Acting Out Traumatic Hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital: Performance and Practice in Jean-Martin Charcot’s Clinic

This article reexamines neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s (1825–1893) clinical work at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and reassesses how he diagnosed and treated patients with traumatic hysteria. Departing from scholarship that views Charcot as a positivist nosologist or a clinical performer, this study demonstrates that his clinical practice cannot be reduced to either nosological classification or theatrical spectacle alone. Drawing on photographic documentation, clinical lessons, recorded physician-patient interactions, and a first-person testimony, the study advances three main arguments. Charcot’s clinical practice was defined by embryonic versions of psychological concepts (autosuggestion, transference, acting out, dissociation, idées fixes , abreaction, and motor reeducation) that foreshadowed Janet’s and Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. Moreover, the performative nature of Charcot’s clinical theater also created, perhaps inadvertently, a setting in which patients could explore their unconscious and act out their trauma. Finally, rather than viewing patients’ somatic expressions as exclusively symptoms of suffering (or worse still, as malingering or forms of clinical manipulation), they are interpreted as posttraumatic protests directed, consciously or unconsciously, at the traumatic event(s) and the social, institutional, and medical conditions that pathologized and silenced their expressions.