Imagination, left to its own devices, abandons itself to unrealizable dreams; science holds it back and teaches us what cannot be. It does not follow that science contains the principle of art, but rather that we must study science either before or at the same time as art, in order to learn the limits by which art must be contained.
CHARCOT AND RICHER (1889) (iv)
[Charcot] exhausts me; when I come away from him I no longer have any desire to work at my own silly things; it is three whole days since I have done any work. My brain is sated as after an evening in the theatre.
FREUD, letter to Martha Bernays, November 24, 1885 (Letters 196)
CHARCOT AND THE GRAND GUIGNOL
EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-NINE MARKED the centennial of the storming of the Bastille, and the entire year was given over to exhibitions and exhibitionism, culminating in the official opening of the World’s Fair in Paris in October. Tourists from around the globe thronged through the Galerie des Machines (the longest interior space in the world), gawked at Thomas Edison’s “phonograph,” cheered Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and listened for the first time, like Claude Debussy, to the microbeats of the Javanese gamelan. The Eiffel Tower had been completed in the spring, after more than two years of labor. And in late summer—on August 10, to be precise—a party was held on its iron platform.
Scientists were celebrating the conclusion of the International Congress on Physiological Psychology. This was the first truly international convention devoted to a subject that drew on a wide variety of scientific fields, and was instrumental in founding psychology as an internationally organized discipline.1 With sections focusing on muscular sensitivity, psychological heredity, hallucinations, and hypnotism, the Congress aimed to bring together “recent work in psychophysics, physiological psychology, psychiatry, forensic psychology, pedagogy, comparative psychology of animals, races, and nations, ethology, or personality psychology, etc., etc.,” in the words of its organizer Julian Ochorowicz (400). The goal of such dialogue was the establishment of a new field, variously understood as physiological psychology, experimental psychology, or even neuro-psychology (a term that first emerged in English in 1875). Two hundred four people registered for the Congress from twenty-one countries, including France, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States (Rosenzweig 19). So successful was it all that plans were immediately laid to transform the event into a regular gathering, with another congress to be held in London three years hence.
On the platform that evening stood many of the leading lights of the scientific world. Hippolyte Bernheim was there, founder of the “School of Nancy,” as was his colleague Jules Liégois. Present too were the French psychologist (and inventor of intelligence testing) Alfred Binet, the Belgian philosopher/psychologist (and discoverer of the Delboeuf illusion) Joseph Delboeuf, the Swiss neuroanatomist and psychiatrist (and co-founder of neuron theory) Auguste Forel, the English polymath (and founder of modern statistics) Francis Galton, and the philosopher/economist (and pioneer of modern moral theory) Henry Sidgwick. The Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso, famous for his research into the identification of criminals by external characteristics as well as into connections between genius and insanity, toasted the health of Charles Richet, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for his work on anaphylaxis (and to coin the word “ectoplasm” for his research into the paranormal). William James, an active participant in the Congress, sent back a rhapsodic report to the journal Mind, in which he described looking down from this platform on tout Paris, with its “wonderfully illuminated landscape of exhibition grounds, palaces and fountains spread out below, with all the lights and shadows of nocturnal Paris framing it in” (615). Among the many others who may or may not have been at the party, but who certainly attended the Congress, were Joseph Babinski, Max Dessoir, and Sigmund Freud.
The first International Congress inaugurated a new period in relations between neurology and psychology; it also marked the precipitous decline of the reputation of the premiere neurologist in the world, Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot’s work on hysteria, which had dominated his practice for much of the 1870s and 1880s, was in the course of being steadily demolished by scientists and doctors working outside his orbit. Over the previous couple of years, opinion had shifted rapidly to that of Charcot’s principal intellectual antagonist, the neurologist Hippolyte Bernheim, whose radical theories of hysteria and hypnotism had broad implications for the understanding of psychology generally. In this chapter, we shall see how Charcot’s work on hysteria forced him into a crisis of objectivity, a crisis that in turn led him and his followers to single out theatricality as the particular enemy of neuropsychological investigation. And Charcot’s conceit was not singular to him. His opponents, too, singled out theatricality as the central trouble of Charcot’s work on hysteria, just as Charcot’s disciples pointed to theatricality as a threat to the work of his antagonists. The irony here is that the more that Charcot and company claimed objectivity for their research, the more they were forced to rely upon theatricality for their results. And the other irony is that Charcot’s foil, in the form of the ostentatiously theatrical Grand Guignol, would ultimately take its revenge.
While Charcot did not attend the International Congress on Physiological Psychology, he had been designated its President. The discoverer of numerous neurologically based diseases that still bear his name (Charcot joint, Charcot foot, Charcot disease, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease) as well as the first to match specific anatomical lesions to neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis, aphasia, and epilepsy, Charcot was the premier neurologist of his day. Beyond this distinction, he was the most influential figure in the study of physiological psychology, the so-called Napoleon of Neuroses whose studies of hysteria shaped much of fin-de-siècle culture.
Charcot was one of the great organizers and systematizers of nineteenth-century medical science, and it is to Charcot, above all, that neurology owes its status as a coherent field of modern scientific study. In early-nineteenth-century neurology, many diseases were still categorized by a single symptom (such as tremors, hypersensitivity, or paralysis), without reference to the underlying neurological conditions, a practice that led to the lumping together of many very different illnesses under single broad rubrics. In an attempt to more accurately catalogue neurological conditions, Charcot took particular pains to emphasize the importance of avoiding reductionism and overgeneralization. “When a patient calls on you,” he reminded his students, “he is under no obligation to have a simple disease just to please you” (Charcot 6). He repeatedly urged empirical induction over theoretical deduction, and stressed the virtues of “photographic” objectivity for scientific research.
I am not of the type to suggest things that cannot be demonstrated experimentally. You know that, as a principle, I pay little attention to abstractions and have no use for preconceived notions. If you want to see clearly, you must take things exactly as they are… . What a marvel it would be if I could, in fact, fabricate illnesses according to my whims and fantasies. But in fact all I am is a photographer. (Charcot 107)
Fittingly, Charcot was a pioneer in the use of instruments of mechanical objectivity—not only photographic cameras (which played a central role in his work at the Salpêtrière) but also, for instance, sphygmographic instruments (for recording pulse strength and rate) and electrodiagnostic instruments (for patients suffering from possible nerve or muscle disease).
While counseling against dangers of overgeneralization and reductionism on one hand, on the other Charcot passionately sought out what he called “archetypes,” or general forms of illnesses discovered through a synthesis of observable clinical signs and underlying pathological changes. This double method, which searched for connections between clinical observations and (often postmortem) investigations into physical lesions, Charcot dubbed anatomo-clinique. The method was extraordinarily successful with research into most neurophysiological conditions, but it became vastly more problematic when it came to hysteria, an ailment with no clear organic causes or (apparently) consistent symptoms. Charcot turned to the study of hysteria in the early 1870s, and came to believe that behind the whirligig of ailments and complaints lay a coherent order. More precisely, he concluded that it was a hereditary physical disease caused by a functional lesion in the nervous system. According to Charcot, hysteria could range from the three distinct stages of full-blown “grande hystérie” (“lethargy,” “catalepsy,” and “somnambulism”) to more subtle and partial expressions. What he offered was nothing less than a revolution in the clinical understanding of the mysterious and apparently widespread ailment—a revolution as appealing to the broad public as to the scientific community. “[W]ith the sessions on hysteria over the past three years,” his student Joseph Babinski writes in 1892, “the audience witnessed the total renaissance—the term is indeed not exaggerated—of the study of nervous system disease” (xv).
The public demonstration of hysterical conditions was undoubtedly the most popular aspect of Charcot’s Tuesday and Friday Lessons.2 But a return to these lessons also illustrates the problematic nature of Charcot’s method when it was turned to the study of hysteria. Consider, for example, Charcot’s presentation of a hysterical woman (her name is not given in the record) at the Tuesday Lesson on February 7, 1888. Standing next to the patient and an intern, Charcot encourages his public audience to
appreciate especially the unfolding of an attack. I tell you all this beforehand so that you can mark each phase, since they are hard to appreciate without preparation. Importantly, the attack is not a series of individual small attacks, but a single event that unrolls sequentially. I use here the method of describing an archetype with the most complex and fully developed features described. This system is essential for all neurologic diagnosis; one must learn to identify the archetype. The epileptoid phase can be lacking and the attack begin with the movement phase, either vocalizations or back arching. Sometimes the movements never appear, and one only has hallucinations. There are as many as 20 variations, but if you have the key to the archetype, you immediately focus on the disease at hand and all these cases represent the same disorder. So, here we have this contracted foot that reportedly cannot be reduced either during the day or night. I have not specifically examined it at all times, but I surmise that this is in fact true. We are not dealing here with simulation, one of the greatest obstacles to neurology (Vous savez que la manie de la simulation est un des principaux obstacles dans la neuropathologie). (The intern touches the hysterogenic point under the left breast. Immediately, the attack begins.) (Charcot 104; emphasis added)
Where in Chapter 1 we saw the decay of gesture as a sign of inner life, at the Salpêtrière we witness something like its return. The gestures of the “attack” were now pointed to as evidence for an inner condition of hysteria, along with the trauma that Charcot believed to be part of the etiology of the disease. But of course the resemblance between these gestures and the telling bodily movements discussed in Chapter 1 is purely superficial, for in fact the two forms of gesture had little in common. Where the eighteenth-century gestural semiotics of, say, Lord Kames described a clear connection between gestural signs and psychological states, the connection had now become difficult, if not impossible, to locate. The bodily motions (back arching, foot contraction, etc.) were extreme enough to be identifiable despite their numerous variations (“as many as 20”), but to what precisely did they point? To answer this question, the intercession of the doctor is necessary, the doctor who narrates the connection that would otherwise remain bewildering to his audience.
More than this, what became necessary was the doctor-hypnotist. By the 1880s, hypnosis was beginning to be taken seriously by the medical establishment, principally though not exclusively in France. These researchers were treading into more or less forbidden scientific territory, since hypnotism was still widely associated with Franz Mesmer’s theories of “animal magnetism,” an occult energy that could be manipulated by the skilled practitioner. Over the course of the nineteenth century, these mesmeric ideas and practices were just as widely debunked by scientists as they were embraced by entertainers, con artists, faith healers, and “country doctors” (one of whom, the rural doctor-hypnotist Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, inspired Bernheim’s research and helped to found the School of Nancy). Already by the time of Mesmer’s death in 1815, his practices were widely viewed by scientists as pseudoscientific, and researchers who dared to venture into their orbit (most notably the Scottish surgeon James Braid, who did much to introduce the scientific use of the word “hypnotism”) frequently found their work to be unpublishable in respectable journals. But by the early 1880s, resistance was starting to loosen, in part owing to a greater openness to the scientific investigation of occult phenomena (the influential British Society for Psychical Research was formed in 1882), and in part owing to a greater interest in the operations of the unconscious (Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious [Philosophie des Unbewußten] was first published in 1869, followed by a French translation in 1877 and an English in 1884).
Charcot was profoundly influenced by this sea change in scientific attitudes toward hypnotism, and he developed characteristically novel theories about its nature and function. Moreover, Charcot’s views on hypnotism were integral to his views on hysteria. For Charcot, hysterical phenomena could be provoked in the hysteric by means of hypnotism, which produced artificially in hysterics what their condition otherwise produced naturally. While Charcot believed that hypnotism had no power to cure hysterics, he maintained that it could provoke their symptoms, and so was especially useful for pedagogical purposes, in order to compel hysterics to demonstrate the distinctive features of the disorder. And as the phenomena of hypnotism precisely mimicked the symptoms of hysteria, Charcot maintained that only hysterics could be hypnotized.
This conception of the relation between hypnotism and hysteria meant that hypnotism was an integral part of Charcot’s hysteria demonstrations. But it also meant more: Charcot had discovered a way, without ever quite realizing it, to make particular physical phenomena manifest themselves to the “objective” scientific eye. Since phenomena “provoked” by hypnotism were supposedly the same as those that arose “spontaneous[ly],” the former phenomena could be studied in precisely the same manner as the latter—only with the greater convenience that “provoked” manifestations could be brought forth at will by the doctor-hypnotist. Charcot’s system, in other words, oddly reconciled a central, burdensome question of objectivity: how does one scientifically identify general rules and types without idealizing and thereby distorting one’s object of study? It reconciled the question by essentially creating a second object of study that was the exact double of the original, that could be called forth at will through hypnotism, and that appeared to demonstrate precisely the archetypes that were theorized from the outset.
With or without the aid of hypnotism, unconscious cues were clearly central to Charcot’s public performances. Recall that, in the lengthy quote given above, Charcot prepares his audience for the phenomena they are about to witness: “I tell you all this beforehand so that you can mark each phase, since they are hard to appreciate without preparation.” He then goes on to describe the archetypes they will see, a description that would have been redoubled by the illustrations, slides, statuettes, and other aids and further reinforced by the fact that the most famous hysterics would have been asked to exhibit the same gestures and conditions over and over again over the course of years. The line between spontaneous demonstration and provoked performance had become blurry at best.
The theatrical nature of Charcot’s “hysteria shows” has been a target of cultural criticism at least since the publication of Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s The Newly Born Woman (1975) and Georges Didi-Huberman’s The Invention of Hysteria (1982).3 Given the importance of such recent criticism for genealogies of hysteria, it is easy to forget how sharply controversial Charcot’s theories and practices were even at the time. The idea that Salpêtrière patients might be simply faking, or alternatively that they might be unconsciously cued or hypnotized into giving appropriate performances, was regularly discussed in the fin de siècle. The philosopher and psychologist Joseph Delboeuf, who visited both Salpêtrière and Nancy, concluded already in 1886 that lines of suggestion ran both ways: not only from doctor to patient but also from patient to doctor.
Doubtless there is an undeniable influence of the hypnotizer on the hypnotized—like master, like disciple. But the subjects themselves, principally the first one, train the one who directs them, and control his method and his maneuvers without his being aware of it. In a way, then, turning the proverb around, one could say: like disciple, like master. This action of the first disciple on the master is then reported to other disciples who adopt his procedures, and thus are created the schools that have the monopoly of special phenomena. (“De l’influence” 149)
Delboeuf’s critique of the Salpêtrière as a case study in networks of suggestion was amplified by the School of Nancy. As Bernheim saw it, susceptibility to hypnotism was neither a symptom of neurological damage nor a trait specific to hysterics. Instead, it was a common condition, indeed simply a form of the very widespread if not universal human susceptibility to suggestion. Suggestion, defined as “the act by which an idea is introduced into and accepted by the brain,” was ubiquitous—“suggestion is in everything”—and just as ineradicable from medical practice as from the rest of life (Bernheim, New 176, 46). Hypnotism thus could not be understood without taking account of the powerful suggestive effects the hypnotizer has on his subject—effects that might in fact explain the whole phenomenon. Indeed, by the time of the First International Congress, Bernheim was already “express[ing] doubt whether any such thing as hypnotism distinct from sleep and suggestion existed at all,” in the words of William James (615), and soon Bernheim was ready to dismiss hypnotism altogether: “there is no hypnotism; there is only suggestion,” he declared to the Second International Congress in 1892 (Forrest 252). Bernheim and his colleagues did not hesitate to draw the consequences for Charcot’s practices and theories. Could it be that the brilliant doctors of the Salpêtrière, that the famous hysterics, that the great wealth of carefully recorded phenomena, that the great Charcot himself were in fact little more than conduits for the flow of suggestion? Could it be that at the heart of the temple of modern neurology lay a circus of mass delusion? The School of Nancy answered yes, and yes.
Charcot himself recognized the difficulty of establishing the independence of the observer in a house for hysterics, but identified the problem with one of deception, or what he called (in the Tuesday Lesson quoted above) “simulation, one of the greatest obstacles to neurology.” Charcot took the charge that his patients merely faked their symptoms all the more seriously, since duplicity was the particular métier of hysterics. In the third volume of his Lessons on the Diseases of the Nervous System (Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux, 1887), for example, he writes that “we all know that the desire to deceive, even without interest, by a kind of disinterested worship of art for art’s sake (culte de l’art pour l’art), though sometimes with the idea of making a sensation, to excite pity, etc., is a common enough occurrence, particularly in hysteria” (3.14).
Given this tricky terrain, Charcot considered it a chief duty, when studying hysteria, to proof himself against mere performances. In addition to his legendary powers of observation, Charcot and his students deployed such techniques as poking hysterics’ bodies with needles (often by surprise) in order to test claims of hysterical anesthesia, writing on hysterics’ flesh with blunt objects in order to reveal the extreme sensitivity of their skin, placing hysterics’ bodies in stress positions (such as being suspended like a plank between two chairs) in order to demonstrate the muscular hyper-excitability of hysterical lethargy, examining the dimensions of the pupils of hysterics’ eyes during fits, measuring the oscillations of their paralyzed limbs, and so on. Over and again, observable and measurable physiological signs were offered as indications of the authenticity of the condition, and Charcot reassured his audiences that no mere mimic could last long at the Salpêtrière. “[S]imulation, which is talked about so much when hysteria and allied affections are under consideration,” he concludes,
is, in the actual state of our knowledge, only a bugbear, before which the fearful and the novice alone are stopped. For the future it ought to be the province of the physician, well-informed in these matters, to dissipate chicanery (fourberie) wherever it occurs. (Lectures 3.18)
The School of Nancy, however, found such reassurances far from adequate. To begin with, they pointed out that Charcot’s famous “grande hystérie” appeared to be irreproducible.4 Moreover, experiments at Nancy seemed to prove that susceptibility to hypnotism, far from being limited to hysterics, was actually quite common—and could easily be reproduced, consciously or not, in a highly controlled space such as the Salpêtrière. Finally, the researchers at Nancy and elsewhere took special delight in exposing the richly theatrical techniques employed by Charcot for his allegedly dispassionate demonstrations.
And these demonstrations, which took place in an amphitheater specially built for the purpose in 1882, were nothing if not theatrical. A stirring performer, Charcot pointed to plaster casts and statuettes while he lectured, sketched diagrams and anatomical illustrations in colored chalk on a blackboard (he was also a gifted painter), and called on the cutting-edge technology of projection slides to complete the multimedia production. “Everything in his lectures,” noted his student Pierre Janet, “was designed to attract attention and to captivate the audience by means of visual and auditory impressions” (quoted in Guillain 55). The room was painted entirely black, like a photography studio, in order to reduce glare from the lights positioned toward the patient. Rows of chairs faced the performance space, where Charcot himself sat, and once the audience had gathered the shutters were drawn to darken the room, footlights were turned on, and limelight could be further employed to pinpoint particular aspects of the demonstration (Marshall, “Dynamic” 137). One by one patients entered and, after taking the stage, typically had their outer garments removed, were submitted to hypnotism, and were compelled to demonstrate symptoms of diagnostic interest. In addition to the usual bizarre phenomena, scenes were often staged to more shocking effect. Pierre Janet describes a not atypical scene in which Blanche Wittman, “thrown into the somnambulant state, had under the influence of suggestion displayed the most sanguinary instincts. At a word or a sign, she had stabbed, shot, and poisoned; the room was littered with corpses”—a scene that was performed before “[a] number of persons of importance, magistrates and professors” (Janet, et al. 1.184).5
One of the reasons for the enormous cultural importance of the Charcot-Bernheim debates was that audience members for Charcot’s “hysteria shows” included many of the leading artists and scientists of the day. A partial list includes Jules Claretie (director of the Théâtre Français), Hippolyte Taine (critic and founder of literary Naturalism), the novelists Alphonse Daudet and his son Léon (the former of whom was also, like Ivan Turgenev, a patient of Charcot), Guy de Maupassant (possibly also a patient), Rudolphe Virchow (the founder of cellular biology), Théodore de Banville (the poet and Officier de la Légion d’honneur), and J. K. Huysmans (author of the Decadent classic À rebours), as well as Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim. Sarah Bernhardt may have attended the lectures, too, and even went so far as to visit the hospital to study its famous patients as a model for her own performance in the Eugène Scribe play Adrienne Lecouvreur. According to reports, she rehearsed her performance of a hysterical breakdown within one of the cells of the quartiers des aliénées.6 And yet, to Delboeuf at least, the doyenne of the French stage was actually outmatched in mimetic skill by the hysteric Blanche Wittman; he remarked of Blanche that “[n]ever has an actor or a painter, never a Rachel or a Sarah Bernhardt, Rubens or Raphäel, achieved this power of expression. This young girl enacted a series of tableaux that surpassed in éclat and force the most sublime efforts of art” (Delboeuf, “De l’influence” 124).
Critics often seized on such theatricality as a stick with which to beat Charcot and his disciples. The Swedish physician Axel Munthe, for instance, who extensively observed both Charcot at the Salpêtrière and Bernheim at Nancy, condemned “these stage performances of the Salpêtrière before the public of Tout Paris” as “nothing but an absurd farce, a hopeless muddle of truth and cheating” (218). Not only were the patients themselves exhausted by being “hypnotized right and left, dozens of times a day” and “bewildered by all sorts of absurd suggestions,” but also the whole school—doctors, students, visitors, and patients together—had fallen under the collective sway of “a sort of suggestion en masse” (219). The journalist Félix Platel, writing in an 1883 issue of Le Figaro under his famous pseudonym “Ignotus,” accused Charcot of “cabotinage” (overacting) and compared him to “Wagner, the great musical ham” (quoted in Marshall, “Dynamic” 131). Other contemporary critics included the writer Léon Daudet, whose bestselling novel Les morticoles (1894) caricatures Charcot as a huckster showman and his hysterics as scheming mimics. Looking back on her eighteen months as a young patient in Charcot’s hysteria ward, the can-can dancer Jane Avril (immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec) recalled the whole business as fakery pure and simple. In her memoir, she writes of “those mad girls whose disease, dubbed ‘hysteria,’ consisted, above all, in simulation of it” (26). More subtly, the neurologist Russell Reynolds and physician Hack Tuke, while generally sympathetic to Charcot, nevertheless cautioned him against possible distortions of his technique; both scientists counseled Charcot that his patients might be simulating their symptoms unconsciously in order to satisfy the expectations of doctors and interns (Goetz et al. 200).
The Salpêtrière occasionally flung such concerns and charges right back at its critics. On this account it was not Charcot who ran a medical circus, but Bernheim; the Salpêtrière was not the theater; Nancy was. Charcot’s student Gilles de la Tourette particularly pressed this case in L’hypnotisme et les états analogues au point de vue médico-légal (1887), in which he threw suspicion at Bernheim’s remarkable demonstrations of suggestion by implying that they were little more than role play. It was well known that Bernheim’s patients at Nancy seemed willing to perform the most extraordinary actions when under hypnotic influence. In Suggestive Therapeutics (De la suggestion et de son application à la thérapeutique, 1886), Bernheim gives an example of one such patient, a middle-aged photographer, who “carries out everything according to my command” when under hypnotic suggestion (57). Bernheim describes his investigation into the limits of this patient’s suggestibility.
I provoked a truly dramatic scene (une scène véritablement dramatique) one day, as I was anxious to see just how far the power of suggestion went with him. I showed him an imaginary person at the door and told him that he had been insulted by him. I gave him an imaginary dagger (a paper-cutter) and ordered him to kill the man. He hastened forward and ran the dagger resolutely into the door, and then stood staring with haggard eyes and trembling all over. “What have you done, unhappy man?” I said. “He is dead, he is bleeding, the police are coming.” He stood terrified. He was led before an imaginary magistrate (my intern). “Why did you murder this man?” “He insulted me.” “We do not kill the man who insults us. You must be complained of the police. Did any one tell you to kill him?” He answers, “M. Bernheim did.” I say to him, “You are to be taken before the justice. You killed this man. I said nothing to you, you acted as your own master.”
He was taken before my chef de clinique, who played the part of the magistrate. “Why did you kill this man?” “He insulted me.” (57–58)
And so on; the theatricality of such a “dramatic scene,” typical of the work at Nancy, was obvious at least to Bernheim. But for Tourette, these theatrics invalidated such scenes’ experimental worth. He argued that Bernheim’s patients knew, just as the doctor himself did, that these scenarios were essentially playacting, and so to show that a subject might commit murder under suggestion under such conditions did not indicate that he might do the same in real life. Quite to the contrary, even hypnotized hysterics at the Salpêtrière would not do anything they considered truly repugnant. As an example he cites a time when medical students gave Blanche (Marie Wittman), the so-called Queen of Hysterics but a sexually “modest (pudique)” woman, a hypnotic instruction to strip for her bath. “She seems unconvinced,” Tourette recalls, “but she starts removing her blouse, but at the moment when she is about to lift off her corset, her whole body stiffened, and we do not have time to intervene to prevent an attack of hysteria that always starts this way with her” (139–140). Tourette further notes that a less modest hysteric, “Sarah R,” showed no compunction about stripping for her “bath” when under hypnotic influence. Such examples seemed to indicate that suggestion was not as powerful as the School of Nancy claimed, and in particular that no one would do something under hypnotism that he or she would find utterly repugnant in a waking state. The further implications are clear: if Bernheim and his colleagues were finding that their hypnotized subjects were eagerly committing all sorts of heinous acts, then they were not so much acting under the power of suggestion as they were acting, pure and simple.7
The disagreement on the point of the limits of suggestibility became a crucial issue in at least one popular case of the period, the spectacular “Gouffé Case” of 1889, in which a murderer contended that she had been hypnotized into the deed by her male accomplice. The subsequent trial pitted the schools of Salpêtrière and Nancy directly and publicly against each other, with the representative of Nancy (Jules Liégois) contending that it was indeed possible to induce someone to murder by means of suggestion, and various representatives of the Salpêtrière denying that possibility. On this occasion, the Salpêtrière carried the day, and, particularly after Charcot’s death, most physiological psychologists came to side with the Salpêtrière position on the point of the limits of hypnotic suggestibility, just as they generally came to side with the Nancy position that many people (including non-hysterics) are susceptible to hypnotic suggestion.8
Such an environment, in which ferocious battles between medical authorities were being conducted as public spectacles, only sharpened the need to purify scientific hypnotism (whether à la Charcot or à la Bernheim) of any taint of mere showmanship. The Lancet correspondent to the 1889 International Congress on “Hypnotism, Experimental and Therapeutic” in Paris (a smaller, sister conference of the First International Congress on Physiological Psychology) reported on the uneasy status of hypnotism among the scientists present.
Speaking generally of the medical profession, and especially the English section of it, the tendency hitherto has been to look askance at the whole surroundings of the alleged phenomena, associated with what is known since recent times under the name of “hypnotism.” Nay, more: the inclination to look with dubious misgivings on anyone in the profession who meddled in the matter, or who claimed any therapeutic or other good effect, or even real existence, for the cerebral phenomena in question, has been manifestly the fashion; rather has the whole thing been condemned or passed over as deceptive or hysterical trickery. (“Paris” 460)
Much of the scientific community, in short, had learned to see hypnotism as a dubious and deceptive practice. It is in this light that a central resolution of this Congress must be understood: the resolution to ban stage performances of hypnotism. The resolution, introduced by the Swiss neurologist Paul-Louis Ladame, was for “[t]he prohibition of all public performances in hypnotism and the necessity of putting hypnotism under legal control” (“Paris” 460). This resolution was carried alongside another that complemented it perfectly: “[t]hat it is desirable that the study of hypnotism and its therapeutical applications be introduced into the curriculum of medical education” (460). Taken together, these were two sides of the same coin: prohibiting the practice in one sphere, arrogating it to the other.
These were reforms that Charcot himself had long advocated. The trouble with stage hypnotism, according to Charcot and other medical authorities, was not that it was a sham but that it worked all too well, that these entertainers were unleashing powers that they were not properly qualified to handle. The effect on audiences, and indeed on the body politic more broadly, was severe: these shows could cause mass hysteria, hallucinations, and epileptic attacks. The resolution passed the Congress easily (despite Delboeuf’s vocal opposition), and stage exhibitions of hypnotism by non-physicians was outlawed in France on November 30, 1892. Here was a step toward an (at least superficial) resolution of the crisis of theatricality; cordoning off scientific hypnotism from theatrical hypnotism and granting science monopoly powers over hypnotic practices prohibited hypnotic demonstration from becoming mere performance.
Charcot put this case against the “vulgar propagation of hypnotism” plainly in an 1887 letter to the physician Giulio Melotti (Oeuvres 9.480; emphasis in original). The letter urges “suppression” of such spectacles, since “theatrical performances of somnambulism provoke and give rise to hysteria” in many cities and, to make matters worse, such hypnotically induced hysteria “may prove to be extremely contagious” (9.479; 9.480). The letter ends with a rousing, and altogether typical, defense of the rights and obligations of medical science in the face of such showmen.
In the name of science and of art, medicine has in recent times finally taken definitive control of hypnotism; and this was fully justified, for medicine alone can know how to apply it properly and legitimately, either for the treatment of the sick or for physiological and psychological research. In this recently conquered domain, medicine now wants to reign as absolute Mistress, jealous of its rights; it formally rejects any intrusion. (9.480)
The French ban soon became an international model, with censures and prohibitions advocated, with widespread success, by medical communities in Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States from the late 1880s through the turn of the century.9
This back and forth between Salpêtrière and Nancy about the distorting theatricality of their practices took place in an environment where the literal theater was drawing liberally from both sources. Sarah Bernhardt was only the tip of the iceberg, for the theater was grabbing as greedily from medical science as medical science was grabbing from it. The most broadly popular of such borrowings was George du Maurier’s Trilby, published as a novel in 1894 and adapted for the stage (by Paul Potter) the same year. A red-hot American bestseller, Trilby sold equally well in Great Britain, sparking “Trilby-mania” on both sides of the Atlantic as well as longer-lasting fashions such as the “Trilby hat”; the play, too, proved an enormous international success. The work tells the story of Trilby, a tone-deaf artist’s model who falls under the spell of a mysterious musician who transforms her by means of hypnotism into an opera star. So long as she remains under his power she sings with the voice of an angel, but as soon as the hypnotic spell is broken she loses all her talent. Written just a few months after Charcot’s death, Trilby did not so much reverse the relation Charcot proposed between hypnotism and theatricality as point to the deeper truth that, in the fin de siècle, the hypnotized woman had become the ideal performer.
Directors, too, were learning from neuropsychology. In The Actor: An Artistic Problem (Der Schauspieler: Ein künstlerisches Problem, 1893), the director Max Martersteig theorized that actors typically perform under a sort of hypnotism that takes hold upon the first reading of the play and is repeated throughout the play’s performance. Defining hypnosis as “a condition in which, through an exterior cause—therefore involuntarily—the entire attention of an individual is attracted to a certain idea, while other rows of ideas of the cerebral system are forced into inactivity and remain in that state,” Martersteig proposed that the actor is transported into such a state by the play text (27; emphasis in the original). At its best, therefore, the actor’s performance is largely the unconscious functioning of a hypnotized nervous system. Martersteig’s theory of acting as hypnotic “transfiguration” (6) of the nervous system shares ground with not only fin-de-siècle neuropsychological understandings of hypnotism and agency but also with the far more influential practices of Konstantin Stanislavsky. As several critics have shown, Stanislavsky’s “system” of acting, as developed in the early twentieth century, was at least partly indebted to nineteenth-century psychological theories, particularly those of the French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot, whose Psychology of the Emotions (La psychologie des sentiments, 1889) Stanislavsky read in Russian translation in 1909.10 It is very likely that Stanislavsky’s technique of “emotion memory,” by which an actor can learn to retrieve affects from past experience in order to perform analogous emotional responses in the present, owes something to Ribot’s own concept of “affective memory.” By the time Stanislavsky set some of his theories down in writing in An Actor Prepares (1936), however, the influence of Ribot had become overshadowed by that of the Russian psychologist (and Communist Party favorite) Ivan Pavlov (Pitches 49, 91–93).
Returning to fin-de-siècle France, we find that hypnotism and hysteria swept downmarket venues just as thoroughly as they did the boulevard playhouses and independent theaters. The 1880s saw a Parisian craze for so-called epileptic singers (gommeuses épileptiques), who exhibited the contortions of Salpêtrière epileptics and hysterics (R. Gordon 60–112). Meanwhile, stage magicians and theatrical hypnotists were using their newfound association with respectable science to elevate themselves, announcing their shows as “Based on Professor Charcot’s experiments at the Salpêtrière” (Didi-Huberman 235). By the early years of the twentieth century, the synthesis of popular neurology and popular theater reached an apex, or nadir, in the horror shows of the Grand Guignol.
“Grand Guignol” refers to Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (which operated in Paris between 1897 and 1962) as well as to the type of play most frequently performed there, a bastard child of stage Naturalism and Gothic melodrama. The form drew liberally from the ultra-realist performance conventions of André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, a stage where real steam rose from tea cups, fresh meat hung from precisely reproduced butcher shops, and actors so honored the “fourth wall” that they sometimes performed with backs to the audience. Into this photorealistic world Grand Guignol thrust unabashedly sadomasochistic fantasies (a particularly popular play was simply entitled Le Marquis de Sade) interspersed with light comedies, sex farces, and other diversions. While characters and locations ran the gamut, doctors were probably the most frequent profession to appear (given that damsels and psychopaths hardly constitute “professions”); hospitals and laboratories were very typical settings; and hysteria, hypnotism, and insanity served as favorite topics. Indeed, the Grand Guignol drew so liberally from the intimate details of the medical world that it initiated a new subgenre dubbed “Théâtre Médical,” with titles such as A Concert at the Madhouse, The Operations of Prof. Verdier, and The System of Dr. Goudron and Prof. Plume.
Whether strictly set in medical institutions or not, Grand-Guignol plots frequently revolved around the horror and the fascination of the person as nervous system. The Horrible Experiment (L'horrible expérience, 1909), one of the most popular Grand-Guignol shockers, involves a doctor’s attempt to resurrect human flesh by electrical stimulation. The plot of Kiss of Blood (Le baiser de sang, 1925) revolves around a chronic (perhaps hysterical) pain in a man’s finger, a pain so severe that he begs a doctor to amputate the appendage. In The Laboratory of Hallucinations (Le laboratoire des hallucinations, 1916), a jealous doctor tortures his wife’s lover by surgically altering the man’s brain, whereupon the lover overpowers the doctor, straps him to the operating table, and returns the favor. The Man Who Killed Death (L’homme qui a tué la mort, 1928) features a disembodied head, recently guillotined, wired to an apparatus to suspend its life. Fittingly, the most prolific and famous of Grand-Guignol writers—the so-called Prince de la Terreur André de Lorde—transformed the German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with its spectacles of hypnotism, madness, and somnambulism, into a highly successful horror show.11 And de Lorde, too, was transformed, lending his name to the head doctor of a psychological laboratory in The Experiment of Dr. Lorde (L’expérience du Dr Lorde, 1916). Even the comedies of the Grand Guignol occasionally developed the themes of nerves and neurosis, hypnotism and madness: Georges Feydeau’s Sleep—I Command You! (Dormez, je le veux!, 1897), for instance, involves a butler who has hypnotized his master into doing all the housework, while René Berton’s sex farce Afterwards! … or Tics (Après Coup! … ou Tics, 1908) tosses together adulterous couples who suffer postcoital nervous tics.
While all such plays were written under the shadow of the neuropsychological debates of the fin de siècle, the influence of Charcot in particular was made explicit in plays such as A Lesson at the Salpêtrière (Une leçon à la Salpêtrière, 1908), a horror show featuring a sadistic stand-in for Charcot. A Lesson at the Salpêtrière helped establish the Théâtre Médical’s dominant character types (the obediently brutal nurse, the dispassionately vicious doctor, the victimized “mad” woman) as well as its dominant themes: medical treatment as a cover for sadistic domination, human beings as mere test subjects, the insanity of temples of learning, and the reason of the supposedly insane.
Cast as the foil to the scientific method, theatricality launched its most sustained counterattack in the Grand Guignol. These plays, with their Woyzeck-like portraits of doctors more deranged than their own patients, painted a grotesque picture of neurological and psychological institutions. More than this, many such works were directly inspired by Charcot’s former disciples—or even written by them. While A Lesson at the Salpêtrière was penned by André de Lorde, it was dedicated “in recognition of a deep and grateful friendship” to one of Charcot’s most illustrious students, Alfred Binet. A brief glance back to Binet’s work with Charcot will help clarify the stakes involved in such a dedication.
Binet had begun studying at the Salpêtrière in 1883, where he captured Charcot’s attention in 1885 with a series of demonstrations of “phenomena of transfer” by means of magnets, the idea being that gestures or perceptions could be unconsciously shifted from one side of the body to the other by means of hidden magnets; Binet and his collaborator Charles Féré frequently employed house hysteric Blanche Wittman to “demonstrate” these phenomena. When the psychologist Joseph Delboeuf began to issue his sharply critical reports of the “experiments” at the Salpêtrière, Binet took up arms as one of the staunchest defenders of Charcot’s work; the exchange soon became a heated and personal one between Binet and Delboeuf, with the Master’s legacy at stake. But even Binet, who rarely backed away from a position, eventually had to acknowledge defeat. In 1892 he finally conceded that, at the Salpêtrière, “[o]ne of the chief and constant causes of mistake, we know, is found in suggestion—that is to say, in the influence that the operator exerts by his words, gestures, attitudes, even by his silence, on the subtle and alert intelligence of the person whom he has put in the somnambulistic state” (76). He regarded the surrender, according to his biographer Theta H. Wolf, as “a distressing personal humiliation,” and after he left the Salpêtrière in 1890 he never again mentioned the place or his former teacher (77).
In Binet’s case, a further consequence of this rejection of Charcot’s understanding of hysteria was a shift to a more nuanced understanding of performance. Where Charcot had been consumed by the thought that his hysterics might be “acting” in the sense of merely deceiving or simulating, Binet saw these medical subjects as “acting” in a very different sense. Binet now argued that subjects of suggestion are particularly difficult to decipher not because they perform that which they do not feel (like Diderot’s ideal actors), but rather for the opposite reason: because they more or less become what they perform. In Alterations of Personality (Les altérations de la personnalité, 1892), Binet distinguishes various views on the theatrical nature of subjects of suggestion. The first view, which he attributes to Delboeuf, is that “the subject is really playing a part, a sort of comedy, and … may be compared to an actor who expresses sentiments which he does not feel” (258). This position is not, however, the discredited one of Charcot, for those who hold Delboeuf’s view are
by no means of the opinion that the subject tries to simulate and deceive the experimenter—the old idea of simulation is no longer held. But they think that the subject obeys from a different motive. When he receives an order, like that of representing a soldier or a peasant, he performs it to the best of his ability, with no other desire than that of pleasing the person from whom he has received the suggestion. He plays a comedy part, but with good intentions. (258–259)
On the other hand, “[t]his position has been violently combated by other authors, notably M. Bernheim, who hold that in every case the subject is sincere and really accepts the suggestion which he receives” (259). Is the subject under suggestion just “playing along” or convinced of the reality of her role? Rather than deciding between the two positions, exemplified by Delboeuf and Bernheim, respectively, Binet concludes that “they appear to me to be equally correct, only they apply in different cases” (259). Binet’s complex understanding here of the performative aspects of behavior under suggestion is important because it is a marker of just how very far the debate had come over the course of roughly a decade. Neuropsychologists such as Binet were having an increasingly difficult time maintaining the sharp distinctions between authenticity and simulation, science and theatricality, and truth and deception—distinctions that had been orthodoxy under Charcot.12
After his break with the Salpêtrière, Binet went on to write or cowrite at least four and possibly as many as eight plays in the Grand-Guignol style, drawing liberally on his medical experience (Wolf 38; R. Gordon 95). Several of these plays were written in collaboration with de Lorde, to whose collected works he also wrote a preface. Among the most popular of Binet’s Grand-Guignol plays was A Crime in a Madhouse (Un crime dans une maison de fous, 1925), written with de Lorde. As with A Lesson at the Salpêtrière, the play blurs lines between reason and madness, doctors and patients. Such themes may also be found in The Deranged Women (Les détraquées, 1921), another Grand Guignol cowritten by a former leading light of the Salpêtrière. In this case the author (together with the actor Pierre Palau) was Joseph Babinski, professor of neurology at the University of Paris and best known today as the discoverer of the “Babinski sign” (the reflex induced when the sole of the foot is struck with a blunt instrument). By most accounts Charcot’s favorite student, Babinski had (like Binet) defended the master’s work on hysteria and hypnotism for many years before finally finding himself forced to surrender the position. Two years after the First International Congress on Physiological Psychology, Babinski was still attempting to repel Charcot’s opponents, but in the subsequent year (1892) he at last began to distance himself somewhat from orthodoxy by drawing a distinction between “great hysteria” (of the sort seen among the “neuropathic aristocracy” at Salpêtrière) and “little hysteria” (of the sort seen elsewhere). This seemingly slight shift was enough to destabilize the edifice beyond repair, for on further analysis the “great hysteria” discovered at the Salpêtrière turned out to be discoverable only there—and only during Charcot’s lifetime. By 1907 the conversion was complete: Babinski at last published a paper in the Bulletin Médical in which he agreed with Bernheim’s view that Charcot’s famous cases of hysteria were products of suggestion (Philippon and Poirier 305–306).
In other words, Babinski’s turn to the Grand Guignol came, like Binet’s, after an embarrassing public break with the best-known part of Charcot’s legacy. Unlike Binet, however, Babinski chose to hide his Grand Guignol involvement behind a pseudonym. Adopting the nom de plume “Olaf,” Babinski attended the premiere of his play while wearing a fake beard. He identified himself there neither as Babinski nor as Olaf, however—in an almost surreal touch, he went by the name “Alfred Binet.”13 Surreality in fact surrounded this play, whose few admirers included André Breton. Breton’s own involvement in neurology remains a little-explored influence on his art; he had in fact studied with Babinski, whom he greatly respected, at the neurological center of La Pitié hospital in Paris for about half a year in 1917.14 Breton considered Babinski’s play, dismissed by reviewers and rarely revived thereafter, as “the only dramatic work … I choose to recall” (45) and described it at length in his novel Nadja. In the first issue of his journal Le surrealisme, même, Breton revealed Babinski as the work’s coauthor (Pierron, Grand 808).
While one agent of the Grand Guignol’s revenge against the Salpêtrière was the medical profession itself, another was the audience. Why, after all, did so many people from across so many different classes and spheres of society go to the Grand Guignol?15 What the Grand Guignol offered above all was frisson, in a new and modern sense: not merely as a shiver, tremble, or shudder but as a current of emotion that spreads through a group—a sense of the word that emerges in French around 1859 (Rey 2.1519). What it offered as well was thrill, in a new and modern sense: not merely as a tingling sensation but as a “[t]hrilling property (of a play, novel, narrative, speech, etc.); sensational quality; a literary work having this property, a sensational story, a ‘thriller’ ”—a sense of the word that emerges in English around 1886 (Oxford English Dictionary “thrill, n.3”).16 More precisely, what many Grand-Guignol plays offered was the modern, medicalized frisson of being a neural subject, a thrill it shared with Victorian-era sensation drama. Much as audiences of railroad sensations were able to transform industrial traumas into industrial transports, so Grand-Guignol audiences could convert neurological anxieties—what we might call neuro-neurosis, the condition of being nervous about one’s nerves—into neurological ecstasies.
All of which is to say that one could go to the Grand Guignol to enjoy one’s nervous breakdown. Max Maurey, one of the founders and great publicists of the Grand Guignol, famously installed a “house doctor” at every performance, a fixture that remained long after Maurey’s tenure. Though a frequent topic of humor about the Grand Guignol, the idea was not entirely a publicity stunt.
“Guignolers” liked to repeat the number of times that the house physician was called to treat temporarily sickened spectators. At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening’s faintings. During one de Lorde horror play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals. (M. Gordon 27–28)
This grotesque and ecstatic neural body was central to audience pleasure at the Grand Guignol, and the sensation of the neurologically troubled (fainting, palpitating, quivering) body was coupled to the sensation of hungry flesh.
Some witnesses reported that the iron-grilled boxes in the back of the theatre encouraged a certain “extremism,” especially during Monday matinees when women often prepared themselves for adultery by throwing themselves, half-dead with terror, into their neighbors’ arms: flirtation, Grand-Guignol-style. The cleaning staff would often find the seats stained… . (Pierron, “House” 99)
With its monstrous doctors, anatomized subjects, and swooning audience members, Grand Guignol delighted in and extended the order it resisted. And yet it also opened up a path of pleasure, and a far-reaching one, for the neural subject.
No single figure more fully embodied this pleasure and its limitations than the actress Paula Maxa (née Marie-Thérèse Beau). Dubbed “the most assassinated woman in the world,” Maxa appeared in countless Grand Guignol performances beginning in 1916 and peaking during the 1920s. In a memoir published in 1965, she revels in the ecstasies of her own “victimized” body—a body that became, through its wild and ridiculous abjection, both a figure of the neural subject at its most brutalized and an icon of performative power.
Flogged, tortured, eyes gouged out, cut into slices like a sausage, pressed with steam, put through a mill, crushed, scalded, bled, vitriolized, impaled, deboned, hanged, buried alive …
Boiled in a pot-au-feu! …
Ripped, torn, shot to death, chopped, stoned, shredded, eaten, suffocated, poisoned, burned alive, eaten by a lion, crucified, scalped, strangled, slain, drowned, pulverized, stabbed, pistol-whipped, raped!
Everything has been cut, planed, cut, shriveled, well! you see, despite all this … It’s going very well. (Pierron, Grand 1381)
Vanquished over and over and over again, Maxa was also un-killable: the sacrifice as phoenix. Her performances spectacularly reenacted the sexualized violence suffered by Charcot’s hysterics—alongside countless others. In this sense, Maxa points to the recurring victimization of women exhibited by theaters of sensation, a leitmotif that returns us to this book’s beginnings, to Shelley’s Beatrice and Büchner’s Marie. Over and again, the figure of woman was offered as a site into which the destructive energies of the neural subject could be displaced and destroyed. As we have seen with Wagner’s Kundry and Charcot’s Blanche, and will see again with Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the restoration of patriarchal order in the face of radical destabilization frequently came by means of the identification and debasement of the supposedly hysterical other. Maxa’s hyperactive repetition of this violent process is a marker of the fact that it was beginning, by the early twentieth century, to become mechanized.
Despite or, more likely, because of the mathematical sublimity encouraged by Maxa’s performance regimen, she consistently attracted a kind of counting mania among her admirers. Thus Camillo Antona-Traversi, secretary to the Grand-Guignol producer Camille Choisy, determined that Maxa cried “Help!” 983 times, “Murderer!” 1,263 times, and “Rape!” 1,8404½ times during her performances, while the theater historian Mel Gordon describes how “she was murdered more than 10,000 times and in some 60 ways. A few examples: devoured by ravenous puma, cut into 93 pieces and glued back together, smashed by a roller-compressor, burnt alive, cut open by a traveling salesman who wanted her intestines; she was also raped over 3,000 times under a dozen circumstances” (26). As Adorno and Horkheimer noted about the writings of de Sade, behind the mask of irrationality lies a face of outrageous reason.
Maxa also operated on her audience with exacting precision. For Maxa, acting in Grand Guignol seems not to have involved significant training in theatrical techniques for emotional reproduction—or at least, she never mentions any such techniques in her memoirs, nor does she write about this aspect of performance as a difficulty or concern. It is a somewhat surprising omission, perhaps, given the genre’s reliance upon extreme emotional states, but it is also telling that she stresses instead the extraordinary importance of exact timing for a successful performance.
Often, a word, a phrase said a little too fast, a little too abruptly could produce laughter. It had to be precise to the millimeter.
This is understandable, the atmosphere being tense, nerves all on edge, any tiny thing could trigger laughter.
… When the mood was broken, it had to be recaptured, which was sometimes very hard and often impossible. (Pierron, Grand 1393)
Just as the Grand Guignol pushed bodies (of characters, actors, and audience members) beyond eroticism into unbounded sex, so, too, it pushed reason beyond the reasonable into obsessive timing and compulsive calculation. It was with Maxa that sexualized violence lost all pretense to order and knowledge, that it rendered itself as pure spectacle. At the same time, it is with Maxa (who played, among her many roles, the tortured Louise in Binet and de Lourde’s A Crime in a Madhouse) that the revenge of theater upon the medical establishment of the Salpêtrière takes on its fullest, or at least its most perversely performative, form. Exhibiting herself as the unsurpassable object of a certain misogynistic gaze, she transformed that gaze from something deadly serious to something ridiculous and vulgar, hysterical and surreal.
We began this chapter in 1889, the year of the Paris World’s Fair and the first International Congress on Physiological Psychology. The Congress actually marked not the apex of Charcot’s influence but the beginning of its end. If the Salpêtrière had previously dominated the field of respectable research into hysteria and hypnotism, that position was quickly collapsing in the face of Nancy’s attacks.
The Congress exposed the extent of the coup. Charcot’s absence from the Congress further weakened his side, and his disciples found themselves both masterless and outnumbered. Tourette, Binet, and Babinski were thrown on the defensive—an altogether unaccustomed position for the leading lights of the Salpêtrière—while followers of Nancy pressed their case on all fronts. William James summarized the situation as an almost total defeat for Charcot: “[t]he partisans of the Nancy School were decidedly in the majority at the meetings; and everyone seemed to think that the original Salpêtrière doctrine of hypnotism, as a definite pathological condition with its three stages and somatic causes, was a thing of the past” (614–615). In short, it may have been for reasons beyond his health that Charcot neglected to appear at the Congress. On one score, however, Charcot and his disciples emerged victorious: hypnotism was to be cordoned off, at first by decree and subsequently by law, from the threat of theatricality. As we have seen, the Congress passed a resolution, enthusiastically supported by the Salpêtrière, to ban all stage performances of hypnotism.
In the same year, a thousand miles away from Paris on the Stockholm Archipelago, August Strindberg and his small company were staging premieres of several works intended to bring into Swedish the movement of theatrical Naturalism initiated in Paris by Émile Zola. The three works that collectively premiered in 1889 were The Stronger, Creditors, and, most famously, Miss Julie. As we shall see in the next chapter, it was through Strindberg’s Naturalistic experiments that hypnotism began to enter the theater—enter it not merely as a “vulgar” attraction (as with the stage hypnotists and magnetizers) but as a principle of dramatic structure and action. Simultaneously claimed by the scientist on one hand and the Naturalist artist on the other, hypnotism was to be protected against vulgar theatricality and preserved as a privileged method of objective inquiry. Hypnotic suggestion would prove the stuff of modern science and modern tragedy.
1 The American Psychological Association, the oldest continuously existing national psychological organization, was founded in 1892, in the wake of the Congress. Similar national organizations were subsequently founded in France and the United Kingdom (both in 1901), in Germany (1904), in Argentina (1908), and in Italy (1910). See Rosenzweig 12.
2 The Tuesday and Friday Lessons had somewhat different formats and aims. Babinski described their difference thus: “On Friday, the professor presents patients whom he has previously examined and studied with the greatest care and reflection. His aim, however, is not restricted to showing his students cases where the clinical picture is fully elucidated and where the diagnosis is already established. He aims foremost here to inform his younger coworkers of his most recent studies and their results… . The Tuesday sessions … are fundamentally different in organization from the Friday lectures… . The patients presented come for outpatient consultation to the Salpêtrière. The patients are unknown to the professor, and he attempts to establish a diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment for the given affliction… . The professor will often bring out new ideas and present new insights, sketches of work that are too undeveloped to be presented in final form at the Friday sessions but which nevertheless could inspire his audience, especially those listeners with the ambition to explore questions related to the fascinating field of neuropathology” (xv–xvi).
3 A partial list of English-language cultural histories of fin-de-siècle hysteria after Didi-Huberman includes S. Gilman, Logan, Bronfen, Micale, Scull, and Showalter.
4 “Only once did I see a subject who exhibited perfectly the three periods of lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism,” wrote Bernheim in 1889. “It was a young girl who had been at the Salpêtrière for three years … the case was no longer one of natural hypnotism, but a product for false training, a true suggestive neurosis” (quoted in Gauld 330; see also Makari 6). According to Axel Munthe, the features of “grande hystérie” were “all invented by the Master and hardly ever observed outside the Salpêtrière” (302; see also 320).
5 Janet’s account of this scene draws from Gilles de la Tourette’s description in L’hypnotisme et les états analogues (203).
6 For accounts of Paris luminaries who attended Charcot’s lectures, see Goetz et al. 250–251; Hustvedt 90, 322. For more on Bernhardt and Charcot in particular, see Hustvedt 93–95; R. Gordon 29; Micale, “Discourses” 76. Never one to let a fad entirely pass him by, Scribe also cowrote a “comédie-vaudeville” on mesmerism entitled Irene, ou le magnetisme. The play premiered at the Théâtre du Gymnase in 1847, where it was admired by the enthusiastic mesmeric practitioner Charles Dickens. But by then such satires were already shopworn stuff, dating at least to Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1780s play Animal Magnetism.
7 One implication of this point is that mass murder, apparently, was not so discomforting to Blanche Wittman as to prevent her from doing it under hypnotism—and was apparently less discomforting to her than removing her clothes in public. Pierre Janet notes this intriguing suggestion in Psychological Healing (Janet et al. 1.184).
8 For more on the “Gouffé Case,” see Bogousslavsky et al.
9 For the history of the prohibition of non-medical hypnotism in Germany, see Wolffram; for its history in the United States, see Nadis; for its history in Great Britain, see Leighton. Freud, interestingly enough, did not share this widespread fear of the misuse of hypnotism by lay practitioners; in the “Preface” to his 1888 translation of Bernheim’s De la suggestion, for instance, Freud concludes that “hypnosis is a harmless condition” (47).
10 Joseph Roach’s claim that Stanislavsky’s system “cannot be comprehended without his science” (206) has been supported by more recent studies. Two good accounts of connections between the human sciences and Stanislavky’s system are Pitches, passim, and Whyman, esp. chap. 1. The influence of Théodule-Armand Ribot on Stanislavsky’s conception of “affective memory” (or “emotional memory”) is also briefly sketched in Bentley, “Who.”
11 De Lorde wrote the dramatic adaptation together with Henri Bauche; it premiered in 1925.
12 Elsewhere in Alterations of Personality, Binet quotes Charles Richet making roughly the same point about performance under suggestion. According to Richet, the subject under suggestion “ ‘is rather like an actor who is seized with passion, imagines that the drama he plays is a reality, not a fiction, and that he has been transformed, body and soul, into the personality that he sets himself to play’ ” (249–250).
13 The authorship was originally attributed to “Palau and Olaf.” “Palau” was clearly Pierre Palau, a well-known actor and dramatist, but “Olaf” remained a mystery until 1956, when André Breton’s journal Le surrealisme, même revealed the author to be Babinski. See Philippon and Poirier 44.
14 Breton worked as a medical orderly in Nantes during World War I and was a student at a military neuropsychiatric center in Saint-Dizier. At Saint-Dizier he cared for shell-shock victims and considered becoming a psychiatrist. (For more on the relation between Breton and Babinski, see Haan et al.) In a 1962 author’s note to Nadja, Breton writes of his surprise at discovering that “Olaf” was in fact his old teacher: “I was greatly surprised when I learned that Dr. Babinsky [sic] had a hand in the working out of Les détraquées. I remember the great neurologist well, having assisted him for a while as a ‘temporary intern’ in his service at la Pitiée. I still feel honored by the sympathy he showed me—even if it misled him into predicting a great medical future for me!—and, in my own way, I think I profited from his instruction, to which homage is paid at the end of the First Surrealist Manifesto” (Breton 53).
15 For the extraordinarily heterogeneous nature of Grand-Guignol audiences, see Hand and Wilson 67.
16 By contrast, the definition of “thrill” as a “subtle nervous tremor caused by intense emotion or excitement (as pleasure, fear, etc.), producing a slight shudder or tingling through the body; a penetrating influx of feeling or emotion” dates back much further, to the late seventeenth century.