside of Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, as well as in 19th-century paintings. As examples, we can list Ophelia (1883) by Alexander Cabanel, La jeune martyre (1855) by Paul Delaroche, and The Nightmare (1781) and Lady Macbeth (1781-84) by Heinrich Füssli.

20One could search for other reasons for such “non-accidental similarities” in the artistic education system of the times, as well as in the common practices of academic painting. Lynda Nead recalls the following theory:

• 26 Nead, Akt kobiecy, 87.

Marcia Pointon pointed out a connection between 19th-century medical examinations of the female body with artistic education. “Lecture halls,” she writes, “were constructed in a similar fashion to the studio found in academies of fine arts, where models worked, and lectures on anatomy in front of art students were conducted just like it was practiced with students of medicine.” Examining the female body from within and without, through medicine and art… took women into full custody. Defined by norms of health and sickness, the female body was subordinated to the rules and templates of what was considered appropriate.26

Surrealism

21The surrealist movement also received the phenomenon of hysteria with interest. Surrealists were fascinated by photographic representations of patients at Salpêtrière, most famous of which turned out to be the already mentioned Augustine. Agnieszka Taborska notes:

• 28 Agnieszka Taborska, Spiskowcy wyobraźni. Surrealizm (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2007), 220-24 (...)

Charcot’s hysterical female patients combined everything that the male ego of fin de siècle dreamt about: untamed sensuality sacrificed at the altar of science, which was embodied by learned men wearing doctor’s smocks… That same appeal was found in those who were “mad” by surrealists fifty years later, proving once more how much they were bound to their Victorian predecessors.28

22Surrealists would turn hysteria into a phenomenon received positively, the best example of which was the article by Louis Aragon and André Breton entitled “Le cinquantenaire de l’hystérie” (1878-1928) and published in La Révolution surréaliste, in which the authors observe similarities between madness and the surrealist method, recognizing hysteria as a poetic form of expression.

• 29 Louis Aragon, and André Breton, “Pięćdziesięciolecie histerii (1878-1928)” [“Hysteria’s Fiftieth (...)

We, the surrealists, want to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of hysteria, the greatest poetic discovery of the end of the 19th century. We celebrate it at the moment when the dismemberment of the notion of hysteria seems to be irreversible. We love nothing as much as we do young hysterical women. Their perfect type is embodied by the lovely X.L. (Augustine), who was admitted to Salpêtrière, under the care of doctor Charcot on 21st of October 1875, aged fifteen and a half. […] Does Freud, who owes so much to doctor Charcot, recall the time when, according to the testimony of witnesses still alive today, the interns at Salpêtrière confused their professional duties with love preferences, when patients met them outside the hospital walls after dark, or welcomed them in their beds?29

25So what exactly was surrealism supposed to be? Let us take a look at the definition:

• 32 Breton, “Manifest surrealizmu,” 77.

SURREALISM, noun, Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.32

As we can see, it is not so much the artist’s imagination that should be freed from aesthetic canons of representation, but rather his morality. It is the morality, which according to Breton, limits artistic expression. In “ruthless non-conformism” Breton looks for a possibility for rebellion against the prudery, against bourgeois and academic art, which is limited by morality – and a fake one for that matter. Hysteria in that context is presented more as a means to an end, rather than a goal, or effect as such. What for surrealists seems to be the most appealing in the figure of a hysterical woman, or more precisely in the photographic representations of Augustine from Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, is how the falseness of the discourse is revealed, which is made possible thanks to those photographs; a discourse, which initially was supposed to be a scientific one. Breton fetishizes photographs attached to the article, but does so openly. Charcot, and his collaborators fetishized them in the same way, but remained adamant in officially rejecting any erotic components of hysteria and its representations; not to mention the unquestionable pleasure they have derived from observing women exposed to their assessing gaze. The hysterical patient during an attack gives expression to tamed forces of sexual drive, which makes some of the stages of the attack turn into pure expressions of free sexuality. However, let us return to Hysteria’s Fiftieth Anniversay:

• 33 Aragon and Breton, “Pięćdziesięciolecie histerii,” 119.

In the year of 1928, we propose a new definition of hysteria. Hysteria is a state of mind more or less removable, characterized by the abolishment of relations between the subject and the moral world, from which an individual has freed him or herself practically, according to his or her belief, but outside of any illness system. That state of mind is based on the need for a double-sided enchantment which explains the wonders of hastily accepted medical suggestions (or counter-suggestions). Hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can be treated as the highest means of expression.33

“The highest means of expression” mentioned by Breton is not connected to the liberation of imagination, but of morality. The postulated “abolishment of relations between the subject and the moral world” is a condition of possibility for creating a new kind of art, free from the rules of mimetic reproduction. However, without that initial condition, art will always remain merely a catalogue registering artifacts of reality, which compose a long, fairly accurate, but boring list. In order to reach the underbelly of reality, the artist’s imagination is forced to explore the deepest layers of the Unconscious, without fear, anxiety or censorship. Only then the poetics of the Uncanny a la Freud will be able to emerge.

27The rejection of the primacy of reason and rationality for the sake of slipping into the sphere of dream, madness and free imagination expressed fascination with the “internal” life of hysterical patients. However, their external appearance was equally appealing to the surrealists. A proof of that seduction of artistic imagination can be found in a performance of Hélène Vanel, a dancer, during an International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris on the 17th January 1938. Taborska described the event as follows:

• 35 Taborska, Spiskowcy wyobraźni, 226.

Her make-up and behavior were derived from Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière: a ragged night shirt, uncoordinated movements, mad laughter resounding in the darkness disrupted only by flashlights from the audience. Her midnight performance was composed of a witchcraft ceremony by a furnace, which symbolized the brotherhood of surrealists, and a dance entitled Mistaken Action. […] [The] performance ended with prances around an arranged pond, and a rage attack reenacted on a hysterical bed – the symbol of love. The artist kept going to sleep, and suddenly jumping out, and then jumping back in again, while whirling a live cock in the air and twisting her face in a terrifying grimace. A painting entitled Ophelia’s Death by André Masson, which was hanging on the neighboring wall, constituted a grim allusion to the pond and an empty bed. References to the great madness, beloved by the 19th century painters, seemed to close the enchanted circle.35

Stylizing the dancer in accordance with Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, and an association with Ophelia are not accidental, and constitute the result of dialectical relationship between hysteria and theater, which is often recalled in contemporary interpretations of that phenomenon. However, it was Joseph Bauer who, while working with Anna O., already described her symptoms as “personal theater.” Actresses playing Ophelia searched for inspiration in hospital patients, as well as in photographs, which were in turn stylized and staged after the theater and paintings. One should remember that in the case of daguerreotype and first cameras, the time of exposition had to be long, which required a model to remain still in any given position for a long time. That is how the future patients of Freud came into possession of rich sources for inspiration on the forms of constructing their own afflictions.