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The fits and convulsions, the paralyses of limbs, the speaking in tongues, the muteness and deafness, in short the conversion symptoms of the hysteric were among the perplexities that inspired the discovery of psychoanalysis. In André Broulliet's 1887 painting of Jean Martin Charcot giving a clinical lecture at The Salpetriere, the brightly lit right foreground is dominated by the figure of Charcot and his hysterical patient, Blanche Wittman. Wittman's body is compliantly collapsed across Charcot's left forearm in the characteristic