19th Century - Secrets of Women

Content Warning: Discussions of sexual assault and violence against women.

Everybody was talking about hysteria in late 19^th-century Paris. Hysterics appeared in novels and plays; they were painted, photographed, sculpted and drawn. People crowded the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris to attend demonstrations and lectures on hysterics given by the world-renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), and to gaze at his star patients. Who could resist admiring the ‘queen of hysterics’, the beautiful Blanche Wittmann (1859-1913), her face relaxed and insensible as she was pierced with needles by doctors, to demonstrate how she couldn’t feel any pain?

A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887), by André Brouillet. (Wikimedia Commons)

Born Marie Wittmann, Blanche was a ‘difficult’ child, who came from an abusive household. She was sent as an apprentice to a furrier, who sexually assaulted her at thirteen. Her medical symptoms quickly followed, and she eventually ran away, finding work as a ‘fille de service’, or a ‘ward girl’ at another hospital, before being hired at the Salpêtrière, where she spent the rest of her life. Patients provided much of the labour needed to keep the gigantic hospital and its facilities running: the work was mandatory for patients who were able, who were paid a nominal fee for their work. Hysterics were the stars of the hospital, but they were also not considered ‘insane’; according to Charcot, they suffered from a neurological disorder, not a mental illness (a statement which has been rightly problematised) and so the hysterics enjoyed a certain level of freedom. There was even a ‘bal des folles’ – a ball of the madwomen – at the hospital, in which patients dressed up, sang and danced.

Blanche in 1878, photographed by Albert Londe. (Wikimedia Commons)

When Blanche was admitted, at eighteen years old, she suffered from convulsions, paralysis, and fainting spells. In her early days there, she was described as ordinary, although her ‘hysterogenic zones’ (points in the body which could trigger hysterical attacks) were very sensitive. During her fits, she often called out the name Blanche (possibly her sister’s name), which was why she eventually started to be called by that name. Blanche was described as beautiful, with her fair skin, big bosom, and blonde hair: a perfect example of femininity, with an ever-fragile and vulnerable female body, largely susceptible to hysteria.

Hypnotism played a central role in shaping Blanche. It wasn’t used to treat patients, but to reproduce symptoms and allow for doctors to experiment. It allowed the unpredictable, unruly female body to become ‘rational’ and predictable, following a specific order. Charcot wanted to provide a rational framework for hysterical symptoms, and he used hypnotism to create the three main phases of hysteria: lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism. For him, hypnosis allowed doctors to study hysteria and isolate symptoms. Furthermore, he considered those more susceptible to hypnosis to likely be hysterics themselves (which was highly contested at the time). Blanche was at the centre of all these theoretical discussions.

Blanche in a cataleptic pose, circa 1880. (Wikimedia Commons)

Through endless demonstrations (they sometimes lasted hours), Blanche held gravity-defying poses for long periods of time, was flashed with bright lights, was hypnotised, received electrical stimuli, was pricked with needles, was deceived by doctors, and had her body manipulated in virtually all ways one can imagine. When she arrived at the Salpêtrière, the young Marie presented a variety of difficult-to-diagnose symptoms but, years later, as Blanche, she was the perfect hysteric, whose symptoms flawlessly illustrated Charcot’s teachings. She was shaped slowly by her life at the hospital, where her name was changed as she was, by the social and medical milieu she inhabited. She was transformed from an ‘ordinary’ hysteric into an ‘exemplary’ one through practice and repetition of enacting her symptoms: her talent and beauty made her the ‘ideal’ hysteric, and the literal star of the show.

Attending these demonstrations at the Salpêtrière was fashionable (socialites sat side by side with politicians, physicians, and artists – not to mention Sigmund Freud), but it was also fascinating, as people could see ‘Charcot’s hysterics’ act out the symptoms of hysteria. Arguably, these sessions were even more about theatre than they were about medicine. Charcot’s goal wasn’t to treat his patients, but rather to isolate and reproduce symptoms in a specific order, to classify the chaotic, making his patients living incarnations of the illness. His focus was on hysteria itself, not people like Blanche.

Blanche photographed under hypnosis (1893). (Wikimedia Commons)

Although she was a medical celebrity, a ‘diva’ in contemporary terms, Blanche’s relationship with her doctors, and especially Charcot, was uneasy. Hysterics were believed to be overly sexual and deceitful, exaggerating their symptoms and blatantly lying to others. Additionally, theirs was a necessarily unbalanced relationship: the wealthy and educated male doctors held almost absolute power over the poor, uneducated female patients. And it is chilling how casually sexual relationships between them were brushed aside in the records, as though not worthy of mention. Not to mention how many of these ‘experiments’ were violent or cruel.

After Charcot’s death in 1893, hysteria as it had been created (and the ‘medical divas’ it had shaped) was in decline. His followers disbanded, his theories were largely abandoned, and his patients lost their star status. Interestingly, Blanche never suffered another hysterical attack after Charcot’s death, nor any other symptoms. She continued at the Salpêtrière but as an employee, not a patient. Blanche was interested in photography, and so she worked as an assistant at the photography laboratory for a while, before working as a radiology technician. She refused to talk about her past as the ‘queen of hysterics’. Sadly, Blanche developed radiology-induced cancer, and spent her final years in pain, suffering a series of amputations to her limbs, until she finally died.

The Salpêtrière in 1925. (Wellcome Images)

Hysteria has a long history, from the ‘wandering womb’ in ancient Greece to contemporary discourse: female politicians are often described as ‘hysterics’ by their detractors. In the 19^th century, it was an illness linked to unruly womanhood, to women who did not conform to strictly limited gender roles, in one way or another. It was in some ways a female response to a stifling patriarchal society: women who suffered from hysteria often felt paralysed.

It is impossible to know to what degree Blanche’s illness was physically or socially determined, or whether her symptoms were somatic or psychosomatic. She wasn’t exactly a fraud, nor was she just a passive recipient of Charcot’s actions. It is also problematic to try to diagnose her retrospectively, a usually frowned-upon idea for historians of medicine. What we do know is just how influential Blanche’s demonstrations were: would we have Madame Bovary without people like her, or Freudian psychoanalysis as we know it? Blanche’s case illustrates how the physical body and the culture of a specific time and place can transform medical symptoms, influencing the way illnesses are understood: cultures shape bodies, which respond and adapt. But Blanche’s story is also a tale of a young woman who had few options, and who had to be resourceful to survive. She might have been described as not particularly intelligent, but I find that hard to believe.

References:

Jean-Marie Charcot, ‘Sur les divers états nerveux déterminés par l’hypnotisation chez les hystériques’,Comptes Rendues hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences 94 (1882): 403-405.

Albert Londe, La photographie médicale: application aux sciences médicales et physiologiques (Paris, 1893).

Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard, Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetriere (Service de M. Charcot) (Paris, 1878).

If there’s one person who thought and wrote about penises a lot, it was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the ‘father of psychoanalysis’. Like many nineteenth-century intellectuals, Freud was interested in sex and sexuality, and how lived experiences shape our minds. For men like him (for it was mostly men who were writing about this subject), Greco-Roman antiquity was key to understanding what it meant to be human.

In the 1886’s reference book Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study (Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie), the Austrian-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing classified what he termed ‘sexual pathologies’, such as homosexuality, sadism and masochism, among others, using Latin vocabulary as his inspiration. However, while sexologists like Krafft-Ebing were interested in historical narratives from antiquity, Freud believed human sexuality could be better understood through myths, which were closer to the human unconscious. For psychoanalysis, these myths could describe things unknown even to ourselves: just think of the Oedipus complex, which is probably the first thing that occurs to us when we think of Freud. So, how did Greek mythology and sex come to play such an important role in Freud’s thinking, defining psychoanalysis in the process?

Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808), by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. (Wikimedia Commons).

For both Freud and Krafft-Ebing, their interest in classic antiquity to explain human sexuality followed the eighteenth-century archaeological craze. The excavation of the Roman sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii had unearthed hundreds of artefacts of a phallic or sexual nature, including plenty of figures of ‘hermaphrodites’. Following these discoveries, many European intellectuals started to collect these phallic objects, as did museums. Also, following many archaeological finds, such as Heinrich Schliemann’s ‘discoveries’ of Troy and Mycenae, the nineteenth century saw the institutionalisation of archaeology. It was a period in which classical archaeology was becoming its own discipline, studied in museums and universities. It is no coincidence, then, that Freud often used archaeological analogies to describe psychoanalysis, such as ‘excavating the mind’. In his paper ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, Freud described how, just like archaeologists unearthed hidden ruins, so too could the psychoanalyst excavate the past, doing an archaeology of the mind.

Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), by Gustave Moreau. (Wikimedia Commons)

But what about myths, which were so often depicted by nineteenth-century artists? Well, Freud described the stories patient told him about their childhoods as not unlike myths. Much like Greek mythology, he believed the stories we told ourselves were our own myths, which could tell much about ourselves. And the psychoanalyst could make sense of these stories with the help of classical mythology. And that brings me to one of psychoanalysis’ most fascinating concepts, the phallic mother. As the name suggests, this is a woman who lacks nothing, bringing together all possibilities of sex. Freud believed that, for children’s ‘normal’ development, this was an incredibly common fantasy, in which the mother could satisfy all needs. (It’s important to keep in mind that in this repressive Victorian period, it was mostly women who cared for babies and young children.) Later, through dealing with the Oedipus complex, they would develop their own sexuality. But where did these ideas come from? Well, archaeologists such as Arthur Evans had excavated what they deemed matriarchal deities in different sites, supporting the idea of a mythological and powerful mother.

The ‘Minoan Snake Goddess’, found in Knossos, Crete. (Wikimedia Commons)

Narcissus’ myth was also an inspiration for Freud’s thinking about homosexuality, which he developed in a 1910 sexual biography of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo’s memory/fantasy of wishing to be breastfed by his mother would have turned into a form of narcissism and, subsequently, homosexual desires. These desires were eventually sublimated through his artistic and scientific pursuits and the study of ‘mother nature’, a symbol for the phallic mother. According to him, homosexuals were attracted to themselves, becoming the objects of their attraction as they searched for the love their mother would once have provided. Queer theorists have critiqued and problematised these views in detail (you can read a summary here).

Narcissus (1830), by Marco Antonio Franceschini. (Wikimedia Commons)

For me, Freud’s most illuminating idea is to understand children’s curiosity through the story of Oedipus and, especially, the passage where he needs to decipher the Sphinx’s riddle. This will to knowledge, the drive to learn, is what motivates children to be curious about learning. The child, just like Oedipus, tries to solve the ultimate mystery: where do babies come from? These ‘sexual theories of children’ would be the basis for adult curiosity. This innate curiosity has a universality to it and is easily relatable for us in the twenty-first century, just as it would have been for ancient Greeks.

This was the backdrop for Freud’s highly influential theories about sexuality. His thinking was shaped by the European interest in Greco-Roman antiquity in general, and the idea of ancient phallic worship, especially the collecting of phallic objects (‘phallicism’). Freud himself acquired many of these objects during a trip in 1902 to Pompeii, in ivory, faience, and bronze. His collection included more than 2500 of these objects. It is possible that these ancient phalloi, detached from the human body, came to highlight the role of the penis in his thinking. For historians, it is incredible to now have access to his collection. (You can see some of it at the Freud Museum in London until July 2023, and the digital archive will be available afterwards, too.)

The Kiss of the Sphinx (1895), by Franz Stuck. (Wikimedia Commons)

Freudian psychoanalysis is the product of a rich cultural and intellectual history, which was influenced by medical theories and an overall interest in classical antiquity. It emerged during archaeological, philosophical, and medical debates about sexuality. Many of Freud’s theories were restrictive and a product of their time (they can be misogynistic, patriarchal, and heteronormative), yet they were highly influential in the development of feminism, queer theory, and gender studies. Ultimately, Freud’s goal was to unearth what it meant to be human. To do so, what better inspiration than the Greek myths?

* This text was revised by Paula Gruman, a clinical psychologist and doctoral researcher at the Université de Paris, and my fabulous sister.

References:

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Histeria’ (1896).

_____, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).

_____, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1923).

_____, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

(Most of Freud’s writings can be found online; I recommend consulting the versions edited by James Strachey.)

References:

Further Reading:

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