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(More customer reviews)This is a must-read and must-have. Beautifully designed and brilliantly written, covering cultural and psychological history and the significance of photography as a new medium and its impact on the emerging modern world. The invention of Hysteria is about new phenomenon being created as performance and recorded in images. An eye-opening book!
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In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman tracesthe intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry andphotography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographicoutput of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane andincurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in theinvention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacherand clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified ashysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visualproof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book,provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de laSalpetriere.As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objectivedocumentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"--theyperformed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in thepurgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of theincurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted topresentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's"Tuesday Lectures."Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Throughtechniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, heinstigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatredand resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity toantipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image cropsup again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance ofhysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy,crucifixion, and silent cries.
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