Freud, “Charcot” (1893)

Freud’s early tribute to Jean-Martin Charcot serves well as an introduction to Freud himself. The obituary conveys Freud’s “style”; his scientific and philosophical values; his self-understanding as an experimenter and innovator; his perceived challenges and opposition; and, more concretely, his program as a psychological researcher.

We may roughly distinguish between form and content in this — mainly laudatory — piece. By “form,” I mean those general attributes, capacities, and tendencies in Charcot that Freud plainly admires and will gradually attempt to embody himself. By “content,” I have in mind those particular ideas, theories, and positions at which Charcot, the scientist, arrives — and towards which Freud’s praise is comparatively equivocal.

In these reflections I will emphasize the “form.” This includes Charcot’s personal, “human” qualities: charisma, warmth, accessibility, and a fundamentally egalitarian ethos. (Freud cites his “kindly openness” and “life-long loyalty” towards pupils, but also the “magic that emanated from his looks and from his voice” (16.) It includes, too, Charcot’s values as a researcher: scientific probity and humility, dedication to empiricism, and skepticism of theory-building unmoored from observation — all combined with a a bold, experimental spirit. And Freud especially praises the “type” of Charcot’s achievements: imparting scientific legitimacy to formerly-maligned subjects (paradigmatically hysteria), overturning traditional dogma (even if succumbing, Freud indicates, to several of his own), and, where necessary, courageously incurring the opposition of the conservative establishment.

Foremost among the man's “special gifts” — and a perfect illustration of the “formal” side of Freud’s admiration — was an essentially non-theoretical, “intuitive” approach to the object of research. “He was not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature of an artist — he was, as he himself said, a ‘visuel,’ a man who sees” (12). This quasi-aesthetic intuition, Freud writes, was based on an immersive empiricism.

Indeed, Freud dedicates a couple of colorful passages to underscoring, illustrating, and — it seems — justifying Charcot’s radical empiricism. In these passages, Freud draws the invidious comparison between the “reflective man” or “thinker” and Charcot, whose “method of working” consisted rather in “look[ing] again and agin at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly an understanding dawned on him” (12). The “things” about which Charcot, after this prolonged exposure, came to sudden illumination, were the “great number of chronic nervous patients at his disposal” (12). Charcot’s first-hand contact with these patients was, Freud implies, to an unusual degree “pure” — that is, unclouded by theoretical prejudice. “Concept” followed “intuition,” the primacy and authority of the senses. Once the repetition of sense-experience reached a certain threshold, the immanent structure of Charcot’s object would present itself spontaneously to his intelligence:

“In his mind’s eye the apparent chaos presented by the continual repetition of the same symptoms then gave way to order: the new nosological pictures emerged, characterized by the constant combination of certain groups of symptoms” (12)

Again, this would occur without any specifically theoretical effort on Charcot’s part — say, in the form of reflection upon logical chains of inference and deduction. The conclusion — the “new nosological pictures” — appeared rather to spring fully formed from a pre-reflective level. Freud’s subsequent self-identifications as a man of science, his unyielding characterizations of psychoanalysis as a legitimate branch of science, as well as the care he took to distinguish his program from the empty cogitations of “philosophy” — all echo these early comments on Charcot’s principles and method.

In “this kind of intellectual work,” writes Freud, Charcot “had no equal,” and it yielded to him “the greatest satisfaction” he could conceive: namely, “to see something new,” or, more precisely, “to recognize it as new” (12). Implied in these descriptions, I suppose, is the idea that, wherever it is authentic, scientific discovery is conditioned by these quasi-aesthetic experiences and values. In fact, it is only by virtue of the type of intellectual intuition cultivated by Charcot that the scientist, and science generally, are able to “advance” at all, since they are otherwise encumbered by theoretical preconceptions that obstruct access to the object as it is. In this way, Charcot transcended the myopia of a “medicine [in which] people only see what they have already learned to see” (12).

Intellectual intuition becomes both the method and aim of science, so interpreted: an approach to the world that (as far as possible) brackets one’s ideas about it; and also the end result, the final disclosure of the “new” in the midst of the old. In this respect, Charcot’s scientific conduct purportedly evokes Adam, in Genesis, before whom “God brought the creatures…to be distinguished and named (13), thus providing him with precisely “that intellectual enjoyment which Charcot praised so highly” (13). The substance of this comparison is the undiluted experience of an object — the animals of creation, nervous disorders — as something utterly new. Mythically speaking, Adam is the first to perceive, name, classify, and grasp the world — and so he must invent the names, concepts, and categories with which to organize that experience. So Charcot, adhering in his way to intellectual intuition, approaches a similar convergence between discovery and creation — for he can capture the new object, formerly unseen or ignored, only by evolving a new framework that is equal to its features.

To reiterate the distinction I drew above: Freud directs most of his praise, not towards Charcot’s conclusions, the particular scientific views he held — here Freud’s praise is tempered — but towards the values, ideals, and principles that guided him in his vocation. Charcot embodied an unprejudiced receptivity to experience; took seriously a phenomenon, hysteria, previously scorned by scientists; expressed humility regarding his uncertainties, but also ambition, disregarding doxa and defending convictions, once reached, even when it inspired antagonism: “The construction of this great edifice was naturally not achieved without violent opposition…the sterile opposition of an old generation who did not want to have their views changed” (21). These qualities and patterns of Charcot’s life, after which Freud can unreservedly model himself — the “how” — appear more important than the “what,” the content itself, or the doctrine which, by the time of the obituary, scientific criticism had already substantially weakened and which, in the closing paragraphs, Freud predicts will continue its decline.

Intriguingly, the scientific “hypothesis” that Freud expounds in this text with the greatest care and apparent interest did not belong to the man he is ostensibly eulogizing. It is Freud’s. In particular, it is an early intimation of his eventual theory of unconscious mental life, which — on a questionable pretext — he manages to insert into the obituary. Whereas Charcot “treated hysteria as just another topic in neuropathology” (20) — an attitude belied, it seems, by his own famous experiments in hypnosis — for Freud the “picture” looks at least potentially much different. I want to quote this hypothetical picture at length, not only on account of its value as an early anticipation of a mature doctrine, but because it helps clarify the limits Freud perceives even in Charcot’s “greatest achievement” (22), his experiments with hysterics under hypnosis. Freud outlines his own explanation — “the theory of a splitting of consciousness as a solution to the riddle of hysteria” (20) — as follows:

“[T]he question could arise as to what method of approach would lead most quickly to a solution of the problem. A quite unbiassed observer might have arrived at this conclusion: if I find someone in a state which bears all the signs of a painful affect — weeping, screaming and raging — the conclusion seems probable that a mental process is going on in him of which those physical phenomena are the appropriate expression. A healthy person, if he were asked, would be in a position to say what impression it was that was tormenting him; but the hysteric would answer that he did not know. The problem would at once arise of how it is that a hysterical patient is overcome by an affect about whose cause he asserts that he knows nothing. If we keep to our conclusion that a corresponding psychical process must be present, and if nevertheless we believe the patient when he denies it; if we bring together the many indications that the patient is behaving as though he does know about it; and if we enter into the history of the patient’s life and find some occasion, some trauma, which would appropriately evoke precisely those expressions of feeling — then everything points to one solution: the patient is in a special state of mind in which all his impressions or his recollections of them are no longer held together by an associate chain, a state of mind in which it is possible for a recollection to express its affect by means of somatic phenomena without the group of the other mental processes, the ego, knowing about it or being able to intervene to prevent it…Charcot, however, did not follow this path towards an explanation of hysteria” (19-20)

Now, what “method of approach,” exactly, is reflected in Freud’s solution to the puzzle of hysteria? The quoted passage is bookended by statements of two, contrasting “methods.” One method belongs to Charcot, who “did not follow this path towards an explanation of hysteria” (20), but instead, Freud continues, “treated hysteria as just another topic in neuropathology” (20), with its tools of description, classification, and through these the identification of “uniformities” and “laws” — thus providing the eventual basis for diagnosis. But these last do not seem to be the methodological “tools” either of the “quite unbiassed observer” or of Freud (whose avatar, of course, this “observer” unquestionably is). What, then, is this observer’s “path toward an explanation of hysteria”?

As a first approximation, we might say that the approach indicated is “psychological” rather than “nosological.” Later, Freud himself will express one basic doctrinal disagreement with Charcot in these terms: “But the exclusively nosographical approach adopted at the School of the Salpêtrière was not suitable for a purely psychological subject” (22). In that case, however, we must inquire: what is the meaning of this distinction, at least in the context of the passage I’ve extensively quoted? Simply put: in what respect or respects does Freud’s unbiassed observer manifest a “psychological” approach to the object — the phenomenon of hysteria — either instead of, or in addition to, the “nosological”?

I will suggest two possible differentia to the psychological method — on the evidence, in any case, of the observer’s conduct in the passage. On the one hand, and most obviously, one’s attention is narrowed to a range of phenomena that are themselves psychological: in the first instance, to a person’s thoughts, beliefs, desires, and feelings, and then, beyond these, to the person’s outward behavior inasmuch as it expresses — or seems to express — those “inner” mental contents. Whereas Charcot’s nosology pertained broadly — notwithstanding his experiments in hypnosis — to the “outer,” especially the organic and anatomical, the example Freud considers is inseparable from the “inner” and its seeming manifestations. So the unbiassed observer who approaches the object “psychologically” does not attend to all outer phenomena indiscriminately (say, to physiological deterioration), but specifically to the sort that is redolent of the “mental” — in Freud’s illustration, to “signs of a painful affect — weeping, screaming and raging” that evince “a mental process…going on in him.”

On the other hand, and closely related to the puzzle of hysteria, the psychological method seems in the nature of things to involve a form of inferential, “depth” analysis that is both unnecessary and inappropriate in the application of nosology. Not only, that is, does the psychological method presuppose a specifically psychological object — thoughts, feelings, and the like. It also presupposes a form of analysis, interpretation, and reflection that are commensurable with that object. In comparison, Charcot’s nosology begins to resemble a “zoological” program: description and classification suffice, since there is no “inner” to which he need infer. The unbiassed observer’s approach to hysteria rests on the intuition of a distinctively psychological puzzle: the perceived discrepancy between (a) the hysteric’s behavior, and (b) the hysteric’s conscious mental state, which does not seem compatible with that behavior. Our registration of this discrepancy —  by definition unnoticed in nosology —forces an “inductive” movement: if otherwise intelligible behavior, such as weeping, does not express the hysteric’s conscious mental state, then it must express a mental state — “mental process,” “impression,” “psychical process,” “recollections” — that is unconscious, but nonetheless gives rise to the observed behavior.