From Iconography to Archaeology: Freud after Charcot

For Joel Whitebook 1. Two Grotesques and a Differential Diagnosis I wish to explore Freud's archaeology by thinking about what went before, and I begin by unpacking a simple visual contrast between two grotesques (see Figures 1 & 2). This is an appropriate beginning in that I wish to explore Freud's relationship to Charcot, the great visuel, a description Charcot gave himself, according to Freud's 1893 obituary of him (p. 12). As the living essence of the "clinical gaze," Charcot engineered an extraordinary matrix of representation for neurological phenomena, making visible obscure diseases and disorders and placing them in their nosological niches by a variety of intricately choreographed means, as Jonathan Marshall (2016) has discussed most recently in an excellent monograph. But Charcot's ambivalent legacy teeters on this representational strategy, of course, as it came to involve highly questionable practices exhibiting his indigent patients, particularly the famous "medical muses" of hysteria (Hustvedt, 2011). Once Charcot had moved on to the neuroses—still defined at the time as neurological disorders without obvious physiological causes such as epilepsy and hysteria, the "Sphinxes that defy the deepest anatomy" (1890, p. 15)—he was at the limits of the anatomo-clinical method; so the fixation of the type, the ideal

and stable essence of the morbid entity as delineated through its precise symptomatology, became the quest. For la grand hystérie (the hysterical parallel to le grand mal of epilepsy, its weird sister) this became a matter of representing a specific 4-stage "grand attack" that the Salpêtrière hysterics and his many interns and students helped to visualize—and "invent," to use the term of Georges Didi-Huberman's somewhat dithyrambic study (1982/2003). But I do not wish to emphasize the performative aspect of this "invention of hysteria," despite its fascinating dramaturgy and deeply troubling ethical implications. I wish instead to focus on an equally important dimension of Charcot's representational project: the historical iconography of hysteria, as represented in the religious art and culture of the past. The historical side of Charcot's school was a vital, complementary endeavor that was intended to stave off the accusation that la grand hystérie was quite simply a hystérie de culture, an artifact produced at the Salpêtrière itself, an accidental nosocomial byproduct instead of a genuine nosological...