The fundamental element of the mind is the image.Footnote 1
Alfred Binet (1886)Jacques Inaudi was not the sort of patient whom the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot usually examined at the Salpêtrière, the enormous Parisian hospital for indigent women where he ran his world-renowned clinic for diseases of the nervous system. After all, the twenty-four-year old Inaudi, a once illiterate shepherd boy from the Italian Piedmont, was not sick; he was a calculateur, capable of performing lengthy and complicated calculations in his head with remarkable speed and accuracy. Without using his fingers or other markers, Inaudi could execute more than sixty successive mathematical operations and accurately recite sequences of thirty numbers in reverse order after hearing them read but once. In 1892, the French Academy of Sciences invited him to demonstrate his abilities before its medical section, of which Charcot was a member. Impressed by Inaudi's performance, the august body authorized a committee, including Charcot, to investigate further.Footnote 2
The case of Jacques Inaudi piqued the curiosity of the Paris medical elite, though not because the young man's mathematical skills were unique or unprecedented. Indeed, a study published the previous year in the American Journal of Psychology had recounted the calculating wizardry of several dozen boys and young men dating back centuries, several of whom exhibited capabilities that seemed to exceed those of Inaudi.Footnote 3 What drew Charcot and his colleagues to Inaudi's case was precisely the fact that the calculating prodigy did not appear to have any unusual mathematical ability. As the eminent physician and anthropologist Paul Broca had established twelve years earlier, it was Inaudi's remarkable memory, not his mathematical prowess, that allowed him to perform the complicated calculations in his head.Footnote 4 For Charcot, whose own research had over the past decade centered increasingly on the intersection of neurology and psychology, the Inaudi case sparked questions about the source and nature of the shepherd's extraordinary memory. Was there something different about the physical structure of his brain? Was there a specific faculty for the memory of numbers that was particularly well developed in individuals like Inaudi? How did the man mentally store, recall, and manipulate such long number strings? What form did those numbers take in his mind?
In the same year that he examined Inaudi, Charcot published a short essay called “La foi qui guérit” (Faith Healing). Drawing upon the example of miraculous cures that had occurred at the famed grotto and spring at Lourdes, he argued that the mystery of so-called faith healing could be explained as a form of self-hypnosis. Holding to his long-standing conviction that only hysterics were susceptible to hypnosis, Charcot maintained that under particular circumstances, people with a range of hysterically induced physical symptoms could heal themselves through “auto-suggestion” or “auto-hypnosis.” In these cases, a patient's own mind, influenced by deep religious beliefs, would generate the mental images needed to vanquish symptoms that had themselves been hysterically induced. A visit to Lourdes could thus have the same impact on a hysterical patient as could therapeutic sessions with a physician trained in hypnotic techniques.Footnote 5
Charcot's concurrent interests in Inaudi's talents and the faith-healing phenomenon were not accidental. At the center of both lay the puzzle of how the brain generated, processed, stored, and employed internal images in the subject's mental engagement with the external world. For calculateurs like Inaudi, the hypothesized internal images were produced by sensory perceptions (the calculation problems read out loud to him) and stored as auditory images in his memory. The man exhibited an extraordinary ability both to recall those images and to manipulate them. The miracles at Lourdes were also a product of mental images, but in those instances the images were not brought about by external sensory stimuli. Instead, the miraculeuses generated mental images internally from what Charcot called the brain's “center of ideation.” Those images acted powerfully on the senses, thereby altering physical symptoms—pain vanished, a paralyzed limb became functional once again, blindness gave way to sight. The brain unconsciously created mental images which produced the sensory perceptions that shaped the subject's conscious experience. In Inaudi's case, mental images formed from external stimuli (hearing an arithmetic problem read out loud) were stored as memory images which, in turn, formed the basis of his rational calculations. In the case of the Lourdes miraculeuses, the pathological mind of the hysteric appeared to generate the mental images that were likewise stored as memories, albeit false ones. Charcot and many of his colleagues believed that in the latter instances, the faulty memory images could be altered or even removed by suggestion, either externally through hypnosis, or internally through auto-suggestion.
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This article explores the central role played by internal or mental images in late nineteenth-century understandings of mental function. It argues that the assumed existence of internal images allowed scientists and clinicians of the time to integrate experimental psychological work on mental pathologies such as memory dysfunction, hysteria, hypnosis, and hallucination into contemporary research on brain physiology. In particular, the internal image—a general term that embraced concepts such as “memory images,” “sensory images,” and multifaceted “language images”—linked older ideas about how memory, perception, and consciousness worked with new research on cerebral localization that dominated studies of the brain throughout Europe and the United States. For practitioners of the new physiological (also called experimental) psychology—a group that included Charcot and his French colleagues Alfred Binet, Théodule Ribot, and Pierre Janet, as well as Wilhelm Wundt in Germany and William James in the US, among others—internal images offered a physiological mechanism for explaining how sensory perceptions are transformed into memories, how memories create perceptions of the self, how the brain generates ideas, and how all these processes can go awry. In short, the internal image was the theoretical bridge between physiology and psychology.
Historians writing about the emergence of empirically oriented experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century tend to focus on the success or failure of efforts to break away from the field's roots in philosophy and on the uneasy relationship between psychology and physiology. Internal images, in these accounts, play a role in marking the intellectual transformation of the field. John I. Brooks III, for example, argues that physiological psychology remained close to philosophy despite its claims to the contrary, and that the “eclectic spiritualism” that dominated French academic philosophy of the time actually “created a philosophical universe of discourse that included and encouraged an empirical approach to human phenomena.” The influence of philosophy, he maintains, can be seen even in the work of some of the most empirically minded of the new practitioners of psychology.Footnote 6 Jacqueline Carroy and Régine Plas, by contrast, see the development of psychology as a discipline as lying not only in its changing relationship with philosophy but also in the separation of psychology from physiology. Most experimental psychologists subordinated psychology to physiology, seeking physiological explanations for psychological phenomena. Carroy and Plas maintain that it was only with the work of Charcot's last doctoral student, Pierre Janet, that psychology definitively shifted away from physiology.Footnote 7
Historians have acknowledged, to a degree, the importance of internal images in this formative period in the development of both psychology and neurophysiology. Carroy and Plas stress the centrality of images in philosopher/psychologist Hippolyte Taine's understanding of consciousness. In his influential 1870 work De l'intelligence, Taine described consciousness as “an ever-unstable balance of power among images,” and any claims to a coherent self were “an invention of metaphysicians and an illusion.Footnote 8 They note that the physiological psychologist Alfred Binet's 1886 statement that “the fundamental element of the mind is the image” was in many ways a rearticulation of Taine's famous assertion that “the mind is a polypary of images.”Footnote 9 Both Taine and Binet emphasized the experimental basis of their belief in the primacy of internal images in mental function, thus explicitly distancing their work from metaphysics and philosophy. Brooks sees evidence of the continuing influence of philosophy even in Pierre Janet's experimentally grounded research on mental images. Janet's insistence “that there were as many different types of images as there were senses” was, for Brooks, an outgrowth of his “interpretation of monism,” in which the domain of consciousness and ideas included the physiological.Footnote 10 Moreover, Brooks points out, while Janet regarded internal images as fundamental to mental processes, he did not think that they alone could explain higher intellectual powers like judgment.Footnote 11
This article focuses less on the role that the concept of internal images played in establishing the intellectual roots or disciplinary parameters of psychology and more on its centrality to understandings of mental function and pathology during a period of both dramatic growth in scientific experimentation in brain physiology and popular fascination with seemingly inexplicable mental feats. Advances in research on the brain—particularly cerebral localization—alongside medical and popular fascination with such phenomena as hypnotic trances, hysterical paralysis, religious visions and hallucinations, and extraordinary displays of memory, prompted a drive to revisit the centuries-old problem posed by Cartesian dualism, of how the immaterial mind interacts with the material world.Footnote 12 Many psychologists and neurologists were drawn to cases of unusual mental abilities and aberrant behaviors in their exploration of how the newly accessible (if still mysterious) material brain affected cognitive processes. Were ideas, perceptions, and memories the products of as yet elusive functions of the brain that would, ultimately, be explained in electrical or chemical terms? Or were such mental activities ultimately irreducible to material forces? Was there an unidentified intervening process that translated sensory information into perceptions and then ideas? And if so, where in the brain did that process occur? The mental image—at once tangible and abstract—provided, in essence, a mechanism for articulating this process.
Internal images also served as a potentially useful vehicle for conceptualizing newly pressing questions about the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious that lay at the very center of the controversial work on hysteria and hypnosis produced at the Salpêtrière. Charcot and his colleagues, though deeply attached to positivist views of an ever more rational, modernizing society, could not ignore the power of the unconscious not only among such supposedly inherently irrational populations as the religiously devout, the mentally ill, and children, but also among those with apparently fully rational mental function. Studies of hypnotized subjects had exposed in dramatic—often sensational—fashion the role of the suggestible unconscious mind in influencing conscious actions, beliefs, and behaviors. Numerous experiments appeared to show definitively that mental images formed unconsciously could shape conscious, rational behavior. The existence of mental images could thus explain the interface between unconscious and conscious thought.
Internal Images in the History of Memory
Inasmuch as internal images helped nineteenth-century scientists conceptualize the connection between the psychological mind and the physical body and between consciousness and the unconscious, the roots of interest in such images lay in centuries-old efforts to understand how memory functioned. Although Plato understood memory fundamentally as “the occasion of the mind's turning away from the world of sense to the inner world of innate and universal ideas,” he described the interior process of memory formation as akin to inscriptions made on a wax tablet.Footnote 13 It was Aristotle who made the connection between sensory signals and mental images, defining memory as “a sort of picture, a[n] … imprint, as it were, of the sense-image.”Footnote 14 As the psychologist Kurt Danziger has noted, the ancient conceptualization of memory as inscription gave rise to the “spatialization of memory,” the idea that memories are images that are stored and that take up space in the mind. The act of remembering, then, became “a kind of internal seeing,” or, more specifically, “remembering meant ‘reading’ the memory image, the ‘copy,’ left behind by a previous perception.”Footnote 15
The belief that memory was a form of internal inscription of external stimuli that might be “read” at a later time still resonated centuries later with the Enlightenment turn toward empiricism. Because all human knowledge derived from sensory information, memory, defined as the capacity to store and recall that information, made up the core of knowledge. Locke extended the reach of memory to constitute the very essence of human self-identity. Defining consciousness as the act by which the mind perceives itself perceiving sensory information, Locke noted that the “personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness,—whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does the present.”Footnote 16 This connection between memory and the self was further developed in the widely influential theory of associationism, first proposed by the English philosopher and psychologist David Hartley in the mid-eighteenth century, that stressed the importance of links among stored mental images.Footnote 17 External stimuli evoked not single mental images, but a series of associated images. It was the particular connections between mental images stored in each individual's mind that constituted the self.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, rapid advances in knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the brain, as well as the relatively recent establishment of psychology as a field of experimental scientific investigation, fueled a surge of new research into both the biological and psychological dimensions of memory.Footnote 18 While some researchers updated the Aristotelian concept of mental “imprints” with analogies between memory and the photographic effect of sunlight on a reactive sheet of paper, many leading experimental psychologists focused on identifying the precise physiological mechanisms of memory formation, retention, and recall. The psychologist Théodule Ribot, influential editor of the Revue philosophique, wrote extensively about the centrality of “a specific modification imprinted on the nervous elements,” while his British counterpart Henry Maudsley posited that the neurological “residues,” “traces,” and “vestiges” of past physical movements accounted for the increasing precision of “automatic” motions. Ribot maintained in an 1880 article that although the exact nature of this process of permanent alteration remained mysterious, he had no doubt that such changes explained all forms of sensory memory. Physiological modifications in the nervous system created by sensations, he concluded, formed the static foundation of memory, which in turn would be associated with other alterations. “What is important,” he stressed, is to understand that “the basis of memory is not only the modification imprinted on each element [of the nervous system] but the manner by which several elements group themselves to form a complexus.”Footnote 19 Thus, he elaborated, “a rich, well-furnished memory is not a collection of imprints, but an assemblage of dynamic associations that are very stable and very easily aroused.”Footnote 20 Ribot warned that describing a memory as an imprint or image implied that it was a unified “thing,” when in fact every “perception, idea, image” that played a part in memory was itself “a multiplicity” of “dynamic associations.”Footnote 21
But other physiological psychologists working in the last decades of the nineteenth century embraced the role of images in memory more explicitly, even as they endorsed Ribot's emphasis on association. Alfred Binet, who worked with Charcot at the Salpêtrière, spoke for many French researchers when he wrote in 1886 that “it is the images that constitute, along with sensations, the materials of all our intellectual operations; memory, reason, imagination are acts that consist of grouping or coordinating images, of grasping the existing relationships, and grouping them in new relationships.”Footnote 22 William James, who attended the Congrès international de la psychologie physiologique that brought many of the world's most prominent experimental psychologists to Paris in 1889,Footnote 23 summarized the prevailing understanding of memory as the simultaneous “revival in the mind of an image or copy of the original event” and the awareness of that image as occurring not just “in the past” but “in my past.” Every memory, he maintained, must be “owned as part of my experience.”Footnote 24
In this, Ribot concurred and, despite his fear that the concept of mental images obscured the dynamic quality of memory, invoked such images to convey the role of memory in constructing the self. It was the capacity of some mental images “to revive those states that attach them to the present and thanks to which we perceive that they are part of a series … that ends in the present” that allowed for the location of a memory in an individual's personal past.Footnote 25 Ribot stressed that personal memories were not accurate records of the past “as it really happened,” but rather “resemble a painting made from long-distance perspective” whose exactitude is an illusion, indeed whose apparent accuracy depends on techniques that fool the eye.Footnote 26 Each individual creates his or her own “painting” which is nothing less than the psychological self.
The Psychological Physiology of Hysteria and Hypnosis
The psychological importance of the relationship among images, memory, and the self placed the image at the center of discussions of mental pathology. The physiologist Charles Richet, an active participant in Charcot's hypnosis experiments on hysterical patients, echoed Locke and Hartley in pointing out the critical role of stored images in psychological illness. “Our consciousness is thus always in the presence of a certain limited number of old images, always approximately the same ones,” Richet wrote in 1886, “and these images, existing in relationship to the same self, make the individual personality, a personality that is stabilized by the commonality of the images.”Footnote 27 Without such stable, linked internal images, our past sensations and experiences are disconnected from our present state of being and the sense of a self that exists coherently over time is lost. “[C]onsciousness assumes memory,” he noted. “The idea of the present self, if it is not tied directly to the memory of the idea of the self from a minute ago, has as it were no psychological reality … Without memory, there is no consciousness.”Footnote 28 Defects of memory thus entailed potentially profound psychological disturbances.
Pierre Janet explicitly linked cases of hysteria to the critical role of memory in forging the self. Almost all the characteristics of the hysterical patient, he maintained in an 1892 lecture on hysterical amnesia, could be tied to memory problems. Janet agreed with Richet that memories constituted the core of “the vast and preexisting notion of the personality,” which he regarded as essential to a person's ability to consciously perceive external stimuli.Footnote 29 Unless sensory perceptions were attached to the existing personality (a complex process which Janet termed “personal perception”), they would be lost to the conscious mind. Here, then, was an explanation for the common symptoms of anesthesia, numbness, or paralysis associated with hysteria. It was not that these patients could not feel, but they could not perceive that they felt.
For Janet, the ancient idea of memory as stored images served as a useful way of understanding how the mind preserved the “primitive psychological phenomena” that resulted from sensations. But the storage and recall of past sensations in the form of images was not sufficient for a healthy memory. Janet did not believe that amnesia, which he described as “one of the cardinal symptoms” of hysteria, stemmed from a defect in the formation of images:
It is not enough for us to be conscious of a memory for a particular image to be reproduced by the automatic play of the association of ideas, it is necessary that the personal perception grabs hold of the image and attaches it to other memories, to sensations clear or confused, exterior or interior, the sum total of which constitutes our personality.Footnote 30
In other words, the memory image must be fully integrated into the cohesive web of existing images that constitute the individual personality. Without such integration, hysteria could take hold.
Both Charcot and Janet maintained that because healthy image integration took place in the conscious mind, the recovery of “lost” images offered a path to the unconscious mind and a potential cure for amnesia. For example, in the case of Mme D, a patient diagnosed with trauma-induced hysterical amnesia in 1891, Charcot insisted that there was no loss of images per se. What had vanished was the woman's capacity to attach the images to her conscious self. Experiments with hypnosis had revealed that the images had lodged themselves in her unconscious. Dramatic experiences that the woman could not recall—being bitten by a rabid dog, undergoing weeks of painful treatment at the Pasteur Institute—reemerged under hypnosis. “You see that all the memories, apparently forgotten, are inscribed in the unconscious personality,”Footnote 31 Charcot observed. The unconscious personality constituted, in effect, “a second self, but a latent self, unconscious, that contrasts strangely with the official self that you recognize as experiencing profound amnesia.”Footnote 32 Charcot was confident that through post-hypnotic suggestion, “the conscious self will little by little assimilate the memories of the unconscious self” and the supposedly lost memories would be restored.Footnote 33
Amnesia of the sort experienced by Mme D was but one form of the disorder of internal images that lay at the root of hysteria, which Charcot understood more broadly as a pathology of memory.Footnote 34 Hysteria, he postulated well before Freud's influential work on repression and hysteria, was often the result of stored memories of a traumatic experience. For men, that event was frequently a harrowing physical experience, whereas for women, the precipitating incident was more likely to be an emotional shock.Footnote 35 As Michael Roth has observed, “The memory of some occurrence, and not the original experience itself, was seen as the pathogenic factor, and often at the center of the constellation of hysterical symptoms was an event that disrupted subsequent memory.”Footnote 36 In making the case for the critical role of memory in hysteria, Charcot invoked the mid-century work of Pierre Briquet, a clinician at the Charité hospital in Paris. “Hysterical delirium,” Briquet noted, “is simply a reminiscence of thoughts that occupied the patients outside the state of [hysterical] attack.”Footnote 37 Almost forty years later, Pierre Janet stated bluntly, “The apparent indifference of [hysteria] patients, their inconstancy, their capriciousness, and even … their astonishing suggestibility, depend on these troubles with their memory.”Footnote 38 The memories in question, Charcot believed, did not even have to refer to an actual event. Foreshadowing his writing on Lourdes, Charcot argued that in many cases the catalyzing “event” was an invention of the imagination—an occurrence created by the brain—but stored in the memory as real.Footnote 39
The proposition that mental images played a significant role in explaining hysteria suggested that such images served as a critical link between the brain's psychological and physiological functions. The relationship between those functions lay at the root of lively debates over the nature of hysteria and hypnosis that had brought fame—and a degree of infamy—to Charcot's clinical practice. Although the doctor conceded in the late 1880s that hysteria was “more concerned with psychology than physiology,”Footnote 40 he insisted that psychology was, for the most part, “but the physiology of the superior or noblest parts of the brain.”Footnote 41 Echoing the approach of physiologically oriented psychologists of the early nineteenth century such as Broussais, Cabanis, and Gall, he regarded mental illness as fundamentally a product of an as yet elusive brain malfunction.Footnote 42 Yet in the last decade and a half of his life, Charcot became increasingly interested in the role that psychology played in the production of physiological pathologies. Although recognizing that the precise nature of the relationship between mental function and the physical symptoms that characterized pathologies like hysteria remained a mystery, he hoped that experimental psychology could provide a path to understanding.
In this, he was deeply influenced by the pioneering work of the British psychologist Daniel Hack Tuke, whose 1872 volume Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease was translated into French in 1886 (though Charcot, with his strong command of English, could well have read it in the original).Footnote 43 Hack Tuke stressed the power of “ideation” to affect the senses and thereby create real physical symptoms.Footnote 44 Citing the work of the Scottish surgeon James Braid, who was credited with inventing the term “hypnotism” in the 1840s, Hack Tuke posited that “ideation immediately acts upon sensation, as sensation acts upon ideation.”Footnote 45 The process of ideation, he maintained, had two sources: external—that is, from sensory impressions—and internal, from the imagination, the latter of which he defined as “the faculty by which we form an idea or image which is not a copy of a previous [sensory] impression.”Footnote 46 Like sensations, such internally produced ideation could be intensified by “Attention, Desire, Faith, etc.,” and thereby have an “influence on the sensorium, as powerful as anything in the outer world, which impresses the senses; and may be really more so, because … there is no disturbing element to distract the attention.”Footnote 47 In other words, because internally produced mental images were not modified by external signals, they could operate unimpeded on the senses.
It was precisely such internally produced images that lay at the root of hysteria. By the time he published “La foi qui guérit” in 1892, Charcot had been working on the connection between mental images and the physical manifestations of hysteria for the better part of a decade. In an 1885 lesson on hysterical paralysis, he observed that “we know that the production of an image” or “mental representation, however basic or rudimentary, of the movement to be executed, is an indispensable precondition for the voluntary accomplishment of [an] action.” Thus, he reasoned, the paralysis experienced by the two patients he featured probably arose because an idée fixe of muscular weakness blocked the normal formation of an image of motion. Having already failed to remove this idée fixe by means of hypnosis, Charcot prescribed a set of “dynamometric exercises” along with massages and other manipulations of the paralyzed limb to “revive motor representation in the center, a prerequisite for … all voluntary movement.” The results were striking. In a matter of days, the exercises and other manipulations worked unconsciously to re-create the “motor images” necessary for action.Footnote 48
Charcot elaborated on the relationship between ideas and physical motion in one of his famed Tuesday Lessons from 1888. Citing the work of the British “modern psychologists” Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain, he maintained that “the idea of the movement of a limb is already the movement of that limb in the process of occurring.” The same principle, he argued, could be applied to instances of paralysis where the idea of immobility takes hold. Using the example of a hypnotized patient who, by virtue of her somnambulic state, lacked the ability to resist any “idea introduced into the mind of the subject,” Charcot urged his audience to consider that “the idea of the powerlessness of a limb determines in reality the paralysis of that limb.”Footnote 49
He insisted, however, that physical manifestations of ideas were not purely psychological in nature. “It is the motor centers which are attacked,” he noted in an ensuing Tuesday Lesson. Hysterical or hypnotically induced paralysis arose from “a purely dynamic cortical lesion” that was itself the product of an idea, whether introduced by an external agent (a hypnotizer) or by the hysterical patient's own mind.Footnote 50 Such dynamic lesions affected physical sensations but not in ways that conventional understandings of anatomy and physiology could explain. In hysterical paralysis, just as in organically induced paralysis, the motor centers of the brain are attacked. But whereas in the latter the brain is affected according to anatomical laws, in the former it is attacked according to psychological laws. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of hysterical paralysis and anaesthesia, he remarked, is that cases usually conformed to popular concepts of anatomy rather than to scientific reality. For example, a victim of hysterical paralysis or hysterical anaesthesia might complain that she could not feel or move either of her hands even though her arms retained feeling and mobility, an occurrence that did not correspond to the actual anatomy of the nervous system but rather to the patient's crude understanding of the body.Footnote 51 In instances like this, the patient's ideas of how her body worked governed her sensory perception of her hands.
Charcot and his Salpêtrière colleagues regarded hypnosis as a mechanism for gaining access to the traumatic mental images that precipitated the hysterical condition—whether rooted in an actual or an imagined event—and, potentially, to “correct” them. For Charcot's students Georges Guinon and Sophie Woltke, hypnosis enabled the doctor–hypnotist to “grasp” “the true nature of the scene that is painted in the brain of the patient.” This internal painting was the creation not of the facilitating hypnotist, but of the patient who is “always controlled by a latent memory or a sleep- or dream-derived conception.”Footnote 52 The hysterical patient, whether hypnotized or not, reacted to sensory stimuli “according to his memories, which do not vary … because they form a part of the psychic substrate of his being.Footnote 53 Charcot and his colleagues saw the potential of a cure for hysteria in “hypnotism's capacity to erase one's personal memories and substitute for them another set of images, another self.”Footnote 54 The internal images—equated here with foundational memories—constituted an individual's sense of self and determined his or her responses to external events: change the images, change the memory, change the patient's interactions with the external world.
Hypnosis thus provided a unique vehicle for exploring the complicated relationship between the psychological and neurological functions of the nervous systems. In a series of experiments conducted in 1885, Charcot used hypnosis to induce in two hysteria patients the very same symptoms of paralysis exhibited by two accident victims who had no identifiable organic neurological lesions. He concluded that hypnosis and psychic shock had similar effects on the nervous system, effectively overwhelming the conscious self and thereby allowing a single, powerful mental image to take root and manifest itself in the sensory form of physical paralysis. Unlike hypnotized subjects who were influenced by external suggestions provided by an experimenter, traumatized patients experienced auto-suggestion, the same mechanism that Charcot would invoke seven years later to explain the miracle cures at Lourdes.Footnote 55
In conceding that ideas and emotions could produce neurological symptoms, Charcot backed away from his earlier categorical dismissal of ecstatic or possessed religious figures as the products of diseased minds deserving of pity and medical treatment and toward a more subtle inquiry into the relationship between mind and body. His incipient integration of psychology into his clinical study of hysteria moved him further from the pathologizing language of many of his physician colleagues and closer to Hack Tuke's observation that it “would be much more difficult to believe in the credulity of the saints and mystics, if we did not see ample physiological reasons for believing that the senses were really acted upon by their intense thought on a particular spiritual subject.”Footnote 56 Charcot grew increasingly convinced that powerful internal images, amplified by “intense thought,” could produce sensory experiences as real as those induced by external sensory stimulation.
Cerebral Localization and the Internal Images of Specialized Memory
To physiologically minded psychologists, the ostensible power of such internal images to affect the senses raised the question of where in the brain such images resided. The new work on brain localization, to which Charcot was an early contributor, offered some intriguing possibilities.Footnote 57 Spearheaded by the pioneering insights of neurologists David Ferrier (Scotland), Eduard Hitzig (Germany), and John Hughlings Jackson (England), cerebral localization research sought to demonstrate that sensory perception and the control of mental and physical functions occurred in precisely defined regions of the cerebral cortex. Most famously, Paul Broca's experimental work on speech localization in the 1850s and 1860s, and Carl Wernicke's elaboration on that research two decades later, convinced many that the brain contained numerous centers dedicated to the processing of sensory stimuli of different types.Footnote 58 “The residues of our sensations, long considered entities floating in the dark, are localized,” Ribot noted in his introductory remarks at the 1889 Congrès international de la psychologie.Footnote 59
In parallel fashion, most researchers at the time held that memories of different kinds were stored at different sites in the brain. This concept of multiple specialized memories originated in the first decades of the century with the work of Franz Josef Gall, the Austrian-turned-French phrenologist, who posited a theory of specialized “memory organs.” “There cannot be a single, specific organ for memory,” he contended in 1819. “The memory of music has its own organ in the musical organ [of the brain]; the memory for numbers in the calculating organ … no organ contains all the different types of memory.”Footnote 60 While Gall's concept of specialized memory was widely disputed at the time, empirical investigations decades later seemed to bear out the general principle. The American psychologist W. H. Burnham, for example, observed that “instead of one seat of memory, the different areas of the brain not only have their special office to perform in governing the organs of the body, but they are also the seat of the respective memories of those organs … Our various memories are scattered over the brain.” In essence, “we have not memory, but memories.”Footnote 61 Ribot noted in his widely read Maladies de la mémoire (1881) that “the history of psychology shows that it is too often forgotten that this general term [memory] … is of value only when applied to particular cases, and that memory may be resolved into memories, just as the life of an organism may be resolved into the lives of the organs, the tissues, the anatomical elements, which compose it.”Footnote 62 Charcot likewise described memory as a “complexus” or “ensemble” made up of “mutually independent,” “special,” or “local memories.”Footnote 63
This concept of memory as a “complexus” led physiological psychologists of the closing decades of the century to postulate that higher-order mental faculties such as language drew upon numerous sites of memory in the brain. Charcot, like many of his colleagues, was fascinated by the phenomenon of speech loss, or aphasia.Footnote 64 In an effort to explain why aphasia took so many different forms (including the inability to articulate, read, write, or understand words), he and others argued that the memory of hearing a word was stored in a different—though probably proximate—region of the cerebral cortex, distinct from the area dedicated to the memory of speaking the word or to seeing the written word, and different still from the site devoted to the motor memory of physically writing or pronouncing the word. Charcot proposed the division of people into four groups according to the form of memory and corresponding mental image that dominated in the individual: auditifs, visuels, moteurs, and those with no particular dominance.Footnote 65 People with a dominant visual memory “see their thoughts … all the other images that constitute the idea are hidden behind this visual image,” while auditifs like Inaudi hear their thoughts, and moteurs act out their thoughts.Footnote 66
In a majority of people, the various special memories worked together to maintain an equilibrium. But for some, one type of memory—most commonly visual—dominated over others. Charcot was particularly taken with the case of a Viennese businessman, a “Monsieur X” who, prior to the onset of partial amnesia, had evidently possessed an extraordinary visual memory which allowed him to recall in precise detail not just scenes and faces, but pages of text and columns of numbers as well. According to the patient's own account, the images visible to him internally “reproduced the form and color of things with as much clarity … and intensity, as reality itself.”Footnote 67 One day, however, the patient noticed that his “visual memory of shapes and colors had completely disappeared.” Places he had visited numerous times and which he had sketched from memory in minute detail he now failed to recognize at all. When asked to draw an archway, he produced a rudimentary sketch based on his knowledge of arch forms, but, he noted, “I do not see at all the way things are in reality.”Footnote 68 The man's capacity to recall visual images had vanished. “Suddenly this interior vision completely disappeared,” Monsieur X reported. “Even today, with the strongest effort, I cannot bring to mind [représenter intérieurement] the features of my children, of my wife, of whatever object I use daily … I completely lost my interior vision.”Footnote 69 The Viennese businessman's near total loss of internal visual images and simultaneous retention of all other forms of memory confirmed for Charcot that memory was not a unified faculty but rather a multifaceted brain function.
Inaudi's overly developed auditory memory for “figures and numbers” provided further evidence of the association of memory imbalance with pathology.Footnote 70 Like most instances of functional mental disease, Charcot maintained, Inaudi's extraordinary memory for auditory images stemmed from an inherited predisposition to mental illness. He insisted that human calculators were “marked in advance,” or congenitally predisposed, like those who suffered from “sexual inversion.” A genius for calculating, Charcot argued, was a form of “compulsion resulting from a hereditary disequilibrium.”Footnote 71 When investigators searched for a family history of mathematical aptitude in Inaudi's past, they were misguided. Instead, they should be on the lookout for signs of a “neuropathological heredity.” Inaudi's unusual calculating ability was not a gift or a talent; it was, like hysteria, a pathology of memory.Footnote 72 Charcot hoped that an investigation into the role of internal images in extreme cases of memory imbalance such as that of Inaudi would lead to a deeper understanding of mental illness more generally.
A critical step toward such understanding was elucidating the process by which those memory images were formed and the mechanism by which they were retrieved. Alfred Binet set out to accomplish just that in an elaborate investigation of men who could play chess blindfolded. In the resulting study, published in 1894, Binet purported to prove that mental image formation was not, as the philosopher Hippolyte Taine had argued two decades earlier, simply a matter of the mind replicating sensory information “as in a mirror.” It was a far more complex process in which individual mental proclivities, beginning with the basic distinction between visuels and auditifs, determined the form the images would take.Footnote 73 All the blindfolded players, Binet found, constructed an internal visual image of a chessboard and players; the specificity of the images, however, varied greatly. Some “saw” a particular chess set and could describe colors, shapes, textures, and artistic flourishes in detail. In many of these cases, though, the boards and pieces they described were not the ones they were using at that moment. Many played mentally using the chess set they were most familiar with, effectively constructing a new image from a combination of preexisting images (memories) and new information. Others envisioned a completely abstract chess set with no clear visual identifiers except the color of the pieces.
Binet's discovery that some blindfolded chess players, in their efforts to remember, created new internal images that were based on, but did not replicate, the external images paralleled his observations about the Greek calculator Pericles Diamondi, a contemporary of Inaudi. Unlike his Italian rival, Diamondi performed his mathematical feats by creating and manipulating visual rather than auditory images. Despite his heavy reliance on visual memory, his was not a photographic memory. The young man insisted that “every time he thinks of an object he sees it appear in the center of a complex figure that is always the same regardless of the object.”Footnote 74 Diamondi's brain apparently generated its own abstract images that were based on visual sensory information but were not exact replicas of those data. “The visual image differs from reality,” Binet concluded. It “differs as a portrait differs from a photograph, by the semi-voluntary erasure of irrelevant details; the best visual memory does not retain things as they appear to the eye, but exercises an intelligent choice that depends on the purpose that the evoked memory is meant to serve.”Footnote 75 Like Diamondi, the blindfolded chess players’ extraordinary talents depended not simply on their capacity to store and recall sensory stimuli, but on the ability of their minds to sort and distill them into images that yielded the information that their conscious mind demanded.Footnote 76
Hallucinations: Images and the Unconscious
The feats of “hypermnesiacs” such as human calculators or blindfolded chess players could thus not be explained by simply invoking a superior capacity for the storage and recall of sensory images. By 1892, Charcot was increasingly inclined to believe that Inaudi's abilities were not primarily feats of reason, a possibility he hinted at when he declared that his calculating skills were akin to mental illnesses like hysteria. Of particular interest was Inaudi's assertion that he often found in his dreams (when mental images floated free of conscious ordering) the solutions to mathematical problems that had stumped him during his waking hours. “He often dreams of figures, of numbers and of calculations, and sometimes thereby solves problems which he could not solve during the day; these are the only dreams that he retains, whereas his dreams about ordinary events in his life only leave a fleeting impression.”Footnote 77
Inaudi's ability to solve mathematical problems while asleep strongly suggested that the manipulation of mental images was not dependent on consciousness. Mental images, it seemed, could be accessed and manipulated in either the conscious or unconscious state. Charcot was probably not completely surprised by this realization. Five years earlier, Binet had demonstrated what he termed the “collaboration between the conscious and unconscious mind” in one of Charcot's patients. The woman in question, afflicted with hysterical anesthesia, claimed to feel nothing of the pinpricks that Binet would administer to her numb limb, yet when asked to think of a number, she would inevitably state the exact count of pinpricks. Moreover, when asked to envision a sheet of paper, she would remark on the tiny holes that appeared in the image when Binet pricked her skin. Somehow, Binet and Charcot concluded, images formed and stored unconsciously became material for conscious, rational thought.Footnote 78
This understanding of mental images as the link between the unconscious and conscious functioning of the mind was on full display in new research on aberrant images or hallucinations, a topic that attracted the attention of physiological psychologists as well those with an interest in spiritualism and manifestations of the occult. The phenomenon of hallucinations had long fascinated the French psychiatric profession as it seemed to offer a dramatic example of the mind's capacity to generate internal images on its own, without sensory input. Even more importantly, hallucinations revealed the extent to which such self-generated images affected sensory perception itself. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the pioneering alienist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol had posited that “the hallucinator gives a body and existence to images, to ideas, that the memory produces without the intervention of the senses.”Footnote 79 Hallucinations were essentially a projection of internal images into the external world.
In the late nineteenth century, psychological researchers, again informed by studies of cerebral localization, sought to understand exactly how the brain produced the false perceptions that led to hallucinations. The Italian psychiatrist Augusto Tamburini noted in an 1881 lesson excerpted in translation in the prestigious Revue scientifique de la France et de l’étranger that research by prominent scientists like Charcot, David Ferrier, and Theodor Meynert showed that there “must” be a place in the brain where sensory impressions are “deposited so that they can be transformed into sensations.”Footnote 80 He argued that just as a disturbance or lesion in the motor center of the cerebral cortex “produced disorganized and intense movements,” so too would an “excitation of the sensorial center produce pathological sensations” that constituted hallucinations. Such pathological sensations, he explained, consisted of “mnemonic images of received impressions that emerged from the centers where they were deposited and present themselves to the consciousness in a form that was either greater or less than reality, depending on the degree of excitation. When such images are evoked with their true character, we are dealing with a hallucination.”Footnote 81
Models such as Tamburini's offered a workable explanation for hallucinations caused by brain lesions but were less satisfactory in accounting for hallucinations that seemed to stem solely from “a deviation in the ideation process.”Footnote 82 Hysterics as well as others who suffered from mental illness provided potentially useful opportunities to study the subject since their characteristic susceptibility to the formation of mental images by suggestion made them particularly prone to hallucination. Charcot and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière conducted innumerable experiments in the 1880s on hysterical patients who, under hypnosis, could be made to see, hear, and taste all manner of false sensory experiences. Subjects would recoil in fear from an imaginary snake, wince in pain from an imaginary blow, lovingly stroke an imaginary cat, or sway to imaginary music. Charcot maintained that while the hallucinations of hysterics could be evoked and manipulated by a hypnotic operator, they were always independent of the will of the operator. They remained, he insisted, under the control of the patient, “who appropriates the perceived sense and transforms it … into a hallucination corresponding to his habits, his lifestyle, his memories, in a word, to his personality.”Footnote 83 The hypnotizer served only as a catalyst for the formation of hallucinations whose origins resided ultimately in the images already present in the patient's memory. Thus the miraculous healings that transpired at inspirational sites like Lourdes could be understood as the hallucinatory product of religious beliefs and images already present in the unconscious and conscious memory of the patients.
Such an understanding of hallucinations implied that the manifestation of interior images as external sensory phenomena did not necessarily signify mental illness.Footnote 84 By the middle of the nineteenth century, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other “mind doctors” had become increasingly fascinated by the occurrence of hallucinations in apparently healthy people. Alexandre Brierre de Boismont, in his influential mid-century investigation of hallucinations, stressed that hallucinations in the contemporary period were more frequently linked to insanity than they had been in the less rational eras of the past. But he nonetheless posited that “in many cases, hallucination is nothing extraordinary; it is almost a normal state consistent with reason.”Footnote 85 For example, he explained, “when a man has long resigned himself to profound meditation, he frequently finds the idea which has absorbed him clothed in a material form.” For such people, hallucination constituted “the material reproduction of an idea” and “the highest degree of tension of which the deep thinker is capable.”Footnote 86 Esquirol's intern Jules Baillarger held that visual hallucinations were, in fact, more common among the sane than among the insane.Footnote 87 Forty years later, Charles Richet observed that “between the mental image and the complete hallucination there is a whole series of gradual transitions, and the dividing line between a very strong mental image and a very vague hallucination is impossible to discern.” Even “men of irreproachable intelligence sometimes experience true hallucinations.”Footnote 88
The critical distinction between hallucinations of a pathological nature and those emanating from fundamentally sound minds, late nineteenth-century researchers agreed, lay not in the character of the image but in the speed with which the subject recognized the image as internally generated.Footnote 89 That recognition was not necessarily a conscious event. For Hippolyte Taine, the eminent psychologist, philosopher, historian, and occasional observer at Charcot's clinical sessions on hypnosis, the process by which interior images were recognized as such was one of subconscious comparison rather than conscious selection.Footnote 90 Much as two groups of muscles only work in opposing sets, so too could an interior image only be recognized as internal when confronted with a counterimage.Footnote 91 This recognition took the form of a “correction,” usually a “contradictory sensation” from the outside world or a memory that exposed the internally generated image as a false perception. Under certain circumstances, however, the interior image retained its hold on the conscious mind, resulting in hallucination.
But, Taine cautioned, this did not mean that hallucination only occurred among the mentally ill. To the contrary, he wrote in his widely read De l'intelligence of 1870, “solitude, silence, obscurity, and lack of attention” all involve the reduction of external stimuli and thus “facilitate or provoke hallucination” even among the mentally sound.Footnote 92 Many individuals experienced a hallucinatory state upon waking from a dream. For a brief period of time, the subject believes that the internal images appearing in the dream are real. Within a matter of seconds or minutes, however, he or she becomes aware of external sensations that contradict the interior images and the latter are revealed to the consciousness as internal. Similarly, hallucinations could also occur in the “reverie before sleep” when the semiconscious mind becomes increasingly less receptive to external sensations and thus the chances of a “corrective sensation” dispelling the illusion of the interior image diminish until they disappear altogether in sleep.Footnote 93 Without countervailing stimuli that reveal their interiority, the internal images “become intense, distinct, colorful, peaceful, and enduring.”Footnote 94 This explains why, Taine noted, the experience of dreaming or daydreaming (reverie) could be very pleasurable and why even the healthy mind often only reluctantly conceded its illusionary status.Footnote 95
Taine argued, in essence, that sanity rested precariously on the ability of the mind to assess the validity of internally produced images by measuring them against external sensations. Under ordinary circumstances, the normal mind made such comparisons so quickly that the perceiver was not even aware of the process. Yet conditions sometimes arose where the comparison was more deliberate. A coat thrown over a chair in dim lighting might evoke in the mind an image of an animal. After some seconds of conscious comparison, the observer recognizes that the internal image does not match the sensory information, and the temporary illusion is dispelled in favor of another internal image, that of a coat. Unlike the healthy mind, the diseased mind is incapable of making such a comparison. The result, if vivid and long-lasting, was hallucination. There was nothing wrong with the hallucinators’ sensory organs or their ability to transmit information to the brain; the fault lay in the unconscious mental process whereby that information was reconciled with already existing images; that is, with memory.
Taine's understanding of hallucination as a product of the unconscious comparison of internally generated images with externally received sensory information stressed above all the importance of the internal images already in the subject's mind. (Without the ability to call to mind the image of a coat, in the example above, the hallucinator would remain convinced that the object was an animal.) This emphasis on the suzerainty of the internal image led Taine to the startling conclusion that perception itself, far from being a process of interpreting external sensory stimuli, was but a form of hallucination. “Thus our external perception is a dream from the inside that finds itself in harmony with the things from the outside,” he famously wrote, “and, instead of saying that hallucination is an external perception that is false, one must say that external perception is a hallucination that is true.”Footnote 96 The external projection of internal images was not a sign of mental illness; it was a condition of perception itself. “The objects that we touch, see, or perceive by whatever sense, are but simulacres or phantoms resembling exactly those that are generated in the mind of a hypnotized person, of a dreamer, of a hallucinator, of a man afflicted with subjective sensations.”Footnote 97
For Charcot, writing a decade and a half later, an inability to distinguish between internal and external images was a marker of mental illness. He warned that any of a number of cultural and hereditary factors could endanger the mental health of vulnerable individuals. An “inordinate belief in the marvelous,” along with anything else “which powerfully stimulates the imagination,” could precipitate the onset of hysteria and a loss of the capacity to distinguish between imagination and reality. In an 1884 lesson on spiritualism, Charcot cited the example of an eleven-year-old patient who had visions of lions, wolves, and his dead father, and attempted to slay “imaginary brigands.” The young boy, already predisposed to hysteria by heredity, Charcot believed, had been tipped over the precipice into pathological hallucination by excessive exposure to spiritualism.Footnote 98 The child's inability to distinguish between internal images and external reality stemmed, the doctor suspected, from his lack of intellectual sophistication. The British eugenicist Francis Galton, admired by both Charcot and Binet, observed in 1883 that when women and children—whose intellects, he maintained, were inherently less well developed than men's—were asked to describe their interior image of something they had once seen, they were likely to report the image in detail as if describing an actual object or scene before them. By contrast, those who frequently engaged in “intellectual analysis” (mostly men) rarely experience “beautiful, colorful images.” Instead, like many of Binet's blindfolded chess players, they reported abstract visual images that were “profoundly different” from the images produced by the original visual sensations and could be easily distinguished from the latter.Footnote 99 Galton's findings could thus explain the widely accepted observation that the great majority of those who experienced powerful visions, especially of a religious nature, were uneducated, unsophisticated, impoverished, young, and most often female.Footnote 100
For those who experienced the healing effects of devotional sites like Lourdes, the power of internal images was such that the miraculeuse’s perception of her own body's physical condition was affected. In these cases, as with hallucinators, internal images were the cause, rather than the product, of sensations. In Charcot's analysis, faulty internal image associations caused the hysterical patient to “remember” that his or her arm or leg, for example, was paralyzed or anaesthetized. In his earlier work on hypnotic suggestion, Charcot had maintained that a patient responded to external stimuli according to the “scene that is painted in the brain” by the hypnotist.Footnote 101 Now, in “La foi qui guérit,” he revised this thinking to include the notion of autosuggestion, which required no external stimulus to evoke the internal image. He maintained that the cure of physical symptoms through autosuggestion was possible in cases where physical symptoms were, in the words of the British physician Russell Reynolds, “dependent on an idea.”Footnote 102 Charcot and his fellow skeptics posited that the inability of the subject to recognize such ideas as the source of the internal images that governed their physical condition, like the failure of hallucinators to distinguish between internal images and external perception, explained the miraculous cures that occurred regularly at the various “sanctuaires en vogue.”Footnote 103 In the end, it was a question of modifying internal images, a process that Charcot tacitly conceded could be effected not only through the rational manipulations of a doctor, but also through the unconscious workings of the hysteric's own mind.
Conclusion
Charcot's late studies of human calculators and miracle cures, though usually regarded as minor contributions to the clinician's large and influential oeuvre, signaled major changes in the development of medical concepts regarding the relationship between psychology and physiology, memory and mental illness, and unconscious mental image formation and conscious interaction with the external world. Surrounded by a growing number of researchers working in the evolving field of physiological psychology, many of whom were drawn to the Salpêtrière by Charcot's own controversial and highly publicized work on hypnosis, the doctor found himself moving slowly toward an understanding of mental illness that downplayed (without abandoning) the traditional nineteenth-century emphases on heredity and elusive lesions in favor of psychological concepts of suggestion and mental imagery.
Jacques Inaudi's extraordinary ability to memorize and manipulate numbers in the form of aural images bolstered Charcot's conviction that the physiology of memory was the key to understanding not just how the rational mind functioned but also how it connected to the unconscious. This conceptualization pointed the way to new understandings of mental function and mental disease. At the same time, Charcot's essay on faith healing revealed a growing willingness to acknowledge the generative—not just receptive—role of unconscious mental images and their capacity to shape individual perception. In the end, his recognition of the power and pervasiveness of “autosuggestion” was not far from Taine's provocative assertion that “perception is a hallucination that is true.” Indeed, it was not far from sociologist Gabriel Tarde's claim, in 1886, that “the normal waking state is an enormously complicated and at the same time harmoniously coordinated dream.”Footnote 104
Charcot held fast to his belief in the fundamental rationality of the normal mind, rejecting the increasingly popular notion that all humans were by nature susceptible to suggestion, whether externally or internally induced. Excessive suggestibility was not the normal human condition, he insisted, but rather evidence of pathology. Charcot's explorations of Inaudi's astonishing memory and the autohypnotic feats of the Lourdes pilgrims were both products of his ongoing investigation into the origins and manifestations of mental disease. The study of Inaudi drew on new theories of brain localization and memory formation, while “la foi qui guérit” emerged from his recent work on hypnosis. By 1892, these streams of inquiry had begun to converge around the role of internal images in memory, perception, and consciousness itself. If the topic itself was hardly new, the questions now asked were. And the answers, as yet incomplete, would shape a field that, in the twentieth century, would drift far from Charcot's belief in a psychology brightly lit by physiological evidence toward Tarde's darker vision of a people ignorant of the workings of their own minds.
This article has argued that internal or mental images stood at the center of a number of important late nineteenth-century discourses on the psychological and physiological functions of the mind. In many discussions of the time, such images appear to serve almost as placeholders for knowledge that remained elusive. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the various attempts to explain memory, which had for centuries relied on “internal images” almost as a heuristic for understanding the ability to retain and recall past sensory perceptions. But by the second half of the nineteenth century, growing interest in and knowledge of brain physiology and the increasing efforts of experimental psychologists to draw on this work meant that the concept of “internal images” was simultaneously subjected to new scrutiny and pressed into service in explaining such subjects of fascination as hysteria, hypnosis, and hallucinations. The concept of the “internal image” remained useful in this period of growing enthusiasm for empirical psychological research because, for all of its scientific elusiveness, it was reassuringly a “thing” that, at least theoretically, could be located somewhere in the brain. In this sense, the “internal image” offered a bridge connecting the incipient research in brain physiology to the equally incipient research in psychology.
In the decades before Freudian ideas overtook psychological research, effectively severing it from its interdisciplinary roots, the fields of psychology, brain anatomy and physiology, and even philosophy—were closely and fruitfully linked, much as they are today in the transdisciplinary specialty of neuroscience.Footnote 105 In the late nineteenth century, it was the concept of the mental image that allowed researchers to connect the physical brain with the ineffable mind, a gap that today is spanned by brain imaging technology.Footnote 106 This article has suggested that the widespread assumption of the existence of internal images allowed for a unity across disciplines that was not possible when images themselves were abandoned. It is telling that in the past four decades, as Freudian theory and behaviorally based practices have fallen out of favor in the field of psychology, a lively debate over mental images has once again captured the attention of scholars across the disciplinary boundaries of psychology, neurology, and philosophy. That debate has been stimulated to no small degree by technological developments that have focused scientific attention on neuroimaging and other neuroscientific data and whether they can prove the existence of images as the dominant (or sole) form of internal representation. Some claim to demonstrate through direct stimulation of the brain that internal images are real. Others, however, question whether research on the physical brain will ever yield meaningful insight into mental function. “Is it possible,” ask neuroscientists Stephen M. Kosslyn, William L. Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis, “that psychology really is a ‘special science’ and relies on a distinct, relatively abstract, level of analysis?”Footnote 107 Charcot and his contemporaries certainly hoped that the answer to that question was “no,” but their continuing reliance on “internal images” to explain a wide range of mental functions suggests that they were not sure.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Modern Intellectual History editors and anonymous readers for their perceptive and helpful comments on multiple versions of this article, and Eric Arnesen for his encouragement and careful readings of the piece.
Katrin Schultheiss is an Associate Professor of History at the George Washington University. She is the author of Bodies and Souls: Politics and the Professionalization of Nursing in France, 1880–1922 (2001) and is completing a book manuscript entitled “Edge of Reason: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Age of Charcot.”
