Seeing Hysteria: A Case, A Study

Abstract

Seeing Hysteria:A Case, A Study Ela Przybylo, with photographs by Ela Przybylo and Michael Holly I come to hysteria lost, confused, detached. Hysteria’s “disappearance,” its current fragmentation, desensationalizes the hysterical body (Micale, 1993). And all those women depicted-invented by the “great optical machine” of the Salpêtrière hospital in late nineteenth-century Paris, by the Salpêtrière’s veritable “image factory,” become fixed (Didi-Huberman 9, 30). Who were they? What did they say? Where did they go? Much of this information is either lost, as most personal histories are, or occluded by the auteur of hysteria, Doctor Charcot himself, founder of the Salpêtrière’s neurology clinic, for he did not like listening, only seeing (Marneffe 75, 77). Described by Sigmund Freud, who was one of his pupils and admirers, as a “visuel”—a man who knows through seeing—Jean-Martin Charcot, along with one of his right-wing men, photographer Paul Régnard, ate lives up, processing them through the twin medico-photographic project of the Salpêtrière hospital (Freud, “Charcot” 12). Augustine was one such life. As one famous hysteric who went through the optical machine of the Salpêtrière, Augustine, like many hysterics, was put under hypnosis and under ether and chloroform. The photographs taken of her were calotypes, executed with a large format camera. These photographs were both posed and “photoshopped” using painting [End Page 177] techniques: the hysterics themselves, the backgrounds, and the final photograph were each in turn regulated by means of paint. In other words, all these elements collaborated to create the hysteria that we can, today, see on paper. These photographs became the very proof of hysteria. As historian Sander Gilman comments writing on hysteria, “[d]isease is only real if it is universal. And it is universal only if it can be seen and the act of seeing reproduced” (379). But while there was the hypnosis, the ether and chloroform, the photographic staging, flash, and subsequent retouching work, Augustine was there as well and she was not mute, and she was not passive (Didi-Huber-man 215, Baer, Marneffe 84). It took skill, reflex, and probably cunning to be “the star model for a whole concept of hysteria” (Didi-Huberman 117). And Augustine used her histrionic skills, finally, after the masterful execution of many poses, after at least seventeen snaps of the shutter, to “put an end to her existence as a ‘case,’ ” to dress up as a man and walk out of Charcot’s “living pathological museum” (Marneffe 79, Didi-Huberman 276, Charcot 3). So, hysteria, and most especially Augustine’s hysteria, was staged, in a very complex way, by the medico-photographic institution of the Salpêtrière: by the lights, the camera, the props, the flash, the photographer, the physician, and Augustine—the hysteric—herself. It was a collusion of all these forces, and probably many more, that led to the invention of Augustine’s hysteria and perhaps hysteria more broadly. The process of opening the shutter on myself (by way of someone else) is an exercise in patience. I am not Augustine, I do not wish to be, and I do not wish to pretend to be. But Augustine, whom so many see, needed to be placed, visually, in a more intricate web. She never acted in a vacuum; her performance had an entirely different dynamic of agency. The patient and physician spiraled off into hysterical plateaus together. They needed one another; they fueled one another’s performance. Elisabeth Bronfen speaks of the “murky enmeshment of mutual consent, mutual deceit, and mutual desire” (174). But that was not all, it was not just physician and patient; the scene was further complicated by the technologies of photography—the lights, the flash, the backdrop, the camera—which were there as well. And then there was the photographer (here—Régnard), Charcot’s middleman, and who knows what other characters appeared on set. There is no “Augustine, the hysteric” without the others. Speaking of individual agency and individual performance, in the photographic landscapes of hysteria, is insufficient. My mirror mimics Augustine’s gaze, it reminds us of the mess of physician...