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The 'Unconscious' and Catholicism in France Author(s): Ruth Harris Reviewed work(s): Source: The Historical Journal, Vol.

47, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 331-354 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4091562 . Accessed: 08/01/2012 17:43
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The Press Historical University 47, 2 Joumrnal, (2004),pp. 331-354 ( 2004 Cambridge DOI: Io.1oI7/Sooi8246Xo400oo37II Printedin the United Kingdom

THE 'UNCONSCIOUS' AND CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE


RUTH HARRIS
New College,Oxford

In nineteenth-century science religion often portrayed irredeemably as been have and France, to oneanother. article how seeks revise interpretationshowing these to this This opposed apparently by Catholicism dissonant intermingled study hysteria. views towards and in the a of of Throughsurvey attitudes in their and were treatment Catholic the showshowFrench of patients, article psychiatrists neurologists Because indebted religious to anti-clericalism. and their deeply of iconography experience, despite vehement their hatred thechurch, focusedon thetreatmentfemalehysterics manifested who of of they 'religious' evidence Catholic conclusive to and states, stigmata in order amass of symptomsdemonopathy, mystical Their re-embedded with patients that paradoxically 'superstition'. preoccupation such however, they meant, and Catholicism their into into bodily poses, iconography by practice incorporating motifs, religious scientific their that meant At thesame their disdain theCatholic time, imagination diagnosis hysteria. of religious for Charcot themore and to the like For refused explore fantasies their they of subjects. physicians Jean-Martin subtle Pierre and Freud suffering, -fantasiesof bodily Janet- a contemporary competitor Sigmund of with and associated images Mary maternal unearthly of physical perfection, an array Catholic of fantasies andChrist all nothing than or were more delusions, thestufffrom which appreciationunderstanding an not transno could was French of the'unconscious' emerge. result that physicians offered psychodynamic The or that a or formation symbolic reinterpretation words physical oftheir symptoms,resistance wasonereason to among for their many hostility psychoanalysis.
A B S T RA C T.

Pierre Janet (1859-1947) was Freud's contemporary and rival, a professor of the College de France and the head of the Laboratory of Psychology at the Salpitriere hospital. In 1897, he encountered Pauline Lamotte, alias Madeleine Lebouc, in the wards of this, the most famous Parisian hospital, which specialized in the treatment of hysteria.1 She came to his notice because she walked on the toes of her feet, displayed signs of stigmatization, and had mystical experiences. Her peculiar gait stemmed from her desire to be closer to heaven and to defy human corporeality. Fascinated by her fantasies, writings, and artistic productions, Janet treated and studied her for seven years and after her death et published a two-volume treatise, De l'angoissei l'extase:itudessur les croyances les sentiments which recounted the inner life of this devout Catholic. (1926-8),

1 Lair Lebouc Janet/Pauline Lamotte de la Jacques Maitre, Uneinconnue cilibre: Madeleine (863--918)
(Paris, 1993)-

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This work is generally seen as a highpoint in the French contribution to the study of the 'unconscious'. There is no doubt that Janet was a leading figure in the broad current that was to become psychoanalysis ;2 however, his account of Pauline Lamotte demonstrated a longstanding intellectual problem which even he could not overcome. Although he recorded both her ecstatic interludes and periods of despair, examined her bleeding feet and intermittent incapacity to urinate, Janet refused to analyse her fantasies. For him they were nothing more than delusions, not the stuff from which an appreciation or understanding of the 'unconscious' could emerge. Neither his treatment nor his account has any psychodynamic transformation, nor is there any symbolic reinterpretation of words or physical symptoms. The reason for this absence stems from Janet's refusal to engage with the Catholic religious imagination which fed Pauline's spiritual life, an inability which derived from the intellectual proclivities of several generations of French physicians. France was not the only place to witness tensions between religion and psychoanalysis. Freud's and Jung's radically different attitudes towards religious ideas famously triggered one of their key battles.3 While Freud saw religion as a delusionary system designed to keep men and women from understanding the true nature of their instinctual drives,Jung focused on the centrality of primordial ideas or 'archetypes' that presented a deeper level of universal psychological inspiration.4 Jung was not a religious apostle, but his notion of 'archetypes' allowed for a more positive approach to religious feeling and mystical experience.5 For Freud, such theorizing brought psychoanalysis back to the occult and superstition; his stalwart opposition to Jung on this issue reflected his conviction that psychoanalysis should be a scientific endeavour.6 The debate over religion took place on very different terms in France and is key to understanding why the French were so 'late' in developing an indigenous psychoanalytic tradition. To date, no one has properly examined the impact of French medical hostility to Catholicism as a source for French 'backwardness' in
2 Forthe classic of see ofthe description thiscontribution, HenriF. Ellenberger, discovery unconThe scious: history evolution the and ofdynamic (New psychiatry York,i970),pp. 331-418. Freud Jungonreligion and to Palmer, (London, 3 For a usefulintroduction the debatesee Michael

trans. illusion, JamesStrachey (NewYork,1961).

1977). 4 See Sigmund Freud, Totemand taboo,trans. James Strachey (New York, 1950), and Thefuture of an (London, 1996). Jung, a biography 5 See the recent but controversial Frank McLynn, Carl Gustav

andsee himas the apostle atheism; forexample atheism the and of see PeterGay,A godless Freud, Jew: and a for time making (New pp. ofpsychoanalysis Haven,1987), hisFreud:life our (NewYork,1988), 533-5;
others perceive him as the covert evangelist ofJewish ethical values. For this stimulating interpretation

6 Historical debates have reflected this tension. Some accept Freud's self-fashioning at face value

seeYosefHayim Moses: Freud's and terminableinterminable Haven,1991); and Yerushalmi, (New Judaism Suzanne Kirschner, religious romantic ofpyschoanalysis: R. and inpostThe and individuation integration origins

Freudiantheory (Cambridge, 1996). Whatever their position, no one denies his explicit endorsement of a occasionally indulged in retrospective diagnosis and analysis, his larger position on the 'dangers' of religion never wavered.

secularworldviewthat rejectedreligious'delusion'. While he commentedoften on religion,and even

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this field. Instead, the historiography has concentrated on the influence of monolithic traditions in French neurology and psychiatry, the opposition to any infiltration of 'la science boche' into the French arena, and the primary role of Cartesian philosophical traditions in opposing Freudianism.7 Here I want to show how the fierce battle between Catholicism and anticlericalism in France in fact structured the very conception of the 'unconscious'. Heirs to a tradition that traced its roots to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, many French psychiatrists and neurologists saw religion and its traditional custodianship of the insane as harmful, if not downright barbaric. Their professional rhetoric from the early nineteenth century - with intermittent changes in tone - harped on the need to rescue the insane from the 'superstitious' practices of clerics and nursing sisters. Professional interests were linked to a set of mentalities that prevented medical men from seeing how religious belief might aid them in their clinical undertaking. They pointed to the 'delusional' nature of possession, ecstasy, and mysticism to show how easily psychic and social pathology might ensue. And yet, the French notion of the 'unconscious' was indelibly shaped and conditioned by the very religion they so despised. It is not too strong even to suggest that their notion of the 'unconscious' was a Catholic one, as they unwittingly incorporated, and even encouraged, bodily poses and mystical and demonic experiences into their discussions. Their clinical practice was based on an unending paradox. They sought repeatedly to record this Catholic world, to make it the stuff of their science, but their desire to extirpate Catholic influence meant that they could not see what assistance the religious imagination might offer to their investigations. Fascination and resistance were at the heart of their enterprise, an emotional conflict that brought them to a conceptual and epistemological impasse. This resistance also meant that the therapeutic possiblities of the psychoanalytic project were not realized. This article seeks to trace not a history of an event or the emergence of an idea. It is instead a study devoted to the development of an incapability which, like a groove in a broken record, came to repeat itself endlessly. Understanding this resistance requires an appreciation of the professional ethos and mythological history of psychiatry in France. The prototype was set out by Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) who pioneered the revolutionary programme to improve the plight of the insane, a story in which the hatred of absolutism and religion were intimately connected.8 This tale brought together three elements that were to reappear in French psychiatry in differing guises for more than a century. First was a professional challenge to existing authorities, next went

de Histoire la psychanalyseFrance: bataille cent I (1885-1939) en la de ans, Roudinesco, (Paris,1986), pp. 181-242.
8 For this now-classic history see M. Foucault, Folie et dsiraison: histoirede lafolie a l'dgeclassique(Paris, 1961); Gladys Swain, Le sujetde lafolie: naissancede la psychiatrie(Toulouse, 1977).

de en 7 SeeJean-Pierre Mordier, Les debuts lapsychanalyse France,1895-1926 (Paris, 1981); and Elisabeth

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Pinel les i~la Fleury, Fig.I. TonyRobert Philippe ddlivrantalignhs Salpitriere. claims to therapeutic efficacy or improved social hygiene, and finally came claims of new knowledge. Pinel began at the Bicetre- the great Parisian hospital responsible for the care of men - where he was appointed physician-in-chief in 1793, then moved in 1795 to the Salptrikere, an almost village-like institution that superintended women who were sick, elderly, and insane. In both hospitals he is depicted (literally, in two separate paintings) as the liberator of the insane, as breaking the chains that bound them (see Figure I). In doing so, he placed his own expertise above that of the ancien regime authorities who had previously governed the hospitals. The myth was so powerful it remained staple fare in the history of psychiatry until the I970s, but in neither institution was he in fact responsible for the new ideas. on Instead, he took his cue from an uneducated concierge the wards, named Pussin, a tanner by origin.9 Pinel absorbed Pussin's 'empiricism'- his capacity to calm the insane, reason with them, and treat them with gentleness - and turned it into a rationalized system of 'moral treatment', a combination of strategies designed both to woo and pressure the patient back to sanity. While Pinel's revolutionary credentials meant that he was pleased to follow the lead of this pragmatic practitioner, he was none the less determined to transform Pussin's knowledge by the most up-to-date medico-philosophical ideas. He maintained that it was only

9 Dora Weiner, 'The apprenticeship of Philippe Pinel: a new document',

Clio Medica, 13 (1978),

pp- 125-33.

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by understanding sensationalist pyschology, by examining the 'lesions' of the imagination, that the insane could be comprehended and treated. Using a as Rousseauian douceur well as authority, theatricality, and occupational therapy, moral treatment embodied a system of psychiatric pedagogy that had an enduring impact on psychiatric practice."1The men who treated such 'alienated spirits' (les esprits aliines) were called alienists, hence the preferred designation for psychiatrists in France for most of the nineteenth century. While in England, Protestant clergy were central to the elaboration of moral treatment,"1 in France, Pinel and the Revolution sought to wrest the care of the insane from the 'superstitious' practices and absolutist structures of church and state. Although their success was hardly as complete as they had hoped, the Pinelian synthesis of liberty, science, humanity, and progress were ideals that generally opposed Catholic interpretations of the soul. Pinel's ideas remained the inspiration for subsequent generations of alienists12and were, as will be seen, of particular importance for fin-de-siecle practitioners engaged in reformulating ideas surrounding the 'unconscious'. What is interesting is that changes in regime did not deflect practitioners from developing this credo. Even though nursing orders flooded state institutions and Catholic personnel oversaw education and the care of the sick in unprecedented numbers during the Second Empire (1852-70),1" simmering conflict between alienists and religious carers remained endemic, with only a few medical practitioners suggesting that religion might aid moral treatment. A strong anti-clerical current pervaded the profession, and co-operation with the church was only assured when they agreed with medical diagnosis. Such was the story of Morzine, an Alpine village in Savoy, where a case of demonic posession erupted in 1857 and continued after France annexed the region in 1860. The French medical plenitpotentiary, Adolphe Constans, sent to control the crisis, did not seek to offend the local bishop, and the cleric, for his part, agreed that the outburst was a case of mental illness, not demonic intervention. The commune, populated by 2,000 migrant masons and seasonal workers, was the site of bodily contortions and spiritual upheaval. At its height, as many as ninety women and young girls were afflicted, during which time they spat on the Eucharist and cursed their priests. So disturbed and spiritually distressed did they become that they begged the church for exorcism. When the

the Console classify: and of workseeJan Goldstein, reinterpretation Pinel's 10Forthe authoritative memoir is French inthe profession nineteenth (Cambridge, pp. 64-119; Pinel's original 1987), psychiatric century surl'alidnation oula manie mentale Traiti (Paris, I8oi); for moreon moraltreatment midico-psychologique
and its transformation over time see Robert Castel, 'Le traitement moral: therapeutique mentale et

socialauXIXe siecle',Topique, 2 (1970),pp. o09-29. contr6le "

seepp. 25-32forthepervasive of in of impact Quaker spirituality the development theYorkretreat. 12Goldstein, and Classify console, 225-30. pp. a 13Claude si au lescongrgations Langlois, catholicisme Le f'minin: franfaisessupirieur au ginerale XIXe cle
(Paris, 1984), PP. 307-42.

Anne Digby, Madness, and a retreat, morality medicine:study theYork 1746-1914 (Cambridge,1985); of

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bishop refused, the women and young girls went on a kind of migration, making their way to other priests, pilgrimage sites, and magnetizers in an often futile search for cure. The case is central to my discussion because it once again exemplifies the sidelining of Catholic power, the supervision of a social pathology, and the claim to special knowledge. Constans, the inspector general of asylums, used his considerable authority to expel the afflicted from the village, interning some in public hospitals, and deploying both the gendarmerie and a small detachment of infantry to maintain order.14 He also introduced measures to educate and 'distract' the Morzinois, applying a kind of social 'moral treatment' to the entire community. Above all, Constans used retrospective diagnosis to place the mal in historical context. He believed Morzine fitted into a tradition of pathological religious experience typical of enclosed communities, be they nunneries or, in this instance, an isolated village.15 While he was not surprised that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a surfeit of such pathological manifestations, as they were part of a particular epoch and its spiritual predilections, he was affronted that such 'superstitions' should persist in the mid-nineteenth century.16 Above all, he never tried to understand the fantasies of the poor and instead merely alluded tantalizingly to witchcraft, savage hunters, Swiss shepherds, and animal visions, leaving their imaginative and religious universe unexplored. He saw the mal as an anachronistic survival, and regarded France's annexation of Savoy as an opportunity to impose psychic and physical health on a backward population. While he never criticized religion per se, but merely its pathological manifestations,17 his preoccupation with the seventeenth century, the Counter-reformation, and the 'baroque' religious imagination were all to remain central to the anti-clerical ideology of later medical men. Equally, the case reinforced the linkage between feminity, hysteria, and religion. Central to progressive psychiatry and neurology was the conviction

14 By 1863, it appeared that his methods had worked, and most of the Morzinoises, seemingly cured, were allowed to return. But they erupted again, and for almost twenty years the mal continued to torment the villagers to various degrees. In the years after the first suppression, Constans used a variety of carrot-and-stick tactics to bring the recalcitrant to heel. The mal went underground, and the insults to public order stopped, but it was not fully eradicated until 1873. See my 'Possession on the borders: the "mal de Morzine" in nineteenth-century France', Journal of ModernHistory, 69 (I997), PP. 451-78; Jacqueline Carroy, De la possessiona l'hysterie(Paris, 1981); and C. L. Maire, Les possidies de Morzine, 1857-1873 (Lyon, I981).

Relations une sur ipidimie en1861 Constans, (Paris, 1863), 13. d'hystero-demonopathie p. 15Adolphe

volume accepts the nineteenth-century conception of 'superstition' rather too uncritically. 1 While church-state relations deteriorated during the I86os, the emperor never advocated anticlericalism, and at various intervals sought to woo back Catholic support. This tactic was endangered by his policy on the Italian peninsula, where he encouraged unification to the detriment of papal interests.

mind: French and in the this peasants thesupernatural nineteenth (NewHaven,1987); unfortunately, century

16 For more on the state of French peasant belief in this period see Judith Devlin, The superstitious

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that hysteria was not exclusively a female malady, as had been believed when it was thought the source of the malady lay in the uterus."s Pierre Briquet (1796-1881), whose pioneering treatise appeared in 1859, stated plainly that hysteria was a disease of the brain."1 The predominant linkage of the disease with women was, however, re-established through religious excess, which was held to be a particularly feminine condition. The women of Morzine demonstrated a susceptibility to spiritual upheaval which would be the hallmark of later hysterics. The study of hysteria in France changed dramatically under the leadership of Jean-Martin Charcot, a specialist in the diseases of the nervous system whose reformulation of the 'neurosis' was to have a tremendous impact on both his neurological disciples and on psychiatrists. He moved to the Salpitriere hospital in 1863 and there discovered a 'living pathological museum', a hospital context that fed his anatomo-clinical method. This painstaking approach attempted to correlate the symptomology of nervous afflictions with the examination of lesions after autopsy, a method he advanced with the help of microscopic histology. This work led him to the classic depiction of progressive muscular atrophy, lateral sclerosis, and the concept of motor-neurone disease, work which remains essential to the foundations of neurology.20 It was this kind of anatomo-clinical precision which Charcot sought to bring to hysteria, an illness that he only stumbled on to accidentally because of an administrative shake-up: in evacuating the decaying Sainte-Laure building in the Salpetriere complex, Charcot became acquainted with the psychiatric service of Docteur Delasiauve in which epileptics, madwomen, and hysterics had all been mixed together. In separating these patients, Charcot attempted to distinguish their clinical symptoms and to describe the elusive lesion responsible for hysteria.21 No doubt he was fascinated by the extremity of the hysterical symptomology, so similar to the most violent epileptic seizures. Political events - especially the defeat by the Prussians and the Commune of 1870-1 - were to transform a field of medical research into an anti-clerical crusade, as Charcot and many other medical men lent their support to the consolidation of the Republic through a programme designed to free primary education of clerical influence22 and laicize the hospitals. While Charcot's career had progressed steadily under the Second Empire, the new republican

For research seeAlainFlambart, enFrancetravers a vein masculine 18is moreon thisimportant L'hysterie midicalelaseconde duIg9me (thesepourle doctorat medecine, Caen,I98I); see de siicle en lalittrature moitiW alsoNicoleEdelman, mitamorphoses Les del'hysterique: duXIXsilcle la Grande (Paris, a' Guerre 2003), dudibut et del'hyst/rie pp. 147-78. cliniquethlrapeutique (Paris, 1859). 19 Seehis Trait/ 20 Christopher and Charcot: Goetz,MichelBonduelle, TobyGelfand, constructing (Oxford, neurology (Paris, 1882), 20. p.
1995), chs. 3 and 4. de Inventionl'hystirie: et dela Charcotl'iconographie 21 Georges Didi-Huberman, photographiqueSalpitriire 22 See EvelynMarthaAcomb, The French laws(1879-1889): theirstanti-clerical laic of Third campaign the FrenchRepublic(New York, 1967).

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mainstream ideology with its emphasis on positivism that developed in the 1870s provided an expanded field for medical intervention.23 With friends in high places - he was acquainted with the republican premier L0on Gambetta and directly connected with Paul Bert, the education minister - Charcot was in a unique position to launch his particular brand of medical politics in which hysteria played a central role. Indeed, the government was to recognize Charcot's special ideological significance by granting him a Special Chair of Diseases of the Nervous System in 1882, a post established outside the normal channels of faculty appointment and promotion.24 But it would be wrong to suggest that it was Charcot who singlehandedly promoted the hysteria diagnosis as a form of medical politics. With the insane patients of Delasiauve's clinic, Charcot had inherited someone else, a psychiatrist named Desire-Magloire Bourneville (1840-19o9). Already known in the I860s for his campaign against a 'false' Belgian stigmatic, Louise Lateau, whom Catholics venerated as a symbol of mystical visitation,25 Bourneville epitomized the new cadre of republican medical men who entered the Chamber of Deputies to further their anti-clerical, hygienist vision.The two men were distinguished by different medical interests. Charcot was a specialist in diseases of the nervous system, while Bourneville was trained as an alienist; their collaboration over hysteria in the 1870s was indicative of the way differing clinical approaches could be united for common scientific and political ends. Bourneville, much more than Charcot, unabashedly made the link between science and politics. Bourneville's wider activities give some sense of the tenor of his missionizing zeal which, whenever possible, was dedicated to resisting religious revival, miraculous pretension, and the institutional power of the church. The 1870s saw a wealth of prophecies and rechristianizing movements which had gone hand-in-hand with the failed attempt to restore the Bourbon monarchy. It is not perhaps surprising, therefore, that it was during this decade in particular that the hysteria diagnosis as a form of anti-clericalism was promoted and linked to other

see 23 For this republican and its Second Empireincubation PhilipNord, The resurgence France moment: in nineteenth-century(Cambridge, i995); and Sudhir MA, struggles democracy for republican French and emergence From the to (Princeton, ofmodern democracy Hazareesingh, subjectcitizen: Second Empire the enFrance on see essai L'idre Nicolet, (1789-1924): d'histoire ripublicaine 1998); republican ideology Claude et role on 'Medecine, Gauchet, politique sociite critique (Paris, 1982), 187-386; doctors' seeMarcel pp. ch. tubireuse:homme, ipoque, maladie un une une (Paris, 1991), 2. of and 'The article 24 Seetheclassic diagnosis thepolitics anti-clericalism byJanGoldstein, hysteria in latenineteenth-century France', 54 pp. ofModern Histoy, (1982), 209-39. Journal
de from the Catholicphysicianand her biographersee F. Lefebvre,Louise sa Lateau Boisd'Haine: vie:ses de Lateau:la stigmatisie Bois-d'Haine authentiques edn, Tournai, 1879); and (4th d'aprisles documents
Dr Varlomon, 'Rapport de la Commission qui a &t& chargbe d'examiner le travail de M. Le docteur Charbonnier', Bulletin de l'AcadimieRoyale de Midecine, 9 (1875), PP.
I46-52"

en France fin XIXe-dibut

XX siecles', in J. Poirier et J.-L. Signoret, eds., De Bourneville la sclirose

25 D.-M. Bourneville, LouiseLateau,ou la stigmatisiebelge(Paris, 1878); for more on this important case

deLouise and extases: stigmates: midicale edn, Louvain, ses itude 1873); HenriVan Looy,Biographie (2nd

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secular crusades.26 For example, in his Progrismidical, the weekly bulletin of the Parisian medical world, Bourneville accused the nursing sisters of all kinds of crimes - from administering chloroform to changing prescriptions, infractions which contravened both good medical practice and the physicians' authority. They were blamed for killing patients with excessive purgatives, and of undermining the fragile health of the sick with frequent visits to freezing chapels. They were condemned for lining the wards with images of the Madonna, and treating the insane as demonically possessed, a refusal to acknowledge the prevalence of hysteria which Bourneville dedicated his career to correcting. Bourneville pushed his case to the point of sacrilege by seeking to construct a hygiene museum in the chapel of the H6tel Dieu, complete with exhibitions on personal and public sanitation, as well as the sewer systems, a plan which predictably repelled the practising Catholics on the Parisian municipal council.27 Such a campaign was almost deliberately offensive, as the Sisters of Charity and other orders remained a symbol of selfless devotion and irreplaceable providers of health care in France. They were eulogized in religious monographs, were a regular subject of salon paintings and prints, and even found their way into the ranks of the Legion d'honneur.28 Few trained lay nurses were available to replace them- indeed, Bourneville established the first school for their provision at the Salpetriere. Even like-minded anti-clerical physicians often resisted the nursing orders' dismissal for practical and ideological reasons.29 But despite such opposition, Bourneville never relented, a position that demonstrates his commitment to a radical approach. The anti-clericalism that he espoused had special characteristics because of its identification with the Revolutionary cataclysm. The universalist evangelism of les droitsde l'homme was designed to oppose that of les droitsde Dieu, the cult of Virtue and Reason opposing that of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven. But the exclusive manner in which these opposing creeds defined themselves also meant that they shared many of the same psychological characteristics. The Jacobin attempt to establish the cult of Reason in the 1790s demonstrated how
26 Scholarship demonstrates the continued pull of Catholicism both in urban and rural contexts, and it was precisely such messianic and spiritual movements which Bourneville sought to combat. For this background, see Thomas Kselman, Miraclesandprophecies nineteenth-century in France(New Brunswick, 1983); Raymond A. Jonas, 'Restoring a sacred center: pilgrimage politics and the Sacrb Coeur',

20 (1994), 95-123. Historical Reflections, Pp. La 27 See Jacqueline XIXe-XXe siicles Lalouette, republique (Paris, 2002), pp. 76-94; anticliricale, and in Third JackD. Ellis,The physician-legislators medicine politics theearly ofFrance: Republic, i870-19I4 Bourneville Frenchanticlericalism and in Magloire duringthe ThirdRepublic', Roy Porterand and historical (Atlanta, Porter, Doctors, eds., Dorothy politics society: 1993), 107-39. pp. essays 28 Langlois, catholicisme Le aufJminin, 695-6. pp.
29

(Cambridge, 1990), p. 70. For more on Bourneville's anti-clericalismsee Bernard Brais, 'Desirei

or that should married bearchildren homerather work be and at than authority, believed laywomen
in public hosptials. For this reasoning and its profound impact on the development of nursing in France see Katrin Schultheiss, Bodies and souls: politics and the professionalization nursing in France, of
1880--1922 (Cambridge, 2001).

Either they feared a professional corps of independent lay nurses as potentially hostile to medical

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a secular religion might be as 'fanatical' as the Catholic 'obscurantism' it opposed."3 The Jacobin attempt to transform the spiritual bases of society failed, but was renewed in the 1870s and I880s by men like Bourneville who were often blinded to the way they built, almost transparently, on the Catholic symbolism they detested. In republican ideology, for example, the allegory of Marianne was seen to oppose Mary, with statues and busts erected to the civil goddess in a bid to replace the Queen of Heaven with an image of equal symbolic power and resonance. Marianne was, in some respects, different from her Catholic counterpart, but equally remarkable were the number of similarities.31 Indeed, the early Third Republic sought to forge a new civic symbolism that barely concealed the Catholic substratum on which it was built. For example, the Pantheon that would house the remains of the great heroes of the Revolution and Republic was nothing more than a de-sacralized church, its symbolic power emerging from the association of the site with a long history that mixed holiness with patriotism.32 All these attempts indicate how difficult it was to create a secular imagery that did not refer back to a religious prototype. The Catholic heritage - with its rich iconography, rituals, and hagiographies - was not so easily effaced. What proved difficult in the realm of political symbolism was equally hard in the realm of medical research, especially when the physicians who worked on hysteria were the self-conscious advocates of republican, anti-clerical ideals. The undeniable link between the worlds of science and religion was literally embedded in their new scientific findings. de Nowhere was this shown more clearly than in the Iconographie photographique la a series of volumes which sought to establish a visual canon for the Salpitriere, study of hysteria. Whether consciously or not, the very choice of the word 'iconography' in the title indicates how they saw science as a domain able both to supplant religion and to inherit its mantle. For the authors, Bourneville and the remarkable medical photographer, Paul Regnard, the fits of hysteria they chronicled were a perfect means both of advancing science and fighting the battle against superstition. They aimed to document two key interconnected areas. The first was the clinical description of a disease entity- hysteria and, in particular, hystero-epilepsy, with its four clearly defined stages and physiological stigmata such as retraction of the visual field, hemi-anesthesia and ovarian
30 For the largely unsuccessful attempt to replace Catholic festivals with republican sacrality see trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA, 1988), especially Mona Azouf, Festivalsand theFrenchRevolution,

trans. inFrance, 31Maurice Marianne battle: into republican and Agulhon, 1789-1880, imagery symbolism but p. JanetLloyd(Cambridge, I98I),see throughout, especially 9; for the legacyof the Second
au Marian associationssee pp. 122-35; see also his Marianne Empire in particularin reincorporating
et de pouvoir:l'imagerie la symbolique rdpublicaines i88o ai 914 (Paris, 1989). During the early Third Republic the concerted campaign to crown statues of the Virgin was, perhaps, an attempt to counter the Republican attempt to make Marianne ubiquitous. 32 The Pantheonwas originally built as the churchof Ste Geneviive, famousfor repelling the Huns from Paris in the fifth century; the shrine to the saint is in the church next door, St Etienne du Mont.

pp. 267-71.

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hypersensitvitiy.33 But this clinical project was indissolubly wedded to an interpretation of history. These volumes sought to demonstrate the connection between past and present and to make a particular statement about the inhumane horrors of the past - witchcraft, possession crises, and the like. The artistic nature of these journals requires further explanation. Artistic and medical traditions were linked in other countries - in England, for example, the number of doctor-artists at the end the nineteenth century was remarkable.34 But Charcot and his associates were premier practitioners in this field using the full range of salon, photographic, art-historical, and theatrical imagery available from the world of the Parisian fin-de-si'cle.35 Regnard and Bourneville's were like art-books with accompanying commentary. But their subIconographie jects were not the paintings or sculptures of the past, although these too would be used by Charcot to make his case in other volumes. Rather the servants and seamstresses of the hospital wards were the object of photographic portraiture, shown first 'at rest' before their naked and desperate contortions were drawn or photographed. What is remarkable about these 'portraits' is how much they derived from French realist painters like Courbet in their depiction of the dignified poor. They are shown in their finery, with ribbons, bonnets or lacey collars adorning their meagre persons. Unlike the delicacy surrounding the identity of paying patients, these women had no right to professional confidence, with the description of hereditarian illnesses and taints - the bane of all middle-class families and hence kept a medical secret - printed for public consumption. Bourneville, unlike Charcot who was often terse to the point of taciturnity in his recounting of the personal histories of his patients, exemplified a psychiatric tradition of biographical description. For example, he explained how Rosalie Ler ..., when she appeared in the in Iconographie photographique 1877, had already been in the Salpitrieire for thirty years. She was an abandoned child of a domestic cook, whose youth was spent under the negligent treatment of several wetnurses. She had had emotional traumas - fears associated with actual experiences of frightening dogs, cadavres of assassinated women, and robbers who pursued her.3' The description of her of see Etudes sur ou 33Forthelatercodification thisresearch P. Richer, hystirie hystirocliniques lagrande
ipilepsie (Paris,1881; 2nd edn 1885). and the man 34 Most notably Francis Seymour Haden (1818-1910), physician to Queen Victoria
(1862-1937), were both medical men.

most responsible the 'etching revival'in nineteenth-century for England,and Henry Tonks Plas on of in and shows the 35Regine in herwork theepistemology psychiatry neurology thisperiod

importance of the 'theatrical' as well as other 'non-scientific' and performative strategies in fin-de-

(Rennes, 2000), see especially chs. 3 and 4. and P. Regnard,Iconographie de la 36 D.-M. Bourneville (Paris,1877), photographique Salpitriire sur pp. 15-16; for his longer clinical history see D.-M. Bourneville, Recherches cliniqueset thdrapeutiques
1 a la et l'ipilepsie i'hysterie: rendu observations compte des de recueillies Salpitrire 1872

see humaine: les etle siicle medicine; Naissance science d'une lapsychologie, psychique' psychologues'merveilleux

pp. 116-50.

1876

(Paris, 1876),

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hysteria showed that religion was at the heart of her preoccupations. She claimed to have been to heaven and to have seen Jesus, the Virgin, and the Saints. But such reports - like Constans's cursory references to fantasies of witchcraft in the case of Morzine - are disappointingly incomplete. Her emotional relationship to her visions is not even explored. Instead they are recorded as an indisputable indication of her pathological attitude, rather than understood as a language of spiritual expression deriving from nineteenth-century Marianism and Christocentrism.37 Instead what fascinated Bourneville were the extreme physical symptoms that Catholicism produced in this hysteric. Rosalie Ler ... (see Figure 2) was presented calmly at first, almost as if to demonstrate the contrast with her later animalistic state. A drawing shows her during a full convulsive attack, with arms and legs flailing and fully naked, unclothed, as the doctors tell us, because she would otherwise shred her attire (see Figure 3). She provided a particularly dramatic example of hysterical fury. This ended with a period of 'passionate attitudes' which included a crucifixion pose - an attack which could last as long as seven hours (see Figure 4) - and a final 'descent from the cross'. While he was uninterested in the emotional meaning of her religious sentiments, Bourneville was concerned to draw an historical lesson. He maintained that Ler ...'s crisis resembled those of the possessed of Loudun, the mid-seventeenthcentury nuns of an Ursuline convent who, for almost ten years in the i63os, were subject to rantings, ravings, and convulsive attacks. A priest of the town, Urbain Grandier, had been eventually identified as the Devil's instrument and burned at the stake, while a Jesuit named Jean-Joseph Surin was responsible for exorcizing the devils and restoring the Ursuline sisters, and especially the superior of the convent, Sister Jeanne des Anges, to spiritual health. So horrible were these demons that Surin himself was afflicted by them, as his autobiography harrowingly recounted. This episode was a favourite of nineteenth-century romantic and realist literature, but especially inspirational for historians and physicans.38 In the tale of Loudun, there was sexuality, politics, and witchcraft, the stuff for never-ending commentary on romance, state oppression, and the dangers of supersitition and fanaticism. For the men of the Salpitriere and many others, Loudon confirmed their enlightenment hatred of conventual enclosure and the psychic corruption it was deemed to produce. Moreover, the seventeenth-century documents showed how the savagery of their clinical world was mirrored in France's tumultuous religious history. Women like Ler ... were nothing more than the 'deimoniaques the nineteenth-century',Clarissa Atkinson, in W. H. and R. Constance Buchanan, Margaret Miles, and the in and eds.,Immaculatepowerful: female sacred and reality (Boston, 1985), 173-200; image social pp. Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, L. to La Encountering (Princeton, 1991). Mary:from Salette Medjugorje
38

37 For this upsurge see Barabara Corrado Pope, 'Immaculate and powerful: the Marian revival in

Paul Bowman,

French romanticism: intertextual and interdisciplinary readings (Baltimore,

1990o),

pp. O106-21.

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dela Salpitriire plate5. Ler... at rest',Iconographie Photographique (1877), Fig.2. 'Rosalie their disease now classifiable by positivist physicians. Rather than being subjected to the useless ministrations of clerics, they were the objects of humane interest and treatment. But the obsession with Loudun went beyond self-satisfied comparisons. The authors of the Iconographie quoted at length (seven pages)40 from a contemporary of Loudon when describing Ler.. because they were fascinated with its history frightening and elaborate portrayal of seventeenth-century society. In it, the assembled nuns merely rise to greater displays of rage when the churchmen try to deliver them, a morality tale of superstitious impotence which no doubt flattered
d'aujourd'hui',39

39This is the termcoinedby Charles Revue Richet,'Les dimoniaques d'aujourd'hui', desDeux and Mondes Iconographie photographique, pp. 26-32. pp. (188o), 340-72. 40Bourneville Regnard,

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dela Salpitriere plate17. Ler photographique (1877), Fig.3. 'Rosalie ... in convulsions', Iconographie the physicians' own self-perception as scientifically effective in their management of hysteria. But if Loudun was a particular target, their disdain in general encompassed the whole of the Counter-reformation, with its baroque piety, inquisitorial methods, and, above all, absolutism. In the nineteenth century, the burning of Grandier was seen as another of Richelieu's crimes;41the male 'witch' was punished, it was argued, by the power-mad cardinal because he wrote pamphlets against him. Grandier was thus a man with whom they could identify, for had they not too bridled under the authoritarianism of the Second Empire before the advent of the also constructed in liberating Republic ? Like the institutions of the H6pital-gindral, 41Bowman, French roman/icism, p. 113.

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Ler dela Salpitriire plate6. pose',Iconographie photographique (1877), Fig.4. 'Rosailer ... in crucifixion the seventeenth century, the story of Loudun and its hapless witch was depicted as the result of a society tragically wedded to both superstition and political coercion. For the men of the Salpetriere and many anti-clerical republicans, these were two sides of the same coin. The project of retrospective diagnosis and historical reinterpretation extended beyond the seventeenth century and can be seen in Charcot's 1887 publication, Les dimoniaques l'art.This work reads like an art-historical catalogue, recording dans and commenting on images from the past in which exorcism and demonic contorsion were depicted. Often seen as a sideline to Charcot's more 'serious' cliniwas cal research, Les demoniaques part of it, a means of juxtaposing art-historical evidence with the data drawn from the wards of the Salpatriere. Les demoniaques was, therefore, more than a display of mere medical cultivation and humanistic erudition, although it was these as well. For what Charcot documented in his explication of the frescoes, bronzes, bas-reliefs, and engravings from the sixth to the eighteenth century was the eternal nature of the demonic phenomenon. He favoured those depictions which confirmed his clinical observation and congratulated his patients (and the painters) when their vision of illness matched his own. He noted favourably, for example, the eleventh-century bronze basrelief on the door of the church of St Zeno in Verona, remarking: 'Dressed in a long, tight tunic, the possessed woman, reverses herself backward, making the stomach jut out in a protuberant way' (see Figure 5).42 He concluded that this
42J. M. Charcot P. Richer, dimoniaques l'art', de' La qui and 'Les suivi dans foi gurit'de J.-M. Charcot, introduction Pierre de Did-Huberman Fedida, by postface Georges (Paris, 1984), 9. p.

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Fig. 5. After a bas relief in bronze on the door of San Zeno in Verona (eleventh century), fiom

Les dans (1887). Charcot, dkmoniaquesl'art J.-Martin

kind of position was exactly duplicated at the Salp&triere.Repeatedly he returned to such descriptions, chiding Raphael (to whom he inaccurately attributed a drawing) for his failure to capture the possessed/hysteric's incapacity to stand on her legs when in the midst of an attack.43 St Zeno and other representations of the possessed being cured by saints passed muster because they confirmed the representation of his own clinical practice, immortalized in the 1887 painting by P. A. Brouillet, completed in the same year as the publication of Les dAmoniaques (see Figure 6). Both reveal the initial contracture of the upper body, the hysteric beginning to fall, the waiting attendant (this time a female nurse rather than the monk of the eleventh century), and the awesome power of the man (this time Charcot and not a saint) able both to provoke and then suppress the disorder. What is remarkable about Les demoniaques the way Charcot so transparently is transferred a category from religious history- possession - on to hysteria. When it reading Les dcmoniaques, is almost as if one walks through a gallery of historical artefacts, with each demonstrating the same everlasting qualities. Here was an example of the polemical power of Charcot's visual pyrotechnics that he had deployed again and again in other contexts such as the famed Clinical Lectures or the the Iconographie photographique; strength of the visual imagery was so intense it is almost as if there was little need to explain or develop a more complex argument. One cannot help but be struck by the comparison between Charcot and Freud in this regard. Freud also collected artefacts, and indeed his consulting room
43

Ibid., 30. p.

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afterUne deCharcot Salpitriire, a la Brouillet Fig.6. Print lefon Pierre-Andri (1887). became famous for the array of Egyptian and classical statuary. But Freud's collection had a different function; he was concerned with harnessing the mythological to the psychoanalytic project, of showing how symbolic power was central to his primary role as an 'archaeologist of the mind'. No doubt, he too, like Charcot, intimidated his visitors with the range and extent of his collection and the erudition it was deemed to encompass, but the message he sought to convey was that the 'unconscious' resembled the different levels of civilization captured in the layers of sediment.44 The lesson here was explicitly linked to the psychoanalytic project. Lesdimoniaques, published in 1887, represented the high-water mark of Charcot's dominance in the field of hysteria and hypnotism. It was precisely around this time that he was subject to intense attack from medical men outside the Salpitriere, especially from the so-called Ecole de Nancy, headed by Hippolyte Bernheim.45 This school insisted on the therapeutic value of the suggestive idea in ameliorating a huge variety of physical ailments. Bernheim had worked extensively with hypnosis, and insisted on its great clinical success among nonhysterical subjects whose 'organic' illnesses were ameliorated. Charcot countered and its wars: MA, (Cambridge, I997), Dispatches the from Freud psychoanalysis passions 44JohnForrester,
pp. 107-37. auspices de la Societe des Amis de 1'Universiti de Nancy, 12 Dec. 19o06,for the inspiration of these new suggestion (Paris, 1891), etpsychotherapie suggestive techniques. See also his more programmatic Hypnotisme

Le et de faite Lidbaultla doctrine la suggestion, 45 See firstH. Bernheim docteur Conference sousles

in particular 239-497. pp.

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by insisting that the 'idea' was nothing more than an epiphenomenon of underlying neurophysiological processes, not sufficently powerful in itself to transform bodily states.46 Moreover, he associated hypnotism and suggestion with pathology, asserting that only hysterics were susceptible to its dangerous manipulations. This debate was important because it revealed the larger therapeutic malaise within nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology. Pinel's moral treatment had been heralded as the dawn of a new age for therapeutics, but the persistent and often intractable nature of mental illness meant that, by mid-century, psychiatrists became little more than custodians of the insane. Indeed, when Adolphe Constans applied 'moral treatment' to Morzine, his efforts were successful as a police operation but ineffective in terms of medical treatment: even twenty years after the initial outbreak in 1857, several early sufferers still experienced convulsions in private. The development of the concept of degeneration in the i85os and its extension in the I880s emphasized the strong hereditary component in insanity.47 Psychiatrists increasingly turned their attention to the nosographic description of interlocking, familial pathology, and favoured studies which showed the connections between alcoholism, mental illness, neurosis, and criminality. Indeed, works such as Les dimoniaques dans l'art exemplified this compulsive collecting and categorizing tendency. Charcot's famous neurological descriptions, which drew on and charted sensory and motor function, had no link to therapy; in this work, Charcot often waited for the patient's demise so that the autopsy might confirm his hypotheses. It was the elegance of a problem solved, rather than the hope of cure, which primarily intrigued him. It was for this reason that Bernheim's claim to a therapeutic revolution in hypnotherapy struck such a chord among many practitioners. The history of psychiatric and neurological practice at this time shows a wealth of new experimental procedures, many of which took issue with Charcot's orthodoxy. This growing chorus may explain 'La foi qui guerit', or in its English version, a Faith-healing,48 short but authoritative article published in 1892 just months before Charcot's death.49 In this work, he testified to the power of healing shrines to cure even the most persistent and fatal ailments. The piece was associated with an even more extraordinary admission - that he sent some of his most resistant patients to Lourdes in an attempt to cure them. This declaration seemed
46 The essenceof the controversy summarized a philosophical in was contemporary Alfred by a 101 et de Revue Deux Mondes, (1891),p. 437. Fouille, 'Lephysique le mental propos l'hypnotisme', des
France (Berkeley, i991); Daniel Pick, Faces of degeneration: Europeandisorder, 1848-1918 c. a (Cambridge,

innineteenth-century madness: and 47See IanDowbiggan, knowledge Inheriting professionalization psychiatric

and and in decline madness politics France: medical ofnational (Princeton, the 1989); Robert Nye, Crime, concept

1984). 48 See Lalouette, La retublique anticlericale, 285-300, in which she analyses the important textual pp. differences in the French and English versions of this article. 49 See Charcot and Richer, 'Les dimoniaques dans l'art', suivi de 'La foi qui guirit'.

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to signal an important volteface, for Lourdes had long been pilloried by anti-clericals like Charcot as the embodiment of Catholic reaction and superstition, something to be opposed as a source of illness, not patronized as a means of curing it.50 This was not the only switch. Charcot was known for his rigidly materialist explanation of hysteria and neuroses and had long argued that hysteria was 'a neuropathic entity with a missing lesion',51 a view which had underscored his desire to move neuroses from the realm of the spiritual and religious into the purely scientific domain. But the article on 'faith-healing' stated plainly that the cure of many paralyses was the result of an 'idea', the impact of the psyche on the body, rather than the other way around. With this statement, he seemed to fall into a much broader contemporaneous trend which tended towards the privileging of the psychological in the examination of hysterical phenomena, a trend which was most famously exemplified by Freud.52 Mark Micale has suggested that 'La foi qui guerit' was a cardinal moment in Charcot's intellectual trajectory that came to nothing because of his death, and implies that the neurologist was perhaps on the way to a more psychodynamic appreciation of the 'unconscious'.53 I question whether 'La foi qui guerit' implied a radical shift towards an indigenous psychoanalytic movement. In it, Charcot bowed to his critics by acknowledging that a host of disorders - including ulcers, tumours, and paralyses - were susceptible to suggestive therapy at healing shrines, a surprising position given that he had always differentiated 'organic' disorders from those he deemed to be hysterical in origin. None the less, he continued to maintain that many of these conditions were also hysterical in origin, a stance which simply hystericized a wider number of subjects and once again linked suggestion with pathology.54 In 'La foi qui guerit' Charcot traversed a middle ground in a longer journey still dedicated to ejecting the supernatural from consideration. For Charcot - and for many other scientitists - religion remained a pathology, and not a staging post to the reinterpretation of the relations between body and psyche. Even the most enlightened were wary of examining the religious imagination to hasten a symbolic reinterpretation of mind-body relations. In his sympathetic hearing of Pauline Lamotte, Pierre Janet developed a form of 'talking cure' and belonged to an international cohort that was keen to examine religious and spiritualist phenomena.55 He was a trained philosopher, conducted some in secular (London, SeemyLourdes: and body spirit the age PP. 1999), 320-56. Mark Micale, Approaching disease itsinterpretations hysteria: and 1995), 278. (Princeton, p. I in Mark Micale's I argument theabove;indeed, seethis closely 52 Hereonceagain amfollowing on discussion pp. 276-9. to article an analysis as subsequent histhought-provoking 54 'Lafoi quiguerit', 111-23. pp. p. 53 Ibid., 3. en etvisionnaires see Forthishistory itscultural and guerisseuses Voyantes, centrality NicoleEdelman, 55 France, 1785-1914 (Paris, 1995),as well as the remarkablecollection by BernadetteBensaude-Vincent
50
51

and Christine Blondel, Des savants face i l'occulte,187o-194o (Paris, 2002).

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remarkable hypnotic and telepathic researches, and was in contact with men like Theodor Flournoy- the pioneering analyst of spiritualist mediums56 - and William James, the philosopher of pragmatism and author of Varieties religious of experience (1902), who condemned the tendency to equate religious experience with psychopathology. It is for these reasons that Janet's analysis of Pauline, who called herself Madeleine Lebouc, reads very differently from earlier neurological and psychiatric descriptions. Gone are Charcot's terse clinical statements or the kind of psychiatric biography which alludes to religious ideas but then leaves them unexplored. In his two-volume study of Madeleine, and through later historical research,57we have a full picture of her spiritual trajectory and the evolution of her illness. Above all, we have her own words about her religious hopes and beliefs. Madeleine Lebouc sought joy in Catholic devotion and mysticism. She deserted her respectable family in the Mayenne to go to Germany, London, and finally Montmartre where she lived among the poorest, even nursing the cancerous and dying. There she gained an apprenticeship in a life of utter poverty, refusing a convent as too luxurious. She took on the name of Madeleine Lebouc, thereby evoking both the sinning Magdalen who becomes Jesus's friend and the scapegoat of the Old Testament. She sought grace in suffering, a life that led her to be imprisoned with the prostitutes of St Lazare. During these years she fell into moments of ecstasy, mystical states which her spiritual director Pere Conrad sought to contain. She broke down after he died and, as an indigent sufferer, was deposited in the Salpetrieire. There her faith continued to reflect a late nineteenth-century renewal of Franciscan piety, with its emphasis on poverty and suffering, hence her imitation of both Christ and St Francis when she experienced her own stigmatization. She attracted attention in the wards because the contractures on her feet led her to walk on the tips of her toes, a seeming yearning to levitate like St Theresa of Avila or, like the Virgin, to be assumed into heaven.58 Although he always believed that her religious fantasies were delusions (and told her so), he none the less recorded them with a passionate attention. Her love of flying like an angel was a pleasure he could well understand, while her many maternal and erotic fantasies of her relationship withJesus formed the stuff of his work. God, she believed, had a sprititual marriage with her in which their hearts like mystics from Bernard de Clairvaux through Therese de communicated;59

56 See his extraordinary FromIndia to theplanetAlars: a caseof multiple with imaginay languages, personality ed. Sonu Shamdashi (New York, 1994). 57 See Maitre, Une inconnue cilibre. et 58 For more on stigmatization in this period see Maurice Apte, Les stigmatisies, itudehistorique critique vaso-moteurs les mystiques sur les troubles chez (Paris, 1900); for an attack on the anti-clerical medicine and its

etlastigmatisation to of see approach thequestion stigmatization Antoine Imbet-Gourbeyre, L'hypnotisme

(Paris, 1899). Many medical theses and articles were devoted to discussing this phenomenon throughout the nineteenth century; Janet's work partook of this wider religious and medical tradition as well as engaging in current debate with famous contemporaries. I 59 PierreJanet, De l'angoissea l'extase:un dilire religieux;la croyance, (2 vols., Paris, 1926-8), p. 69.

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Lisieux, her famous contemporary,60 Pauline viewed Jesus as a mother: 'Madeleine is normally the child of God and "huddles in his arms to be coddled".'61 Madeleine's love was also explicitly erotic: 'I've just passed a night of love and folly; yes, it is true, God makes me mad with love ... The waves of tenderness that flood me do not allow me to believe that I dream; I sense that I really love God in every way.'62 Mostly her imaginative life centred on the need for union, but at other moments she wanted to be hermetically sealed, distinct from the orifices, secretions, and excretions of common humanity. She sought this unearthly isolation in order to please God. Thinking of the Song of Songs, she explained how the Almighty regarded his wife as a 'closed garden and a sealed fountain'.63 By kissing Madeleine all over, God had put a seal on her; henceforth she would never urinate again. Such fantasies show how mystical experience might readily produce a symbolic language for understanding the psyche, especially fantasies associated with infant experience of maternal pleasure and protection. Had Janet been inclined to analyse this language in such a fashion, the idea of Jesus and Mary as mothers would have provided a wide field for psychodynamic interpretation, and a vision of the 'unconscious' that drew on Catholic beliefs. Similarly, Madeleine's anorexia, toe-walking, and ischuria pointed to fantasies of perfection, as an untainted vessel sealed up by the kisses of God and separated from the physical imperatives of bodily pleasure and instinct. No ideas of this kind emerged in his writing. His sympathy for her was evident and sustained. He showed, for example, a genuine interest in her religious plight, or noting the depression associated with spiritual 'dryness' (sicheresse), the feeling of emptiness that pervaded her when she felt God had abandoned her. She also experienced the even more dangerous moments of 'temptation' and 'torture' in which the devil plagued her, painful experiences blissfully succeeded by periods of ecstasy. But for all his compassion, he reverted to psychiatric nosology; torture became 'anxious melancholy', while ecstasy was similar to happy dreams or drug-induced states.64 He sought to categorize her affliction rather than analyse it. In I9oiJanet decided that Madeleine's state was improved enough to merit her release. She returned to her family and the Mayenne, took up her real name of Pauline Lamotte, and continued her deeply religious life, even if her poverty was not as extreme as previously. In these years she helped in a local school and loved to play with the children; Janet was impressed that she seemed to prefer this 'concrete' happiness to the moments of religious ecstacy that had sustained

See Caroline as studies spirituality high Bynum, Jesus mother: in the 1982); ages ofthe middle (Berkeley, for de dela ThireseLisieux Maitre, (Paris, L'Orpheline Bhirsina: andJacques (1873-1897) 1995), a remarkable 8 l'extase, 75. maternal account Therese's of p. spirituality. 61Janet,Del'angoisse
60
62

Ibid., p.

77.

63

Ibid.

64

Maitre,

Une inconuue cilibre, pp. 61-76.

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her during the early years at the Salpetriere.65 This preference for 'real' life convinced him that she had made decided progress. He maintained a correspondence with his erstwhile patient, noted her many moral qualities without reserve- especially her ability to differ with him without rage - and was visibly saddened by the deteriorating health, which meant that she died in 1918 before the armistice in November - a peace that she had longed to witness. The publication of De l'angoisse l'extase 1926 underscores the real differences a in with Freud. While Janet was at the pinnacle of the institutional hierarchy, Freud had only a private practice and had long given up hope of the professorial advancement which he had missed in the anti-semitic days of late Habsburg Vienna. And yet, Freud was world-famous, the controversial pioneer of a new psychoanalytical enterprise. The men were competitors, withJanet concerned to dissociate himself continually from the work of his Viennese colleague. This difference is shown in the wayJanet was uninterested in either Madeleine's childhood traumas - except insofar as they might reveal degenerative tendencies towards somatic and mental disturbance - or her primary emotional relationships. He rejected the symbolist lens that Freudian dream interpretations and free associationist techniques proffered. There are a few instances in De l'angoisse a l'extasein which he falls ever so slightly into the symbolist 'trap'. For example, he recounted Madeleine's fantasy of protective enclosure: God put me in a singularplace, in a kind of cupboardin which one would place a precious object; a statue; my passive state permittedme to stay in the position I was put in; I felt very warm and did not sufferfrom a lack of air. My spiritwas very alive in this tabernacle and I thought about the sacrificeto accomplish.66 Janet concluded that in this instance she was speaking not about herself or of Mary, but was instead describing 'Jesus himself in the uterus of his mother'. He even went so far as to acknowledge Freud who saw the cupboard as the symbol of the uterus.67 There is no denying that working with Madeleine and listening to her fantasies evoked Freud's theorizing. But the acknowledgement of such a debt was transitory and did not refashion Janet's approach. Janet also remained a stranger to the notions of transference and countertransference. He saw his position as entirely different, and one which, I believe, was profoundly influenced by the example of the church. Janet's mother was an Alsatian Catholic who apparently also had a spiritual director, while Janet himself experienced a spiritual crisis in his youth.68 This was a man well schooled in, if unreflective about, Catholic models of confession and direction. He regarded himself as guiding the patient back to health in the same way that a priest would guide those to whom he gave spiritual direction. Indeed, he went so far as to call
65 Ibid.,p. 82.

67 Ibid., p. 75. Freud 'a soutenu que ces armoires etaient l'uterus de leur mere'. With rare

a l'extase, 91. 66Janet,Del'angoisse p.

persipicacity, Janet concluded that 'est-ce que Madeleine n'est pas en train de se mettre dans le
sein de Marie?', expressing succintly the spiritual fantasy that probably underpinned the dream. 68 Maitre, Une inconnue clbre, pp. 153-4.

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himself a 'directeur', and praised Madeleine's spiritual director, Pere Conrad, for trying to moderate her mystical 'excesses'.69 His remarks about Madeleine's willingness to respond without rage to his different point of view suggests that both sides were habituated to spiritual and psychological dialogue. He explains how she normally called him 'mon pere', and let him publish her letters in the hope that her life would be edifying to religion.7" Such remarks reveal that, at least for her, Janet's treatment was a form of spiritual direction. Here as before, French attitudes to mind-body relations, to patient and healer, were pervaded by Catholic ideas and practices. Indeed, it seems likely that it was precisely the perceived 'confessional' aspect associated with psychoanalysis that aroused emotion among French postmodernist theorists. In his pathbreaking Historyofsexuality(1976), Michel Foucault criticized psychoanalysis as a revised 'confession'. He saw the 'talking cure' as dangerous precisely because it combined the normalizing potential of older religious strategies with those of the newer psychiatric and sexological 'gaze'.71 Michel de Certeau, another noted postmodernist theorist and a Catholic priest, took an opposing tack, seeing Surin, the exorcist who battled with Ste Jeanne des Anges and the nuns of Loudun, almost as a proto-psychoanalyst.72 There is no place here to evaluate such claims, but they do suggest the enduring link in French intellectual culture between Catholicism and psychoanalysis and the continued capacity of that linkage both to offend, inspire, and, at moments, constrain intellectual debate. Freud too was no stranger to the kind of retrospective diagnosis so central to Charcot and the Salpitrieire school, an interest which may well have been generated by his time in Paris. In his analysis of the seventeenth-century painter Christoph Haizmann, for example, he patiently pieced together a psychic puzzle to explain Haizmann's melancholia and then demonic possession after the loss of his father. Freud shows how in Haizmann's psyche the Devil replaced the subject's lost father, a figure of intense ambivalence who had opposed his son's wish to become a painter. He argues that Haizmann's inability to practise his art was a kind of 'deferred obedience' to the wishes of this dominating paternal figure, a conclusion which Freud reached by decoding dreams, fantasies, and even numbers.73 Whether we agree with his elucidation depends on whether we accept the interpretive credentials of psychoanalysis itself; the essay is none the less a monument to a psychoanalytic enterprise that remained foreign to the likes ofJanet.

Ibid.,p. 61. 70Ibid.,p. 5The Vol. (NewYork, trans., of 71MichelFoucault, history sexuality. I: Anintroduction, RobertHurley pp. mode,pp. 18-21anditspsychoanalytic re-deployment, 113-14-. i980);on confessional de 72 SeehisL'criture l'histoire (Paris, 1975), 249-73. pp. with in 'A neurosis', JamesStrachey Alix Freud, seventeenth-century demonological 73Sigmund works edition thecomplete The AlanTyson,and AngelaRichards, standard psychological of of Strachey,
Sigmund Freud, (London, 1953-74), PP. 72-105. xIX

69

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RUTH HARRIS

It was this idea of conflict between different elements of the unconscious that Janet obdurately resisted and which the religious imagination potentially offered. While Freud sought to use the history of possession to further his movement, the French listed and elaborated upon such 'pathological' phenomena to show their dangerous delusional qualities and the need to resist them. Both Charcot's hysteria and Freud's study of Haizmann required an engagement with religion. One would move in a psychodynamic direction while the other would have an important political success in shaping the tone of republicanism in the 1870s and I88os. Only later, when Lacan managed the synthesis of indigenous intellectual traditions with Freudianism would the full potential of psychoanalysis in France finally bear fruit.74 But rather than conclude that Freud was the hero of the piece, I want to suggest that his choice of retrospective diagnosis reflects, in turn, the confining furrows of his own intellectual landscape. While he might have appreciated the symbolism of cupboards in Madeleine's dreams, he would have been as bewildered asJanet by the array of maternal fantasies that Catholic images of Mary and Christ offered. Haizmann's story reflects a preference for the continual examination of the Oedipal conflict. Fascinated with father figures as Freud was in his case studies, in his reflections on Moses, and in his last analyses of the Jewish monotheistic God, the maternal preoccupations of the Catholic religious imagination would have passed him by. In this sense, Janet had also observed something it would take another generation of psychoanalysts to begin to interpret.

74 Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic politics: Freud's French Revolution (New York, 1978) and E. Roudinesco, Histoirede la psychanalyse France:la bataillede centans (1925-1985), part III. en

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