Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Charcot, Jean Martin (1825-1893)

Jean Martin Charcot was born in Paris in 1825, the son of a coach builder, and died of a heart attack near Lake Settons (Nièvre) on August 16, 1893. He was a physician with the Hôpitaux de Paris, a professor of clinical medicine for nervous disorders, and a member of the Académie de Médicine.

He was appointed a physician with the Hôpitaux de Paris in 1856, associate professor of medicine in 1860, senior physician at the Salpêtrière in 1862, professor of pathological anatomy in the School of Medicine at the University of Paris in 1872 (succeeding Alfred Vulpian), and in 1882 was appointed to the first chair of neurology, a position created for him at the request of Léon Gambetta, as professor of diseases of the nervous system. He was made a member of the Académie de Médicine in 1873 and the Académie des Sciences in 1883,

Charcot had an impressive career and received numerous academic honors, but the accuracy of his theories on hysteria, which he began working on in 1865 after the "department of epilepsy" was placed under his supervision, had begun to be seriously questioned at the time of his death. The work of his student, the neurologist Joseph Babinski; the rise of Pierre Janet's dynamic psychology; and especially the success of psychoanalysis all contributed to bringing down a theoretical structure that had nurtured these developments at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Charcot was an attentive observer, which helped establish methods of neurological description and classification still in use (Charcot's disease, Charcot-Bouchard aneurysm, and so on), and possessed an almost magical talent as a speaker. He attracted a diverse group of personalities to his presentations: his public "Leçons Cliniques," held on Wednesdays, and his "Grandes Leçons," held on Fridays. His patients, it was learned after his death, had to some extent been prompted to exhibit to the audience the typical "hysterical crises" that the Master expected of them. He was particularly interested in paralysis, anesthesia, and other symptoms considered to be "hysterical," and attempted to demonstrate their "functional"—rather than anatomical—origin, a belief that contradicted a number of other practitioners, who were proponents of the surgical removal of their patients' ovaries.

He succeeded in isolating a clinical entity he referred to as the "grande hystérie" or "hystero-epilepsy." He described a crisis, or "attack," as occurring in four successive phases: the epileptiform phase, clonic spasms, emotional "acting out," and terminal delirium. In addition to these attacks patients exhibited "stigmata" (narrowing of the visual field, anesthesia)—conditions that could only exist if there were some form of "diathesis," that is, a predisposition to hereditary degeneration.

To demonstrate his ideas, Charcot publicly performed hypnosis to provoke or eliminate such symptoms, which proved they were not connected to organic lesions, unlike true neurological disorders. This was a step toward a "psychological" conception of the origin of hysterical symptoms, but Charcot wrote in 1887, "What I call psychology is the rational physiology of the cerebral cortex." He gave encouragement to the new field with the creation, in 1890, of the Laboratory of Psychology at the hospital, with Pierre Janet as its head. He supported Janet in his work on his dissertation, "L'État mental des hystériques" (The Mental State of Hysterics; 1893), and ensured publication of the work of Sigmund Freud in French medical reviews.

Freud's work with Charcot at the Salpêtrière contributed greatly to Freud's later work and the birth of psychoanalysis. Arriving in Paris on October 13, 1885, with the help of a grant from the School of Medicine of the University of Vienna to study anatomic pathology, he was introduced to hysteria and its "psychological" etiology, which had a decisive influence on his decision to treat patients privately, which he did when he returned to Vienna in the spring of 1886.

A month after his arrival in Paris, on November 24, 1885, he wrote to his fiancée, "Charcot, who is one of the greatest of physicians and a man whose common sense borders on genius, is simply wrecking all my aims and opinions. I sometimes come out of his lectures as from out of Nôtre Dame, with an entirely new idea about perfection. . . . Whether the seed will ever bear fruit, I don't know; but what I do know is that no other human being has ever affected me in the same way." Before he left Paris at the end of February 1886, Freud obtained Charcot's approval to translate his Leçons cliniques into German. He took with him a number of expressions that proved useful to him later on: "theory is good, but that doesn't prevent its existence," "in those cases, it's always genital," "the wonderful indifference of hysterics," "the refusal of the sexual is enormous, like a house."

Freud and Charcot maintained their relationship through correspondence, even though the personal comments Freud added to the Poliklinische Vorträge (1892-1894a), his translations of the Leçons du mardi, left a somewhat bittersweet residue (Mijolla). Although Charcot was not interested in the cathartic method Freud had spoken to him about, Freud left the hospital with a draft for an article on hysterical paralysis that took him seven years to complete, but when published in French in the Archives de neurologie (1893c), represented the first "psychoanalytic" approach to the phenomenon. Freud named his first son Jean Martin, and throughout his life kept a reproduction of André Brouillet's painting Une leçon cliniqueà la Salpêtrière.

In his homage to Charcot at the time of his death, Freud confirmed his rejection of Charcot's theories but at the same time expressed his gratitude: "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" (1893e). In February 1924, at the request of the review Le Disque vert, he wrote, "Of the many lessons lavished upon me in the past (1885-6) by the great Charcot at the Salpêtrière, two left me with a deep impression: that one should never tire of considering the same phenomena again and again (or of submitting to their effects), and that one should not mind meeting with contradiction on every side provided one has worked sincerely" (1924a).

ALAIN DE MIJOLLA

See also: Bernheim, Hippolyte; Cäcilie M., case of;