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For Joel Whitebook
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
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Frederika Tevebring and Alex Wolfson for the invitation to present an early version of this article at the Warburg Institute in London. Thanks also go to Vered Lev Kenaan, Mary Bergstein, Miriam Leonard and Marco Galli for their input at the conference. For a different approach that reaches similar conclusions, see Armstrong, forthcoming.