Wagner of the neurosciences? Charcot’s theater and his circle’s influence on the performing arts

In this article, I gloss and bring together two narratives from the cultural history of neuropsychology. First, I explore the theatrical aspects of the practice of the founder of French neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), characterizing his lecture style and diagnostic practice as a dramaturgical or choreological method. Charcot and his peers depicted the neuropathological body as a sensorial assemblage whose expressions and inputs could be charted across the dimensions of time and space, each body acting within an often determinative mise en scène, as in a theater. This echoed Richard Wagner's influential concept of a musico-dramatic Gesamtkunstwerk, or a totalizing combination of diverse actions, sensory inputs, sounds, and responses. I then trace reverberations from Charcot's practice within the theater of his own time and beyond, isolating the main trends. Charcot's lectures, and particularly his famous work on hysteroepilepsy and hypnosis, meant that although he and his peers championed neoclassical performances, their influence was most pronounced upon grotesque cabaretic mime and dance; the semihypnotized performance style of expressionism; the balance of automatism versus conscious reflection promoted by Konstantin Stanislavski; and, above all, the fraught depiction of modern nervous character types and women by Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen.