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“Many of Charcot's demonstrations began by provoking in me and in other visitors a sense of astonishment and an inclination to scepticism,” Freud recalled when he wrote his Autobiographical Study in 1924, almost 40 years after he had been an impressionable student at Salpêtrière. The most well-known painting from that famous French asylum for women, A Clinical Lecture by Charcot, by Brouillet, illustrates how dramatic the demonstrations that Freud witnessed were: a woman whose bodice falls back, revealing her shoulders and chest, arches backwards across the supportive left arm of Charcot, as he gestures with his right hand towards the rapt and attentive men watching her contortion. Reading Freud's reminiscence without reference to what he saw results in an impression that is completely different from the one we have when we consider the two together. When we read Freud we do not often pause to ask ourselves what he was looking at, or how it influenced him. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière fills this gap with ample archival examples of the sights that provoked Freud's skepticism.
Charcot's clinical approach centred on meticulous visual scrutiny of bodily symptoms. The appearance of a patient was Charcot's entry point to treatment, in the same way that the language of a patient is the entry point for psychoanalysts. The human inability to remain as still as a statue can interfere with diagnostic scrutiny, so it is not surprising that Charcot enthusiastically embraced the emerging technology of photography. A vast archive of photographs of women deemed to be hysterical was created. Published in France in 1982, Invention of Hysteria, now available in English, is a selection of these photographs and other contemporaneous visual materials, accompanied by a commentary by Georges Didi-Huberman, a professor of art history and culture at the École des hautes études en sciences socials in Paris. While not specifically devoted to