By then he had already published widely and had assembled a team of research specialists and students who approached the study of the nervous system through the celebrated methode anatomo-clinique that correlated specific neurological signs with discrete lesions in the central nervous system. Pushing beyond the bounds of anatomical study, Charcot went on to study hysteria, attracting both scientific and social notoriety.

This text provides a study of Jean-Martin Charcot, a founding figure in the history of neurology as a discipline and a colleague of Sigmund Freud. It argues that Charcot’s diagnostic and pedagogic models, explaining both how disease is recognized and described and how to teach the act of neurological diagnosis, should be considered through a theatrical lens. Considering the constitution of the living, moving body in terms of performance, Charcot created a situation whereby the line between deceptive acting and real pathology, scientific accuracy and creative falsehood, and indeed between health and unhealth, becomes blurred. The physician becomes a medical subject in his or her own display, transforming medicine into a potentially destabilizing, even grand guignolesque, discourse. Offering a unique insight into Charcot’s work, his concepts and his methods, this text represents a unique and interdisciplinary analysis cutting across the fields of art and neurology.

Academic interest in hysteria has burgeoned in recent decades. The topic has been probed by feminist theorists, cultural studies specialists, literary scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, medical and art historians, as well as novelists. The hysteric is construed as a powerless, voiceless subject, marginalised by the forces of the patriarchy that have been the root cause of their distress, dissembling, and disablement. In Performing Nerves, Anna Furse interweaves her artistic and academic practice, drawing on her own performance texts to explore four different versions of debilitating hysteric suffering. Each text is extensively annotated, revealing the dramaturgical logic and, in turn, the historical, medical, and cultural contexts behind their protagonists' illnesses, which are argued as environmentally caused in each case. This unique, reflective insight into a playwright and director’s craft offers not only an account of how mental suffering can manifest in different contexts and times, from the 19th century to today, but also a breadth of access to the ideas that can motivate creative research. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars of theatre studies, performance studies, dramaturgy, 20th-century history, gender studies, and medical humanities.

Since its publication in 1989, Console and Classify has become a classic work in the history of science and in French intellectual history. Now with a new afterword, this much-cited and much-discussed book gives readers the chance to revisit the rise of psychiatry in nineteenth-century France, the shape it took and why, and its importance both then and in contemporary society. "Goldstein has raised our understanding of the politics of psychiatric professionalization on to a new plane."—Roy Porter, Times Higher Education Supplement "[A]n historiographical tour de force, quite simply the most insightful work on the subject in English or any other language. . . . [A] work of distinctive originality. . . . It is written with lucidity and elegance, even a certain confident scholarly panache, that make it a pleasure to read."—Toby Gelfand, Social History "Exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and persuasively argued, Console and Classify is an excellent example of the . . . sociologically informed intellectual history, stimulated by Kuhn and Foucault."—Robert Alun Jones, American Journal of Sociology

In this thought-provoking book, Deborah Wright examines the role of both space and objects as they become manifest in the psychoanalytic process and looks at how the role of the consulting room in the therapeutic process is both primitive and transferential. Wright explores spatialisation as simultaneously being a psychological projection of meaning and as physically acting upon the environment, utilised to master the undifferentiated, relentless, internal pressure of instinct. Throughout The Physical and Virtual Space of the Consulting Room, she considers the spatial aspects of work with patients by foregrounding the importance of the consulting room and its contents, including the impact of changes of consulting room, travelling, and in working virtually. Illustrated with clinical material and hand-drawn artwork, Wright orients the reader in the new territory by going beyond the existing literature that considers the objects and space of the consulting room solely as transferential aspects of the analyst. The interdisciplinary approach in this book calls on psychoanalytic theory and technique as well as philosophy, history, archaeology, and anthropology, which will be of great interest to all psychoanalytically orientated therapists as well as anyone, clinical or non-clinical, who makes use of psychoanalysis.

Hysteria is probably the condition which best illustrates the tight connection between neurology and psychiatry. While it has been known since antiquity, its renewed studies during the 19th century were mainly due to the work of Jean-Martin Charcot and his school in Paris. This publication focuses on these early developments, in which immediate followers of Charcot, including Babinski, Freud, Janet, Richer, and Gilles de la Tourette were involved. Hysteria is commonly considered as a condition that often leads to spectacular manifestations (e.g. convulsions, palsies), although both structural and functional imaging data confirm the absence of consistent and reproducible structural lesions. While numerous hypotheses have tried to explain the occurrence of this striking phenomenon, the precise nosology and pathophysiology of hysteria remain elusive. This volume offers an enthralling and informative read for neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, as well as for general physicians, historians, and everyone interested in the developments of one of the most intriguing conditions in medicine.