#Doctor Jean-Martine Charcot

[bargainsleuthbooks]

#ARCReview #TheMadwomenofParis by #JenniferCodyEpstein #NewBooks #July2023Books #NetGalley #HistoricalFiction #BallantineBooks

“I didn’t see her the day she came to the asylum..." An upcoming #historicalfiction book, #Themadwomenofparis, explores the life of women at #Salpetriere asylum in #France in the #19thcentury #jennifercodyepstein #July2023books #Netgalley #ballantinebooks

“I didn’t see her the day she came to the asylum. Looking back, this sometimes strikes me as unlikely. Impossible, even, given how utterly her arrival would upend the already chaotic order of things at the Salpêtrière—not to mention change the course of my own life there.” When Josephine arrives at the Salpêtrière she is covered in blood and badly bruised. Suffering from near-complete amnesia,…

[silver-stargazing]

[Image ID in alt text]

Epilepticon Movie Marathon 2023

Augustine (2012) dir. Alice Winocour

Summary: An erotic biographical drama film about Louise Augustine Gleizes and her love affair with her neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, in the late 1800s.

Representation: Augustine has a violent seizure at her workplace early in the film that results in her being temporarily paralyzed in her right eye. For the rest of the film, she remains a patient at a hospital with little control over her life choices.

Augustine has many seizures throughout the film, including several that are intentionally triggered by Charcot in front of large crowds of onlookers to serve as a demonstration of the science behind seizures.

The framing of these seizures plays heavily into the sexualization of epilepsy, with several of Augustine's seizures filmed similar to how a masturbation scene would be filmed in an erotic film.

No first aid is given to Augustine during any of these seizures as, because of the era she lived in and the medical community's attitude towards people with seizures, she is meant to be viewed as an exhibition and not helped. She is regularly dehumanized, with even her own neurologist describing her as an "animal".

The word "epilepsy" is not used to describe Augustine's disorder and she is instead diagnosed as having "ovarian hysteria". As this film is a partial biography of the real-life Augustine, the use of this diagnosis term is accurate when recounting her particular experience.

Notes: The main plot of the movie follows a romance between a doctor and their patient. The power imbalance is addressed but may still be uncomfortable for some viewers.

There is full-frontal nudity at several points in this film including a sex scene. There are moments of graphic on-screen animal death. A woman has a brief monologue about intentional self harm.

The film is entirely in French. English subtitles were available.

[Image ID: Three screenshots from Augustine (2012):

Image 1: Augustine, a woman with long black hair in a braid, looks off to the right with a concerned expression. Her right eye is closed due to temporary paralysis.

Image 2: Augustine, a woman wearing only undergarments and a loose corset, and Charcot, a man who is fully dressed in a dark suit, embrace in Charcot's office.

Image 3: Augustine is laying down, perched between two chairs with her neck resting on the head of one chair and her feet resting on the head of another further away chair. She is wearing a dress with a striped skirt that drapes down in the space between the chairs.

/end ID]

[naran-blr]

Marian Huxley, también conocida como Marian Collier o Marion Collier (1859-1895) pintora británica

Nació y vivió en Londres, fue la segunda hija del científico y naturalista británico, Thomas Henry Huxley.

Estudió en la Slade School of Fine Art de Londres y su trabajo fue reconocido por el artista Alphonse Legros.

En 1879, Huxley se casó con el escritor y pintor de retratos británico, John Collier, también titulado en la Slade School of Fine Art.

La pareja se mudó a Chelsea Embankment, lugar en el que abrieron su estudio de pintura.

El 28 de abril de 1880, la Grosvenor Gallery, describió a Huxley como "como una bacante brillante y traviesa en traje del siglo XIX".

Huxley exhibió en la Royal Academy of Arts, tres de sus pinturas entre 1880 y 1884. De las pinturas más reconocidas de la pareja, destacan los retratos que se hicieron mutuamente y que luego fueron expuestos por ambos en la Grosvenor Gallery.

En 1883, Huxley exhibió en esta galería, An Artist at Work, un retrato de su marido pintando el retrato de Huxley en su estudio, con sus pinceles en la mano y uno entre los dientes, junto a otras seis de sus obras.

Huxley y Collier, se convirtieron en padres en 1884, cuando nació, Joyce Collier, quien también se convirtió en una artista miniaturista.

Este mismo año, exhibió un retrato de su hermana Nettie y una pintura de temática neoclásica que mostraba a dos figuras femeninas, obra que fue comprada por Arthur Lewis.

Por esa época su condición psicológica ya era grave, debido a una depresión posparto, y en 1887 fue examinada por el neurólogo Jean-Martin Charcot, quien le diagnóstico histeria nerviosa.

Viajó con su marido y dos enfermeras a Francia, donde murió repentinamente a la edad de 27 años, de neumonía, en Suresnes, probablemente en la clínica psiquiátrica del doctor francés, Valentin Magnan.

Después de su fallecimiento, su esposo Collier, se casó con su hermana menor, Ethel Huxley.

No se tiene certeza de la cantidad de obras que realizó debido a su temprana muerte.

Le ponemos cara con estos retratos, pintada por su marido.

[psychreviews2]

Studies in Hysteria - Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer

As the 19th century came to an end, a new kind of philosopher was dawning for the 20th century. He would come up with strange and ground breaking theories of the human unconscious. Bridging the 19th century’s experience with Darwin and hard science, with softer sciences of hypnotism and free association. This was the rise of Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis.

Studies in Hysteria

Family

Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg in 1856. Son of Jacob Freud, a wool merchant, and Amalia Nathansohn. Amalia was the 3rd wife to Jacob, and was half his age. This left Freud in the strange position of having 2 brothers near the same age as his mother. They later would become objects of self-analysis for Freud. His future work often involved not just the unconscious, but experiences of childhood.

School

Freud did well in school and was a voracious reader, and would teach his siblings about the subjects he read. When the family moved to Vienna, and Sigmund grew up, he wasn’t able to find a specialty to put these passions to work. His interests went in many different directions. Between Law and Medicine, Freud chose medicine because of his desire to gain knowledge, and its practical ability to gain an income. Freud graduated in medicine in Vienna in 1881. He did anatomical research before working in Meynert’s laboratory where neurological causes of psychiatric disturbances were being sought.

Cause and effect lens

With his various mentors throughout his training he was taught objectivity, and emotional distance to facts. His influences came from empiricism, and from Darwin’s work on evolution. Yet Freud found that he was actually drawn to human affairs more than natural objects, but he would keep is empirical cause and effect attitude in these humanistic studies.

Martha Bernays

As Freud struggled to gain expertise in medicine he decided to focus on a private medical practice to win over his lover’s mother. She didn’t see Freud as a good catch for her daughter, due to his lack of prospects. His lover was Martha Bernays. They were often apart when Freud pursued his career interests, but they wrote to each other almost daily.

Charcot

In 1885 Freud received a travelling scholarship, and he took 6 months off to visit a hero of his in Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot. He wanted to learn about hypnotism and how it was used in dealing with mental disorders. The hypnotist Pierre Janet was learning there as well.

Charcot was a psychiatrist and medical hypnotist. He showed that hypnosis and suggestion could help people with their hysteria. Hysteria was a very common diagnosis at the end of the 19th century. It often involved strange paralyses, anesthesias, and fits. Many doctors couldn’t find any physical neurological damage and couldn’t explain the symptoms. They often treated it as if the patient was faking the symptoms, which is called malingering. To Charcot these symptoms were from a conversion from psychological stress into physical symptoms. He also felt that sexual problems were the culprit.

Freud heard Charcot say “in this sort of case it’s always a question of the genitals – always, always, always.”

Freud was indebted to Charcot for the clinical methods and hints that hysteria was related to trauma and sexual elements. He was also inspired by how the mind has layers of unconscious material not available when the patient is completely conscious. This is where Freud decided to focus.

Extending on Charcot’s methods of hypnotism and suggestion, Freud was able to theorize at what gave patients relief. This was the beginning of a catharsis method that is still a part of counselling today. When Freud returned to Vienna, he used his neurology practice as a place to try hypnosis.  He was also impressed with physiologist Josef Breuer, and worked with him on the foundational Studies in Hysteria.

Studies in Hysteria

Studies in Hysteria involves 5 case studies and theories on the origin of Hysteria. As Freud and Breuer continued on their studies, Freud theorized that what they were learning included unconscious phenomenon in normal people. For example, as patients got better they would often respond to Freud with love responses, as if he were a lover or a family member. This he called Transference.

Topography

The early theory of Freud at the time was that emotions that were not allowed to be expressed, got “dammed up” and appeared in physical symptoms instead. These memories were either out of conscious awareness or an abridged story missing pertinent details.

Trauma

The cause of hysteria wasn’t always a single strong trauma, it could also be a series of smaller traumas. These traumas were psychic traumas or frights. The mind finds something objectionable about thoughts or traumas, and then doesn’t react emotionally in the correct way but instead represses these events in memory. Often these repressions were to avoid some social stigma. Here are some examples:

Anxiety - over consequences to an action.

Hypochondria - fear of the bodily effects of the anxiety, and then superstitious treatments, medicines, and rituals to rid the bodily effects.

Delusions of persecution - fear of the social effects of releasing what is repressed.

Shame - fear of others knowing about you.

Catharsis

As Freud worked with these patients he was able to come up with 2 general procedures to apply.

Bringing up repressed memories related to the trauma. This meant using hypnotism and suggestions with Freud’s hand pressed on the head.

Free association, where patients were allowed to release their unconscious thoughts without censorship.

The main part of the practice was to bring out more and more detail from the traumatic memories, to expand on those abridged memories. The patient would be in a chair facing away from the listening Freud, and letting the patient release the repressed emotions associated with the memories. This release, catharsis or abreaction, relieved the patients of their hysterical symptoms as well. By bringing out the cause and effect of the trauma details, that were redacted from conscious awareness, it gave the patient the opportunity to bring out the repressed emotion.

Obstacles

Freud's methods moved from hypnotism into a form of “talking cure.” As this opened the doors to new avenues for Freud, many unexpected problems emerged.

Over time Freud and Breuer’s patients found their cure did not last. Hysteria ended up being an amalgamation of many psychological and neurological disorders. Modern psychology still recognizes this disorder, but it is now called Conversion Disorder. Elements of Multiple Sclerosis, and anxiety disorders are separated into their own sections as science advanced through the decades. Hysteria as a disorder became obsolete.

Another difficulty was related to the type of trauma. The understanding of external traumas is still important as Freud’s method advanced, but he still had to see what people were doing internally to cause their own stress.

Sex abuse

One of the problems of focusing on what was external, was sex abuse. As much as sexual assault is a real problem, Freud was becoming aware that providing suggestions of sexual abuse could be leading the patient to conclusions that are untrue.

As ground breaking as Studies in Hysteria was, Freud was challenged to develop his understanding of the unconscious much further. In the next installment on Psych Reviews, we will be looking at those further developments in understanding dreams. After that, the series will continue on Freud’s later updates of his topography, and then his massive influence on later psychologists which continues to this day.

Studies in Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781420948608/

Freud's Models of the Mind: An Introduction by Joseph Sandler: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855751675/

Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud's Writings by Jean-Michel Quinodoz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781583917473/

Freud: A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393318265/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

[vaspider]

Seventy years ago, and longer, the way people with epilepsy were treated and cared for was entirely different. Many myths and misconceptions underpinned a reluctance for people to disclose their condition to anyone, until a seizure was witnessed.

Children and adults could be sent to colonies, asylums or psychiatric hospitals as a treatment for their condition. But in 1959, the Mental Health Act set the framework to move from care in institutions to care in the community. The BEA shared this view and believed that colonies were not as effective in rehabilitating people with epilepsy as they should have been.

Epilepsy patients continued to face discrimination through the mid-20th century. This discrimination ranged from lack of access to health insurance, jobs, and marriage equality to forced sterilizations. Despite the strides that have been made, there are still many misconceptions globally regarding epilepsy.

Epilepsy has been misunderstood and often viewed in a negative light throughout history. The word "epilepsy" comes from ancient Greek and means "being seized by forces from without." This refers to the supposed supernatural origins of the disease. Those with epilepsy have been seen as mentally ill, possessed, or faking their symptoms in the past.

In Norway, the diagnosis insania epileptica (epileptic insanity) was used for some time. In 1925, altogether 223 persons were hospitalised with this diagnosis (8). The term «hysteroepilepsy» was coined by the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot to describe seizures that neurotic patients suffered after having observed epileptic seizures in patients on the same ward.

And that comment about madhouse stigma? From my dad, who won a few awards for the article he wrote about being diagnosed with epilepsy at 45.

So in short, yes.

hey

hey whoever is out there trying to police how cripples talk about our disabilities

stop your fucking toxic positivity shit

people are allowed to be sad about being disabled

we don't have to turn cripple into a positive thing, or crippled

we are allowed to express sadness, rage, depression, fear, upset, all of it over the things we can't do and the things we lose

we are allowed to say that our disabilities "cripple" us

we do not have to reframe it as a positive thing

that shit is poison to actually learning how to live well with your disabilities.

YOU ARE ALLOWED TO HAVE NEGATIVE EMOTIONS ABOUT YOUR OWN DISABILITY AND TO TALK ABOUT YOUR NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES WITHOUT SOMEONE TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT YOU NEED TO CHANGE YOUR LANGUAGE AROUND YOUR OWN FUCKING EXPERIENCE

people are allowed to be sad about being disabled, and no, not just about how ableism impacts our lives. i am allowed to be FUCKING SAD that my disabilities are progressing and i can't knit anymore (maybe ever) or that i can't take my dog for long walks anymore

i am allowed

fucking stop it

[cecilekauffmann]

History of Hysteria

The essay women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health by Cecilia Tasca, Mariangela Rapetti, Mauro Giovanni Carta and Bianca Fadda gives an insightful understanding of how mental illness and hysteric women have been seen and thought of throughout history. From the idea of the wandering womb to freudian ideas linking to the Oedipus complex, it gives a clear understanding on how women with mental illness were and still are perceived in society.

In Ancient Egypt (2000 BC), it was believed that hysterical states were caused by a movement of the uterus. The illness was treated by firstly identifying wether the uterus had moved upwards or lowered itself in the body, then tried to be moved back to its original place by placing malodorous scents near the nose or vagina. This belief was shared amongst Ancient Greeks as well, who named it the ‘wandering womb’. Hippocrates was the first to use the term hysteria which is derived from the Greek word uterus (hystera). 

Similar ideas to those pf Hippocrates can be traced back to Claudius Galen (2nd century AD) in ancient Rome. He wrote: ‘Passio hysterica unum nomes est, varia tamen et innumera accidentia sub se comprehendit’, which translates to ‘hysterical passion is the name, but various and several are its symptoms’. (Tasca, Rapetti, Carta, Fadda, 2012, p. 111)

In the Middle Ages, hysteric women were not seen as patients, but as the cause of their illness, which they called ‘amor heroycus’ or the madness of love, unfulfilled sexual desire. During the 11th century, the first female doctor of Christian Europe, Trutola de Ruggiero from Salermo, believed that women were more vulnerable than men and that their suffering was intimate as it dealt with gynaecological issues and that women therefore felt ashamed and wouldn’t seek help.  The German female doctor Hildegard of Bingen played a very important role in the reconciliation of science and faith; she believed that hysteria was brought to women by Evil and that patients should accept their fate. 

As the church aimed to unify Europe at the beginning of the 13th century, mental illnesses were seen as obscene bonds between women and the devil, which lead to hysterical women being subjected to exorcisms. It was believed that if a physician was unable to diagnose the cause of an illness, it must stem from the devil, because the devil knew everything about the human existence and could therefore easily interfere with a more vulnerable, or hysterical, person. Up until the 18th century, hundreds and thousands of women were wrongfully executed on the basis of false confessions obtained through torture. 

During the renaissance period, theologist and physician Giovan Battista Codronchi (1547-1628) criticised the treatment of hysteria, which at the time consisted of midwives inserting fingers into the patient’s vagina to stimulate an orgasm. Condrochi strongly argued that the treatment of hysteria should lay in the practice of spiritual guides. Nonetheless, the idea of male superiority was very much present at the time, as physicians still saw hysteria as a female disease caused by the uterus. 

René Descartes (1596-1650) was the first to introduce the idea that hysteria was not linked to the uterus but to the brain. In 1680, English physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) published Epistolary Dissertation on the Hysterical Affections in which he recognised that hysterical symptoms may simulate all sorts of diseases and demonstrated that the uterus was not at the basis of the disease.

In 1748, Joseph Raulin defined hysteria as an affection vaporeuse arguing that the illness could be caused by foul air in large cities. Following this theory, both men and women could be affected by the disease, however, women are more at risk as they were deemed “lazy and irritable”.

In the Enlightenment period, mental illness was seen from a scientific point of view for the very first time and hysteria was described as one of the most complex diseases.

In the 18th century, the belief that hysteria was linked to the brain became more and more popular and it was no longer seen as an illness that was purely female, but could affected both genders.

Neuropsychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859-1947) opened a laboratory at the Salpêtière in Paris alongside neurologist Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893). Janet was convinced that hypnosis was the best option when it came to the investigation and therapy of hysteric patients. He argued that “the patient’s own idea of pathology is translated into a physical disability”.

Until Sigmund Freud (1865-1939) hysteria was believed to be the consequence of a lack of conception and motherhood. Freud contradicted this theory with his belief that hysteria was an illness caused by a lack of libidinal evolution and the inability to conceive was a symptom of the disease rather than its cause. He linked hysteria to the Oedipal conflict, arguing that hysteria causes the inability to fulfil the sexual drive because of it. 

The history of hysteria is very lengthy and is are its social changes and its evolution throughout those years. A closer look at this historical development and interpretations of mental illness contributes to giving an explanation of psychopathological expression. It may also open a new discussion about introducing new cognitive systems adapted to new social requirements. 

Looking at the history of hysteria also provides an insight of how women have been seen and treated, starting off by being seen as a means of Evil, to fragile things, to a person of her fate. 

Tasca, C., Rapetti, M., Giovanni Carta, M. and Fadda B. (2012) ‘Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health’, Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health, pp 110-119.

[thinkingimages]

This paper offers a new reading of Auguste Rodin's most important sculpture, the Gates of Hell, by arguing that the artist engaged with the visual language of and the wider discourse on hysteria, which permeated not only the French popular and scientific press but also the culture at large in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Recently uncovered archival evidence reveals Rodin's strong ties to the family and intellectual circle of Doctor Jean-Martin Charcot of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, affording the sculptor exceptional exposure and access to the medical discourse on hysteria. Rodin assimilated and adapted the lexicon of hysterical postures for the figures that populate the Gates of Hell, using the 'great malady of the century' to suggest the modern human condition and thereby creating a new and potent sculptural idiom that we recognize today as idiosyncratic of Rodin-and distinctly modern.

+

[the-winedoctor]

Wine as Medicine  -  Part Three – The Modern Era

By Dr Philip NORRIE  MBBS, MA, MSc, MSocSc[Hons], PhD, MD, FRSN, FRSM

        After the Middle Ages wine was constantly prescribed for medicinal purposes by the medical profession. The leading English physician of his day, Dr William Heberden (1710-1801 of Heberden’s nodes fame) advocated the use of wine to benefit one’s health. As a result, the use of wine as a medicine increased in popularity among English doctors, hence the medical professional internationally.In1818 Thomson’s London Dispensatory contained a chapter on wines, listing ten formulas for medicinal wine. The British Pharmacopoeia, as recently as a century ago, contained formulas using wine, sherry and brandy.

        Hospitals regularly used wine as a medicine. For example, the single biggest expenditure of Leicester Hospital in England in 1773 was for wine for their patients. In Germany, at the Alice Hospital in Darmstadt,755 patients, between October 1870 and early April 1871 (i.e. in less than six months),consumed 4,633 bottles of white wine,6,332 bottles of red wine,60 bottles of champagne and 30 dozen bottles of port, besides some superior white wine and Bordeaux. Oh to be sick in those days !

         So it follows that the English surgeon in charge of the health of all the convicts, soldiers, sailors and free settlers on board the First Fleet sailing from England to found the settlement in Sydney, Australia in 1787,Surgeon John White, insisted on having wine available to maintain the health of everyone during the six month voyage. This tradition of using wine as a medicine during the long voyages out to Australia, from England, was to continue until transportation of convicts to Australia ended in 1868.This practice was the first large scale use of wine as a preventative medicine in modern times and guaranteed the health of all the convicts, soldiers, sailors and free settlers for 80 years.

            Between 1863 and 1865 a series of articles by Dr Robert Druitt about the medicinal virtues of foreign wines appeared in the “Medical Times Gazette”. The series was later published in a book in 1873 entitled “A report on the Cheap Wines from France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Greece, Hungary and Australia”. In the book he concluded “The Medical Practitioner should know the virtues of wine as an article of diet for the healthy and should prescribe what, when, and how much should be taken by the sick”. Note Dr Druitt was talking about preventative medicine here when he was talking about wine as part of the diet for the healthy. Dr Druitt’s book was followed in 1877 by one called “On the Uses of Wine in Health and Disease” by Dr Anstie, a physician at the Westminster Hospital in London. Originally this book appeared as a series of articles in the “Practitioner” medical journal. Dr Anstie argued against the opponents of wine stating that its medical use was “established by wide spread custom” and therefore not subject to discussion. Even the great French physician Dr Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) wrote a ten volume encyclopaedia of current European medical treatments titled “Traite de Medecine” which included many wine prescriptions. An endorsement of wine by one so famous as Charcot was not to be taken lightly.  

           Alcoholic drinks were also a safe alternative to polluted and cholera or typhoid infected water, and milk which was often infected with tuberculosis before Pasteurisation became mandatory. The only safe and infection free drink was alcoholic and the most therapeutic of the alcoholic drinks was wine, not spirits. Arguably the greatest scientist ever, the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), who first proposed the germ theory and gave us Pasteurisation, described wine as ”the most healthful and hygienic of beverages”. Even as late as 1892 Professor Alois Pick of the Vienna Institute of Hygiene recommended adding wine to water to sterilize the water during the cholera epidemic of Hamburg.

            The Twentieth Century witnessed huge changes in medicine. Infection was no longer the biggest killer of mankind – that title was transferred to vascular disease which included heart attack, stroke, renal failure, peripheral vascular disease, vascular dementia and aortic aneurysm. The average life expectancy was significantly increased so now people were suffering from a whole new group of diseases called degenerative diseases such as cancer, diabetes, dementia and arthritis. Also for the first time the medical professional understood what caused these diseases. Knowing the pathophysiology of the various diseases meant for the first time we were able to prevent these diseases, hence the concept of Preventative Medicine becomes relevant. Surely the best way to treat a disease is to not get it in the first place!

           Again, even today, wine is just as highly relevant as it was in the past. Instead of being a tonic and preventing the biggest cause of death in the past namely infection; wine now is still our best preventative medicine for the new Twenty First Century diseases as it can, if consumed in moderation daily, reduce our death from all causes rate by up to 50% which includes reducing vascular disease by up to 50%,dementia by up to 80%,cancer by up to 24% and significantly reducing insulin resistance thus helping to prevent diabetes. It does this by reducing bad cholesterol(LDL) levels, increasing good cholesterol (HDL) levels, acting as an anti-coagulant to reduce clot formation, acting as an anti-oxidant to reduce bad cholesterol being incorporated into the artery wall to form artery blocking plaques of atheroma, by reducing nitrous oxide levels within artery lining endothelial cells which finally reduces inflammation within the artery wall which leads to unstable plaque rupturing and causing blockage of the artery.

          The vascular disease/diabetes epidemic has become so bad that doctors were proposing “The Poly Pill” as a preventative measure. This Poly Pill would contain asprin to act as an anticoagulant (thin the blood),a statin drug to reduce cholesterol levels and an ACE inhibitor drug to reduce  blood pressure.

           Wine does the same thing but even better because it contains anti-oxidants such as resveratrol  and is far better tasting !

            The USA insurance industry knew from the early Twentieth Century ,by examining its statistics, that people who consumed alcohol lived longer than teetotalers. Pearl wrote this up in an article published in 1926 called “Alcohol and Longevity”. Unfortunately, the anti-alcohol lobby was in control and Prohibition came into being. Eventually science and evidence based medical research prevailed as more and more medical studies showed the medicinal virtues of consuming wine in moderation. In 1988 Prof Charles Henneckens from Harvard Medical School showed moderate alcohol consumption reduced coronary heart and stroke in women and in 1991 Dr Eric Rimm, also from Harvard Medical School, showed an inverse relationship between alcohol consumption and coronary heart disease, for example. The world’s leading epidemiologist at the time, Sir Richard Doll from Oxford University, said ”When we allow for age,smoking and other known risk factors, the moderate drinkers have the lowest total death rates and the lowest rates for vascular death”.

           But it was Prof Serge Renaud’s land mark “French Paradox” article, which appeared in the Lancet in 1992, that cemented wine’s pre-eminence as the healthiest of the alcoholic beverages when it showed that, despite eating a diet rich in fat ,the French people had a lot less coronary heart disease than Americans because they drank wine. Prof Renaud concluded that “Red Wine is the most effective drug yet discovered, for the prevention of heart disease”. This was followed by Dr Morten Gronbaek’s “Copenhagen Study” published in the British Medical Journal in 1995,which was the first scientific study to divide alcoholic beverages into beer, wine and spirits and then compare their death rates. It showed that spirits drinkers increased their death rate by up to 34%,beer drinks showed very little change but wine drinkers reduced their death from all causes rate by 50%.The recent Zutphen Study from the Netherlands also favoured wine drinkers when it showed they lived on average 5 years longer than teetotalers.

           The next logical step in the history of wine as a medicine is to make wine even healthier, which I have done by making the world’s first full strength Resveratrol Enhanced Wine (REW).Resveratrol is one of the anti-oxidants in wine that gives it its many health benefits, but resveratrol is unique in that it is the only substance to stimulate SIRT 1 which is a substance that makes cells live longer. This has been shown by research conducted by Prof David Sinclair ,who is the head of the Harvard Anti-Aging Research Laboratory in Boston, USA. A normal white wine has 1-2mg/l of resveratrol and a normal red wine has 3-6 mg/l of resveratrol in it. My REW has up to 100 mg/l of resveratrol making it much more therapeutic.

          In summary - it is now becoming apparent that abstinence from consuming wine in moderation can be a health hazard if you look at all the evidence based medical studies; which leads me to conclude with my favourite advice to my patients – wine is the thinking person’s health drink, so enjoy it in moderation daily.

[daisyofthenight]

Medical history but make it zoom

ft. A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière by André Brouillet, wherein French Neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot stands in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, giving a clinical presentation on a "hysteric woman", in the "hysteric's classic posture". You can see some famous medical figures like Georges E. B. Gilles de la Tourette (the doctor to describe the symptoms of Tourettes), below Charcot (surrounded by Green) in the picture.

[fuckyeahwomenfilmdirectors]

Augustine dir. Alice Winocour (2012)

While serving at a dinner party kitchen maid Augustine feels her hands going numb and then has a violent fit that leaves her paralyzed in one eye. Augustine is brought to a hospital where she attracts the attention of Jean-Martin Charcot after she seizures in front of him and soon both patient and doctor become obsessed with one another.

[beatrice-otter]

I mean, the thing is though, that you have got to remember that Freud was a giant step back for psychology, and in the late 19th Century the greats of psychology knew goddamn well what trauma was. They didn’t have as complete a knowledge as we do, but they knew something was going on. Look up Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet. Janet in particular studied the link between dissociation and traumatic memory. Starting in the 1890s, he published regularly on the phenomena.

Freud was actually a student of Janet’s. So Freud’s first belief was that the women who were coming to him because their fathers/brothers/husbands/sons found their trauma symptoms inconvenient were telling the truth. They were messed up because of the way they had been abused. But unlike Janet, who worked in hospitals, Freud set himself up as a doctor for wealthy and prestigious families. And you know who mostly came to him? Wealthy and prestigious women.

Problem was, these women were from wealthy families but didn’t have any money they had access to themselves; it was their male relatives who were paying for treatment, and their male relatives who didn’t want to hear that “hey, yeah, the reason she’s freaking out is because you’re beating her, and she’s not going to get better unless you stop doing that.” If he told the truth, he would not make it as a doctor to the wealthy. Also, he couldn’t believe that that many men were abusive (he wasn’t looking much at childhood trauma, or the ways in which women can also be abusive); surely all men are good and generous and kind. Therefore, there can’t be that many women who are suffering from abuse. Therefore, if that many women are reporting abuse, at least some of them (and maybe all of them) must be lying. And thirdly, feminists in turn-of-the-century Vienna were taking Freud’s early work and advocating for women to have control of their own money so they could leave abusive homes, and that was a threat to everything good and right.

So Freud changed his theories. Threw out everything he’d learned from Janet. Made up a whole bunch of bullshit about id, ego, superego, all sorts of complexes. And it was bullshit. Every bit of it. But it was what Society wanted to hear, especially the abusive men; they ate it up with a spoon. It got proved to be pseudoscience bullshit fairly quickly, but that didn’t matter, because it sounded good. Even literature critics got in on it as a method of literary analysis, which (unlike psychology) still uses Freud’s theories today. There were “therapists” using Freudian analysis decades after it was conclusively proven to be bunk, because it was what people wanted to pay for. Thank God that’s pretty much gone now, but it did a lot of damage and set the field of psychology back for decades.

So now let’s talk about Shell Shock and WWI. And, you’re right, the psychologists looked at what was going on, and they knew immediately that it was trauma-related, and started looking for treatment. They dug up Janet’s work, and rolled their sleeves up, and started in. They made some mistakes (many of which were because most of them were being paid by the army hoping to get the men ready to fight again instead of healed), but they’d correctly identified the source of the problem at least.

And then the war ended, and the funding dried up. The men were discharged from the army and not the army’s problem any longer, so it didn’t have to pay, and society as a whole didn’t want to pay for care either. See, people didn’t actually care about the disabled war vets once they no longer had to care. They didn’t want to see the reminders of the cost of society’s violence. They wanted to shove the soldiers in the corner, bring them out on Remembrance Day, and pretend everything was fine. And if you couldn’t pretend things were fine, they’d lock you up and throw away the key. The traumatized veterans with shell shock didn’t stop being traumatized; but research into shell shock stopped completely, and treatment largely stopped along with it.

Then came along World War II, and you started getting large numbers of traumatized soldiers again--a lot of traumatized people all at once in one place (the army) which had to figure out (again) what to do. All of a sudden, there was money for studying trauma and treating it! The psychologists dug up those old WWI studies on trauma, and got to work. But after the war ended, the funding dried up again. Research and treatment of trauma symptoms stopped cold again. The army wasn’t going to pay to treat civilians, and society wanted to pretend the whole thing was done.

Then came along the Viet Nam war, and you can probably guess what happened. But this time, there were differences. First, the disability rights movement was pushing towards de-institutionalization, so you couldn’t just shove vets in the institution if they couldn’t cope. Second, Viet Nam was a much less popular war both among military and civilian population, and many of the Viet Nam vets were no longer of the “stiff upper lip pretend everything’s fine” school like their fathers had been in the 40s. You had a much higher percentage of vets standing up in public and saying “I’m not fine, it’s the Army’s fault, I want help and society owes it to me because society is the one that sent me over there to suffer.” Third, you had feminists talking about rape survival insisting that the symptoms of many rape survivors were the same as the symptoms of many war vets, this is not just a war thing this is a trauma thing and any trauma (including gender-based and sexual violence) should be included in diagnostic criteria and treatment. Together, this was enough to change the narrative such that research didn’t stop when the war did.

But when you look back at history, the biggest thing guiding the development of trauma treatment was not need, and it was certainly not science. It was “who’s paying for it? who’s benefiting?” And most often, the people who get traumatized are not the ones with the resources to pay for their own treatment, and they’re certainly not the ones paying for the research. So research and treatment, if there is any, are based on what benefits the people with the resources.

Back when WW1 came along, and first soldiers came home with the trauma of warfare the like of which had never been seen before, the term "shell-shocked" was coined to explain what had happened to them. At the time, the diagnosis of hysteria was still in living memory - if not still actively being diagnosed - as an all-encompassing blanket term for any thoughts, feelings, personality traits and behaviours that women had which men in their lives found inconvenient.

While the 'symptoms' of hysteria could cover anything and everything from excessive crying, too high sex drive, too low sex drive, to having physical chronic pain that doctors didn't believe was real, some of the more well-known symptoms were distinct enough that people drew an association between the two. There needed to be a diagnosis to explain why so many of these brave young soldier boys were coming home with the symptoms of an ailment only known to exist in the feeble and fragile female sex.

A question apparently nobody thought to ask was why the fuck was it so common for ordinary women to have PTSD.

[stillellensibley]

Becoming Machine: Surrealist Automatism and Some Contemporary Instances

Involuntary Drawing

DAVID LOMAS

Examining the idea of being ‘machine-like’ and its impact on the practice of automatic writing, this article charts a history of automatism from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring the intersections between physiology, psychology, poetry and art.

Philippe Parreno’s The Writer 2007 (fig.1) is a video, played on a screen the size of a painted miniature, of the famous eighteenth-century Jaquet-Droz automaton recorded in the act of writing with a goose quill pen. Zooming in on the automaton’s hand and face, Parreno contrives to produce a sense of uncertainty as to the human or robotic nature of the doll. It is an example of a contemporary fascination with cyborgs and with the increasingly blurred dividing line between machine and organism. In a manner worthy of surrealist artist René Magritte, Parreno plays on the viewer’s sense of astonishment. As the camera rolls, the android deliberates before slowly writing: ‘What do you believe, your eyes or my words?’ The ‘Écrivain’ is one of the most celebrated automata that enjoyed a huge vogue in Enlightenment Europe. In a lavish two-volume book, Le Monde des automates (1928), Edouard Gélis and Alfred Chapuis define the android as ‘an automaton with a human face’.1 A chapter of this book, which supplied the illustrations for an article in the surrealist journal Minotaure, is devoted to drawing and writing automata.2 The oldest example Gélis and Chapuis cite was fabricated by the German inventor Friedrich von Knauss whom, they state, laboured at the problem of ‘automatic writing’ for twenty years before presenting his first apparatus in 1753.3

Fig.1 Philippe Parreno The Writer 2007 Photographic still from DVD 3:58 minutes Courtesy the artist and Haunch of Venison, London © Philippe Parreno

The graphic trace

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, recording instruments became vital tools in the production of scientific knowledge in a range of disciplines that were of direct relevance to surrealism. Such mechanical apparatuses, synonymous with the values of precision and objectivity, quickly became the benchmark of an experimental method. The inexorable rise of the graphic method has been intensively studied by historians of science and visual culture, but surrealism has not yet been considered as partaking of this transformation in the field of visual representation. In what follows, recording instruments are shown to have helped to underwrite surrealism’s scientific aspects and bolster its credentials as an experimental avant-garde.

The graphic method inaugurated a novel paradigm of visual representation, one geared towards capturing dynamic phenomena in their essence. It was the product of a radically new scientific conception of the physical universe in terms of dynamic forces, a world view that is doubtless at some level a naturalisation of the energies, both destructive and creative, unleashed by industrial capitalism.5The proliferation of mechanical inscription devices in the life sciences coincided with the displacement of anatomy, as a static principle of localisation, by physiology, which analysed and studied forces and functions. Étienne-Jules Marey, known today as an inventor of chronophotography, was one of the main exponents of the graphic method in France, and he personally devised a number of instruments whose aid, he wrote, made it possible to ‘penetrate the intimate functions of organs where life seems to translate itself by an incessant mobility’.6 As an apparatus for visualisation, the graphic method carries implications for how to construe figures of the visible and invisible. It was not simply a technology for making visible something that lay beneath the human perceptual threshold (like a microscope), but rather a technology for producing a visual analogue – a translation – of forces and phenomena that do not themselves belong to a visual order of things.7

At its simplest, a frog’s leg muscle is hooked directly to a pointed stylus that rests on a drum whose surface is blackened with particles of soot from a candle flame (fig.2). An electrical stimulus causes the muscle to contract, deflecting the stylus and thus producing on the revolving drum a typical white on black curvilinear trace. Fatigue of the muscle produces an increased duration and diminished amplitude of successive contractions, as shown in the figure at the bottom. A more sophisticated device pictured by Marey consisted of a flexible diaphragm, a sort of primitive transducer, connected by a hollow rubber tube to a stylus, which inscribed onto a continuous strip of paper. At the heart of the graphic method is the production of a visible trace.8 A stylus roving back and forth on a rotating cylinder or a moving band of paper translates forces into a universal script that Marey regarded as ‘the language of the phenomena themselves’ and which he proclaimed is superior to the written word.9 In an era where quantitative data gradually became the common currency of scientific discourse, Marey considered written language, ‘born before science and not being made for it’, as inadequate to express ‘exact measures and well-defined relations’.10 The incorporation of a time axis owing to the continuous regular movement of the drum lends a distinctive property to the graphic trace. The historian Robert Brain remarks that ‘the graphic representation is not an object or field like that of linear perspective, but a spatial product of a temporal process, whose order is serial or syntagmatic’.11 Units of time are marked off at the bottom of the myographic trace as regular blips on a horizontal axis; additionally, the passage of time is registered in the palimpsest-like layering of successive traces.12

Fig.2 Simple myograph (top) and trace of repeated muscular contractions (bottom) From Etienne-Jules Marey, La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine, Paris 1875, p.194

From its initial applications in physiology, the graphic method soon made inroads into areas such as medicine and psychology, eager to prove their scientific legitimacy. The familiar chart of a patient’s temperature, pulse, and respiration had become standard fare in hospital wards by the mid-nineteenth century.13 Marey went so far as to predict that the visual tableau comprised of such ‘medical curves’ would replace altogether the written record. The growth of medical specialties saw doctors attempting to justify their status and claims to authoritative knowledge by adopting the tools-in-trade of an experimental science. The Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, under neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, was at the forefront of these developments, and graphic traces are liberally interspersed among the better-known photographs, engravings, and fine art reproductions of Charcot’s book Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1878). Employed first for the investigation of muscular and nervous disorders, the myograph was subsequently applied by Charcot to the study of hysteria. By enabling the hysterical attack to be objectively recorded in the form of a linear visual narrative, the graphic trace performed an invaluable service in conferring a semblance of reality upon a condition that was widely dismissed as mere playacting or simulation (fig.3).

Fig.3 Epileptic phase of an hysterical attack From Paul Richer, Études cliniques sur l’hystéro-épilepsie ou grande hystérie, Paris 1885, p.40.

Nearer in time to the surrealists, the hysteria problem was revived with particular urgency in the guise of shellshock, and there again physicians placed their faith in the graphic method as a means of reliably excluding simulation where clinical observation alone was of no avail. Evidence of the surrealist André Breton’s first-hand acquaintance with such devices is not hard to find. Soon after his arrival at the neuro-psychiatric centre at St Dizier in August 1916 he writes excitedly to Théodore Fraenkel, a fellow medical student, saying that all his time is devoted to examining patients. He details his technique for interrogating his charges and in the same breath adds ‘and I manipulate the sphygmometric oscillometer’.14 The instrument to which Breton refers gives a measure of the peripheral pulses and would have been used by him to detect an exaggerated vascular response to cold that was held to be a diagnostic feature of reflex nervous disorders. There is a reasonable likelihood that Breton also came in contact with the use of a myograph for the same purpose, either at St Dizier or the following year when he was attached as a trainee to neurologist Joseph Babinski’s unit at the Pitié Hospital in Paris. Breton possessed a copy, with a personal dedication from the authors, of Babinski and Jules Froment’s Hystérie-pithiatisme et troubles nerveux d’ordre réflexe en neurologie de guerre (1917), a textbook profusely illustrated with myographic traces.

As a newly formed discipline, psychology was also quick to integrate the paraphernalia of experimental physiology.15 Alfred Binet, one of the pioneers of psychology in France, employed the graphic trace as an instrument more sensitive in his opinion than automatic writing for revealing a dissociation of the personality in cases of hysteria. ‘In following our study of the methods that enable us to reveal this hidden personality’, Binet writes, ‘we are now to have recourse to the so-called graphic method, the employment of which, at first restricted to the work-rooms of physiology, seems, at the present time, destined to find its way into the current practice of medicine’.16 The definition of psychology as experimental is seen to be closely tied with the use of a measuring instrument. Binet’s goal appears to be an almost paradoxical exclusion of the subject, with its nigh infinite capacity for dissimulation, from the scientific investigation of that subject’s own subjectivity. Coinciding with the introduction of quantitative forms of measurement, introspection rapidly fell into disrepute as a method of inquiry. Robert Brain’s observation that in the field of psychology ‘the graphic method served both as a research tool and a source of analogies for investigating mental activities’ is certainly to be borne in mind with regard to surrealism.17

Alongside mainstream science, recording devices also made incursions into psychical research. The use of such apparatuses to restrict the latitude for fraud contributed to the general air of scientific enquiry. The historian Richard Noakes has shown that the intractable problems of researching mediums, their notoriously capricious and untrustworthy nature, led some experimenters to suggest that sensitive instruments alone could replace the human subject as a means of accessing the spirit world.18 In the 1870s, William Crookes, a respected chemist and a pioneer in the application of measuring instruments to spiritualist research, devised an apparatus for recording emanations from the body of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, as a result of which he claimed to have discovered a mysterious new form of energy, which he termed ‘Psychic Force’ (fig.4).19 A Marey drum was used to make physiological recordings of the medium Eusapia Palladino, who had been often exposed for cheating in the past, during a highly publicised series of séances conducted under controlled experimental conditions at the laboratories of the Institut général de psychologie in Paris.20

Fig.4 Apparatus for recording the emanation of psychic force from a medium. From William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London 1874.

Modest recording instruments

It would appear that surrealism was not indifferent to the lure of the graphic method. The particular aspect to foreground here is the promise of objectivity. The graphic method offered the prospect of bypassing altogether the human observer who was increasingly liable to be viewed as a source of error in scientific experiment. With precision and objectivity the yardsticks of science by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the historian Peter Galison remarks that ‘the machine as a neutral and transparent operator … would serve as instrument of registration without intervention and as an ideal for the moral discipline of the scientists themselves’.21 Addressing the graphic trace in these terms, Marey strikingly adumbrates the language of surrealism in remarking that ‘one endeavoured to write automatically certain phenomena’.22 The surrealists spoke of their art and literary productions as objective documents and advocated an objective stance that sidelines the authorial subject who was meant to be as near as possible a passive onlooker at the birth of the work. Or, in Breton’s words, a modest recording device: ‘we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments not mesmerised by the drawings we are making.’23 Closely allied with this imperative to become akin to a machine is a metaphorics of the trace and tracing: ‘here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing’, Breton insisted in the 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’.24

The accent on objectivity is consonant with surrealism’s avant-gardist ethos of experiment, stemming ultimately from science. In fact, Breton contended that by the time the manifesto had been published, five years of uninterrupted experimental activity already lay behind it.25 Around the time of the manifesto, the surrealists set about creating a research centre of sorts, the short-lived Bureau of Surrealist Research, testifying to the earnestness of their experimental impulse. However, it was no ordinary laboratory that opened to the public at 15 Rue de Grenelle, Paris, in October 1924. The surrealist playwright and poet Antonin Artaud recalls that a mannequin hung from the ceiling and, reputedly, copies of the crime fiction volume Fantômas and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretations of Dreams framed with spoons were enthroned on a makeshift altarpiece. The second issue of the house journal La Révolution surréaliste, the cover of which was modeled on the popular science magazine La Nature, carried an announcement of its purpose:

The Bureau of Surrealist Research is applying itself to collecting by all appropriate means communications concerning the diverse forms taken by the mind’s unconscious activity. No specific field has been defined for this project and surrealism plans to assemble as much experimental data as possible, without knowing yet what the end result might be.26

Asserting a parallel with science, as Breton was fond of doing, was a way of implying that surrealism was dedicated to finding practical solutions to vital problems of human existence, and of distancing it as far as possible from a posture of aesthetic detachment. The statement above identifies the unconscious as the privileged object of surrealist research. Automatism, from this point of view, could be understood as a research method, a set of investigative procedures that organise and govern practice but do not determine outcomes. The openness of scientific inquiry is something that may have been especially attractive to surrealism; the final clause above insists upon their refusal to define goals – a programme – which would have run the risks of a reductive instrumentalism or empty utopianism. At the same time, however, bearing in mind the extreme animosity towards positivism that Breton notoriously gives vent to in the 1924 manifesto, the dangers for surrealism of too close a proximity to science should not be overlooked. Perhaps for this reason, Artaud, in a report on the bureau carried in the third issue of the journal, argues warily for the necessity of a certain surrealist mysticism. A survey of the terms ‘research’ and ‘experiment’ in the period would reveal that much the same vocabulary was utilised in the marginal, pseudo-scientific world of spiritualism and parapsychology as by mainstream science, and it is notable that surrealist experimentation happily straddles these seemingly contradictory currents. The hypnotic trance sessions, one of the main experimental activities engaged in by the nascent surrealist group, are illustrative of this cross-over between science and the occult. 543 pages of notes and drawings obsessively documenting the sessions, which took place nightly between September and October 1922, were preserved by Breton and included among a list of artworks, books and other objects housed in the bureau.

While Salvador Dalí did not partake of the ‘birth pangs’ of surrealism, as Breton ruefully observed, his overheated imagination provides a vivid if fanciful evocation of this first phase of surrealist experiment. In an essay written in 1932, Dalí conjures up an improbable scenario of hypnotic subjects wired to recording devices like the unfortunate frog in Marey’s illustration, though in this case it is the trace of poetic inspiration that is expectantly awaited:

All night long a few surrealists would gather round the big table used for experiments, their eyes protected and masked by thin though opaque mechanical slats on which the blinding curve of the convulsive graphs would appear intermittently in fleeting luminous signals, a delicate nickel apparatus like an astrolabe being fixed to their necks and fitted with animal membranes to record by interpenetration the apparition of each fresh poetic streak, their bodies being bound to their chairs by an ingenious system of straps, so that they could only move a hand in a certain way and the sinuous line was allowed to inscribe the appropriate white cylinders. Meanwhile their friends, holding their breath and biting their lower lips in concentrated attention, would lean over the recording apparatus and with dilated pupils await the expected but unknown movement, sentence, or image.27

Dalí clearly took to heart Breton’s exhortation to his fellow surrealists that they should make themselves into ‘modest recording instruments’. Inspired by extant photographs that afford a rare glimpse of the legendary bureau, Dalí conjures up a fantastical laboratory with pliant subjects hooked to a plethora of arcane recording devices.

Beyond a serviceable metaphor employed by Breton, what evidence is there for the graphic method as having any bearing on the actual practice of automatic drawing? While scattered instances of direct citation of graphic traces can be demonstrated, what is more significant is that this novel regime of visuality, beginning as a style of scientific imaging and becoming by the time of surrealism a widely circulated and understood visual idiom, was a necessary historical antecedent in order that the automatist line might be imbued with meaning as the authentic trace of unconscious instinctual forces and energies (in its absence, they would have been literally unreadable in these terms). With the precedent of the graphic trace available to them, it was possible for surrealist artists to imagine how they might square the circle by integrating temporal duration within a static visual medium.

‘Could it be that Marcel Duchamp reaches the critical point of ideas faster than anyone else?’, wondered Breton. It is a question that can profitably be asked in examining the impact on avant-garde artists of an avowedly scientific visual idiom. Duchamp, and his artistic collaborator Francis Picabia, around 1912 to 1913 rejected traditional painterly techniques, along with extreme subjectivism that had reached a zenith in the neo-symbolist circles both artists had been involved with up until that point, and turned instead to technical drawing and scientific illustrations as alternative, non-artistic sources of inspiration. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages 1913–14 (fig.5) is evidence of his search for what art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson calls ‘the beauty of indifference, the counterpart to his painting of precision’.28 For this work, one-metre lengths of thread were allowed to fall from a height of one metre, and the random configurations formed as they came to rest on the ground were fixed and recorded. Displaying the resultant shapes as curved white lines on a long horizontal black strip of canvas would have rung bells with viewers familiar with the then standard repertoire of scientific imaging practices. The typical format of the graphic trace served as a convenient shorthand by means of which Duchamp encoded the desired values of precise measurement and objectivity. Not for the first (or last) time did Duchamp appeal to forms of visual competency that had begun to creep into the common culture, as art historian Molly Nesbitt’s pioneering study relating his use of technical drawing to reforms in the French school curriculum shows.29 The creation of wooden templates or stencils based on the resultant curves is also significant: these were utilised to transfer the curves to other works, notably Network of Stoppages 1914 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the capillary tubes in the Large Glass 1915–23 (Tate T02011), but in addition they provide a measure of the area beneath the curve which, as every student of basic calculus knows, is equal to the integral of the curve.

Marcel Duchamp 3 stoppages étalon (3 Standard Stoppages) 1913–14, replica 1964 Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

Of the surrealist artists, links between art and science run deepest in the work of Max Ernst, who attended lecture courses on psychology while he was a student at university in Bonn.30 Scientific illustrations and tables are frequent source materials for Ernst’s collage, among which are examples of graphic traces, most notably the illustrations to the book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922), a collection of collages and automatic poems produced collaboratively with the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Between the Two Poles of Politeness is one of at least two collages in the book to utilise a graphic trace, which functions as a ground for the image and a springboard for the artist’s imagination. The typical white-on-black format is exploited by Ernst to evoke a night sky against which the solid white line of the trace stands out starkly. He embellishes the horizontal x-axis marked on the graph by a dotted line with a distant polar landscape that appears to echo the peaks and troughs of the graphic trace. At the left-hand edge of the image, the lines of the graph are extended so they appear to converge towards a vanishing point; the net effect of these hand-drawn additions is to produce incongruities of scale as well as an ambiguous play between the flat space of the diagram and an illusory perspectival space. Accentuating the horizon serves to foreground the idea of a horizon of vision, beyond which normally one cannot see, and thus implies the existence of an invisible realm to which surrealism affords access.    

From 1919 through to the manifesto of 1924 – a period of intense experiment with automatic writing and other means for penetrating the unconscious, including hypnosis – Breton’s poetry is replete with imagery of electric currents and magnetic fields, to which the title of Ernst’s collage may allude. Ernst’s deployment of a graphic trace in the context of this book can be seen as mounting a polemic in favour of collage as an equivalent to automatic writing. Breton, who the following year in his poem ‘Sunflower’ penned the exquisitely apposite phrase, ‘the white curve on a black ground that we call thought’, would have understood that the graphic trace in Ernst’s collage offers itself to be read as an indexical equivalent to thought, in no ways inferior in this respect to the automatic text on the facing page.31Ernst’s painting North Pole 1922 is contemporaneous with the collage and closely related to it.32 A distinctive fine wavy pattern across the upper half of the canvas, the result of dragging a fine comb or something similar across the black oil paint so as to expose the white support, is highly suggestive of a seismographic or magnetic trace. There is a direct connection between this work and Ernst’s use of frottage and other automatic procedures in the 1920s. Between 1927 and 1928 Yves Tanguy produced a number of quite distinctive automatist paintings in which undulating lines are scratched into a black ground. Of even greater significance than such isolated examples of the direct citation of graphic traces, however, is to recognise that the novel regime of visuality it inaugurated made possible a mindset that saw the automatist line as an authentic trace of unconscious instinctual forces and energies. In its absence, they would have been literally unreadable in these terms. The surrealists were not alone in choosing to regard the unconscious as a repository of imperceptible, yet powerfully active forces. Sigmund Freud commonly spoke of the unconscious in terms of an energetics of instinctual cathexes and circuits.33 But what has been lost sight of is that these were never any more than metaphorical descriptions or analogies, a way of talking. The mistake is to think that the wavy lines in an Ernst painting are actually a trace of anything, least of all Ernst’s unconscious, rather than a polemical mobilisation of the idea (or metaphor) of the indexical trace.

Re-inscriptions of automatism

It comes as a surprise to learn that, notwithstanding the seemingly intractable difficulties posed by the Bretonian concept of ‘pure psychic automatism’, a considerable number of more recent artists and poets have not been deterred from taking up such practices, often in the context of an overt re-engagement with the historical avant-garde.

In the main, the aleatory and automatic practices to be surveyed here no longer purport to be indexical traces or expressions of the unconscious. These recent examples prompt the question afresh: is surrealist automatism expressive, and if so what is it expressive of? This question is inseparable from another concerning the status of chance in surrealism.34 Here, it is necessary to make a distinction between Breton’s objective chance (‘hasard objectif’) and true randomness.35 Freud maintained that seemingly chance events, slips of the tongue and so forth, are actually governed by a strict order of psychic determinism: nothing in the mind, he believed, is arbitrary or undetermined.36 This alone is what assures the validity of dream interpretation. Without the supposition of unconscious causation, the whole hermeneutic project of psychoanalysis would be pointless. Automatism, from this angle, registers an unconscious level of determination, that is to say, of meaning. But what if it turned out that surrealist automatism had been all along simply a method for generating randomness?

Between October 2003 and June 2005 the musician and composer Jeremy ‘Jem’ Finer was artist in residence in the astrophysics department at OxfordUniversity, where Roger Penrose, nephew of the surrealist artist Roland Penrose, had conducted pioneering work in theoretical physics on black holes and the early conditions of the universe. Finer’s Everywhere, All the Time 2005 (fig.6) comprised part of a larger sculptural project arising from the residency. As Finer explains:

A chart recorder is transformed into an automatic drawing machine, its source the electrical fluctuations of a detuned radio. The universe is permeated by radiation, the Cosmic Microwave Background, which contemporary cosmology concludes is the cooled remnant of the Big Bang. Everywhere, all the time, it’s visible in the snow between channels on a television, the hiss of static on a radio, the rattling pen of the chart recorder, like a spirit hand.37

Fig.6 Jem Finer Everywhere, All the Time 2005 Chart recorder, transistor radio and paper Courtesy the artist Photograph © Jem Finer

The automatic messages that are of concern to Finer – ‘an unreadable communication with its own inner sense’ – are of an impersonal, non-human nature (fig.7). Rendering literal the Bretonian metaphor of a simple recording instrument, Finer bypasses altogether the artist as expressive origin of the message: ‘Endless gyres, overwriting, obliterating, annihilating any pretence of analysis, the chart recorder is transformed into an automatic drawing machine, the universe the invisible hand.’38

Fig.7 Jem Finer Everywhere, All the Time 2005 Graphic trace from chart recorder Courtesy the artist Photograph © Jem Finer

It is fruitful to think about Finer’s practice in terms of a tension between noise and message as theorised by communication theory. Random noise can be understood as interference within a system of meaning production. In this respect, it might be understood to be quite similar to a Freudian slip, which manifests as an interruption or distortion of the intended message. However, the apparently chance or accidental nature of the latter turns out to be illusory and the lapsus is, in fact, subject to a strict psychic determinism. True randomness, which is the arena of contemporary practitioners’ interest, implies a breach in causality and hence ought not to be confused with the surrealist notion of objective chance, though it is compatible with the surrealists’ interrogation of the author function. The ratcheting-up of randomness undercuts the expressive paradigm of a subject who is the putative origin of a message.

Finer’s reference to a spirit hand resonates with surrealist automatism, whose derivation from mediumistic writing and drawing Breton acknowledged in his essay ‘The Automatic Message’ (1933). It also recalls a passage from the philosopher Roland Barthes’s famous text ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) that implicitly appeals to the precedent of automatic writing: ‘the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin.’39 Barthes conceives of the writer not as expressive origin but rather as a kind of radio antenna picking up and remixing messages randomly absorbed. Tuning in to white noise instead of the overt communicative content of their chosen medium, postmodern artists perpetuate as well as update the historical avant-garde’s engagements with chance. In an essay on Cy Twombly, Barthes made an explicit analogy to white noise, writing of the picture Panorama 1955 (private collection) that: ‘The whole space is crackling in the manner of a television screen before any image appears on it.’40 Twombly reinterpreted an automatist practice in a manner contrary to the expressive paradigm that had dominated in the previous generation of artists. It is thus comparable to other gestures of cancellation, such as his friend Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing 1953 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The artist in the abstract expressionist mould was not only masculine, he was also stridently hetero-normative, a factor that art historian Jonathan Katz has argued lay behind the next generation of artists’ wish to distance themselves.41 Barthes refers to a new technological analogy for an automatist procedure in the television set, which, by the mid-1950s, had become nigh ubiquitous in American households. The origins of information theory in the immediate post-war period narrowly preceded the arrival of this new medium of mass communication. The white on black of Twombly’s Panorama evidently reminded Barthes of the cathode ray screen.

The experimental filmmaker Peter Rose explains that his sixteen minute film Secondary Currents 1982 is about the relationships between the mind and language: ‘A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language.’42 In the course of the film, words – white on a black ground – gradually decompose into constituent letters that jostle in a random, Brownian motion, such that the screen becomes an almost literal representation of white noise (fig.8). Rose’s work relates to concrete poetry but also draws upon his mathematical training. In communication theory, the concept of entropy is closely related to randomness. As expounded by engineer John R. Pierce in his book Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961): ‘entropy increases as the number of messages among which the source may choose increases. It also increases as the freedom of choice (or the uncertainty to the recipient) increases and decreases as the freedom of choice and the uncertainty are restricted.’43

Fig.8 Peter Rose Secondary Currents 1982 Still from film 16 minutes, 16 mm, black and white, sound Courtesy the artist Photograph © Peter Rose

Might it be possible to consider Rose’s language experiments as offering a route in to the final automatic text of Breton and Éluard’s ‘The Possessions’, the ‘attempt at simulating schizophrenia’ (‘démence précoce’), which plots a similar stepwise dissolution of language and sense? Under the guise of emulating the language of the insane, Breton and Éluard can be understood as exploring in an intuitive vein the relationship between a poetic or creative use of language and entropy. The act of collaboration seems to have been one means for interrupting the smooth flow of logical sense, an express aim of automatic writing being to divert language from its communicative function. In a manner not dissimilar to Rose, the schizophrenic treats words as things; their language was described in the kinds of manuals to which Breton and Éluard had access as propagating on the basis of chance associations or incidental resemblances between words. One can point to numerous examples of this in Breton and Éluard’s text. Within certain limits, an increase in randomness is experienced as poetic indeterminacy. However, the final paragraph of their exercise in simulation presses way beyond this threshold:

Fils de Judas rondève, qu’A Linné pasteur hippomythe U vraïli ouabi bencirog plaïol fernaca gla …lanco. U quaïon purlo ouam gacirog olaïama oual, u feaïva zuaïailo, gaci zulo. Gaci zulo plef. U feaïva oradarfonsedarca nic olp figilê. U elaïaïpi mouco drer hôdarca hualica-siptur. Oradargacirog vraïlim…u feaïva drer kurmaca ribag nic javli.44

Extraordinarily, this was among the texts that Samuel Beckett chose to translate.

The fact that The Magnetic Fields (1920), the true ur-texts of surrealist automatic writing, were composed jointly by Breton and Philippe Soupault (most obviously the texts called ‘Barrières’ (Barriers) which take the form of a dialogue or conversation) demonstrates that believing automatic writing to be the outpouring of a single unconscious is a misconception. In these texts, the writing subject makes use of an interlocutor in order to interrupt the flow and continuity of his discourse; a systematic interference with communicative language is thus built in to the procedure. It is a device that maximises incongruities. This can also be seen in the long distance collaboration of Ernst and Éluard in Les Malheurs des immortels. In his later comments on The Magnetic Fields, Breton placed great value on the speed of execution as the guarantor of the authenticity of a message that was to be as far as possible an uncorrupted record of unconscious thought. It is necessary to consider that the factor that comes increasingly into play as the speed of writing increases is not the unconscious but sheer randomness, which beyond a certain point manifests as a lexical decomposition.

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, and other artworks utilising chance, the New York conceptual artist William Anastasi began creating Pocket Drawings on folded sheets of paper while he was at the cinema in the 1960s. These led on to Subway Drawings that started as he was travelling to and from daily chess games with his friend, the composer John Cage, and which he has continued to produce (fig.9). Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees, his shoulders away from the backrest, Anastasi surrenders to a random process. His body operates likes a seismograph, allowing the rhythm of the moving train – its starts, stops and turns, accelerations and decelerations – to be transmitted onto the sheet of paper. In a 1990 interview, Cage talked about Anastasi’s modus operandi vis-à-vis surrealist automatism, insisting that: ‘It’s not psychological; it’s physical.’45

Fig.9 William Anastasi Subway Drawing Courtesy Gering & Lopez Gallery, New York

It is instructive to compare Anastasi’s Subway Drawings with another work that references the movement of a train and its effects on the human body, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train 1911–12 (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice).46 For Anastasi and the other artists in Cage’s circle, Duchamp was a cardinal reference point. The picture depicts the pipe-smoking artist on a train journey between Paris and Rouen. It is, Duchamp explained, a painting of ‘two parallel movements corresponding to each other’, that is to say, the forward velocity of the train together with the sideways rocking motion of the man standing in the crowded carriage.47 The passivity of a body acted upon by external mechanical forces is certainly akin to Anastasi’s Subway Drawings. The painting’s multiple registrations of a single figure, comparable to the more famous Nude Descending a Staircase 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), reflects Duchamp’s preoccupation with Marey’s chronophotography. Moreover, the picture might be said to represent a quirky response to the futurist cult of machines and the dynamism of speed. Slightly perplexing is the undress of the solitary figure, who, it has been suggested, is depicted in a state of sexual arousal. What the picture represents, then, is a bachelor machine: the kinetic energy of the train transformed via the onanistic rhythms of a swaying body into libidinal energy. A helpful commentary on this state of affairs comes from faraway Vienna. Asserting that ‘mechanical agitation must be recognised as one of the sources of sexual excitation’, Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), specifically relates the pleasurable effects of this mechanical stimulus to train travel:

The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or other in his life wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman. It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways, and, at an age at which the production of phantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensation of movement.48

Freud contends that any physical stimulus to the body releases a quota of energy and this release of (libidinal) energy is felt as pleasurable. He instances the rocking of a child in order to put it to sleep. Duchamp wrote enigmatically of the period immediately preceding the First World War: ‘The machine, motion and eros were things which touched me in a poetic way. They were in the air and I felt I could use them for my art.’

Anastasi is well aware that his drawing could be seen as a displacement of a forbidden act. He says as much when he explains that he began making the Subway Drawings instead of the Pocket Drawingsbecause he was concerned about what fellow passengers might think he was doing with his hands in his pockets. The drawing is done on a sheet of paper that rests directly on the artist’s lap. For a near equivalent, one must look to surrealism’s disreputable left field, to the sole example of what Salvador Dalí dubbed ‘espasmo-graphisme’. An inscription on the etching, purpose-made as a frontispiece to a collection of poems by Georges Hugnet titled Onan (1934), forthrightly confesses: ‘“ESPASMO-GRAPHISME” OBTAINED WITH THE LEFT HAND WHILE MASTURBATING WITH THE RIGHT HAND UNTIL BLOODUNTIL BONE UNTIL SCAR!’ The image harks back stylistically to some tentative experiments by Dalí with an automatic technique in the late 1920s, quickly abandoned as he evolved his more characteristic illusionism. The jagged, staccato rhythms of the compulsively repeated doodles mime the action believed to have been carried out with the artist’s other hand. There is a crucial distinction to be drawn between illustrating the act of masturbation, which Dalí plainly was not reluctant to do, and producing a non-representational, so to speak, automatic trace of the activity, as he does here. Using his left hand to engrave the plate – Dalí was right-handed – eliminates at one stroke any semblance of manual skill or virtuosity. One is reminded that for Freud the solitary vice of masturbation was a frequent cause of neurosis. If this opinion, oddly indebted to Victorian prudery, is accepted for a moment, then Dalí chooses the shortest possible route between the supposed forbidden activity and its unfettered, automatic expression.49 But in doing so, it seems that he short-circuits the whole Freudian apparatus of the unconscious and repression. An area of staining across the centre of the sheet raises other questions for the inquisitive critic: does it merely simulate what it purports to be, or is it the forensic evidence one is searching for, the veridical trace that authenticates the automatic message? Granted, the work is parodic in intent, tossed off in a matter of minutes, but it is nonetheless a wry, amusing commentary on the discourse and practice of surrealist automatism.

Rebecca Horn Pencil Mask 1972 Tate © DACS, 2018

Finally, Rebecca Horn’s Pencil Mask 1972 (fig.10) is a sort of mechanical prosthesis that transforms the artist into a drawing machine. It is a sinister and disturbing piece, more autistic than artistic. Horn describes its operation thus: ‘All the pencils are about two inches long and produce the profile of my face in three dimensions … I move my body rhythmically from left to right in front of the white wall. The pencils make marks on the wall the image of which corresponds to the rhythm of my movements.’50Strapped around her face, the harness turns the wearer into a blind automatic drawing instrument. There is not space here to do justice to this arresting work, nor to tease out its relation, on the one hand, to her robotic painting machines or the pseudo-expressivity of her later Artaud-like drawings.51 The key point, however, is the way it encircles the artist’s head, interposing a physical barrier between the artist and the sheet of paper. The ‘unconscious’ is simply bracketed off from whatever is going on. Horn and the other contemporary artists discussed here point to ways of understanding surrealist automatism beyond the impasses of the assumption that such works are, or ever were, the expression of such a thing.

Source

[circumswoop]

Game & performance.

The opening shot of The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is of a heart splayed, a chest jacked open with ribs akimbo. It is apparently a real heart: photographed in extremis, under surgical duress. With its discernible hemispheres, the heart almost looks more like a brain gobbed in unspeakable fat. If a brain cld be said to beat, it would look like this: the grossest opening shot maybe in movies, or at least that I have ever seen. What comes from confusing the brain and the heart, however lightly? Utter gore, and Colin Farrell being ritually undressed afterward, headlamp and funny surgical glasses on top of other funny surgical glasses and layers of scrubs and gloves reversing off him. If all your life you have been sick with fantasy abt hospitals and their demented sense of enlightenment––the Byzantine corridors the corners of which echo with coughs, in light that can only be described as taurine-colored––you will not so much watch as wander this movie, the latest from a Greek filmmaker whose remade myths are both catchier and kitschier than the originals.

Steeped as easily in opera, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer explores impossibly big moods with a neck-craning soundtrack of Schubert and Ravel. But for a film addicted to classicism, the visual joke of Nicole Kidman being married to another doctor would not be possible if you've never had an affair with Eyes Wide Shut. Alice Harford, having rid herself of the locked-down and oblivious Dr. Bill, landed in the arms of a cardiac surgeon with several shakers full of salt and pepper in his beard. When nicole stares into the mirror of a medicine chest you think she will withdraw a band-aid container that contains weed instead of band-aids. This pot is making her aggressive. No it’s not the pot. It’s you.

Giorgios Lanthimos is notorious for having his actors speak in gray mono, not the stereo of Actorville. This mannerism is Mametian, and takes me back to watching State & Main or Spartan when I was a moviegoing pup, trying to spot how Sarah Jessica Parker or Val Kilmer arrived at such impeccable deadpan. Young audiences schooled on YouTube minimalism may recognize it better now than I did then, albeit as something else. Lanthimos has his own version of Mamet’s command to “just say the lines”, so there are no scenes in TKOASD that cld rightly be called “acted” except for one in which Farrell expertly trashes a kitchen. And yet the threadbare flatness of the performances is still stylized, even glamorized, into fantastic states of catatonia or even anhedonia. The inability to feel pleasure, carried by Farrell, contrasts with the inability to feel anything at all, carried by Kidman: her reliance on psychosomatic diagnoses for her children falling legless to the floor is just her belief that they’ll never stand on their own.

Included in the soundtrack is “Enantiodromia”, a piece by the (also Greek) composer Jani Christou that alternates between narrow and wide frequencies. Carl Jung used the term enantiodromia for “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time”. He updated this from Heraclitus, flipping it into “the most marvelous of all psychological laws”–that which accounts for the subconscious occasionally overruling control freaks. (Jung would describe it as extreme one-sidedness, but he meant control freaks.) The first and really only thing Colin Farrell discusses at length in TKOASD is wristwatches, their waterproof depth and if metal or leather bands are better. For insisting on an ordered life, his unconscious opposite punishes him with a disordered effect, scrambling the health of his family into nightmare fuel. It’s treated as a placed-upon curse by the script, but the odd boy who introduces this malevolence to Farrell’s life probably doesn’t know his Jung from his Young Thug. He simply sells Farrell on the concept of a favor owed, then lures him into a funhouse of unconscious glitch. 

Farrell fears two things: drowning without knowing what time it is (apparently), and killing a patient. He even denies the second one is possible, insisting that surgeons don’t kill patients anesthesiologists do. The boy character, played by the fascinating Irish actor Barry Keoghan, is the son of a patient who died on Farrell’s table which still doesn’t remind Farrell of revenge––only recompense. So when the boy begins to art-direct Farrell’s life, promising catastrophe in three-act structure (paralysis, bleeding from the eyes, death), Farrell’s too committed as a father figure to get out with honor. One thing the Greeks knew: honor as tool for sorting things is always DOA.

As a surgeon, Farrell simply regards the unconscious as a performance space. This extends to erotics, as he and Nicole act out a bizarre and really hot operating room scenario as sexual prelude. General anesthetic? Nicole asks, semi-naked, before going limp. First of all, I’m thrilled by how much this rape fantasy probably horrified woke Twitter. But later, when Nicole ups the ante and gets naked on her own, Farrell isn’t interested. There’s a plague on his family so he’s got a lot going on, but it’s more like he cannot block a sex scene if there’s too much motility. 

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot got famous for expanding the limits of hysteria, and for his pyromanic teaching style that probably tricked Freud, his most famous student, into thinking he was a performer. Charcot’s work moved the chains on nervous abnormalities, using techniques like hypnosis to source seats of trauma. He also liked to get high and paint. His portraits and caricatures were known to liven up meetings. Although his findings on hysteria eroded, he is still reputed as the father of neurology. Several neuropathological disorders carry his name, including Charcot arthropathy––a progressive denaturing of weight-bearing joints. This disconnect between bone and soft tissue usually affects the foot or ankle, and can result in pathologic fractures and paralyses––both of which Charcot interrogated as neurotraumatic. So, the condition that leaves Colin Farrell’s teen daughter and adolescent son suddenly unable to use their legs can be explained as a rare or unprecedented form of Charcot arthropathy, which none of the experts at Farrell’s hospital think of since it’s ordinarily progressive. The effects of a curse are not always immediate, but can be. 

Images of the kids slithering down steps and across floors are so disturbing they cause Farrell to confess that he once jerked off his own dad. His dad was asleep and there was no coercion, but this is still a trauma so unbelievable it must be true. Farrell is so desperate to prove his son is faking paralysis that he relates it as heartfelt. Or his brain and heart have finally traded places. Either way it’s a morale-destroying instance of metapraxis, normality blurred by the deep need to perform. The battle of the pragmatic against the unconscious is rendered hilariously anecdotal, as Lanthimos tips his farcical hand. 

Altogether austere, absolutely clinical scenes in basements and one involving the most nightmarish spaghetti usage since Gummo echo further perversity and nonsense. Jung, writing abt the psychoid archetype, found “no hope that the validity of any statement about unconscious states or processes will ever be verified scientifically”. But filmically? Performatively? The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is either tragedy reëxperienced as camp, or a feature-length realization that the desires for recompense and revenge are never evenly matched. Although in a race of opposites, they’re never far apart. 

[mysterious-secret-garden]

During the decade of the 1870s, three young women found themselves in the hysteria ward of the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris under the direction of the prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.

All three — Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve — would become medical celebrities. The stories of their lives as patients on the ward are a strange amalgam of science and religion, medicine and the occult, hypnotism, love, and theater.

The illness they suffered from was hysteria. This disease was not an arcane preoccupation of the doctors that treated them, but an affliction that would increasingly capture the public imagination. Stories about hysterical patients filled the columns of newspapers. They were transformed into fictional characters by novelists. Hysterics were photographed, sculpted, painted, and drawn. Every week, eager crowds arrived at the hospital to attend Charcot's demonstrations of hysterics acting out their hysterical symptoms. And it wasn't only medical students and physicians who came to view the shows, but artists, writers, actors, socialites, and the merely curious. Hysteria had become a fascinating and fashionable spectacle. Source

[completeworksofsigmundfreud]

Charcot (1893) - English summary

Obituary of Freud’s teacher and mentor Jean-Martin Charcot, French doctor and one of the creators of neurology and psychiatry. Freud’s describing Charcot as a magnificent teacher who spent most of his time by studying and examining neurological influences on a human psyche.