What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories Book

It amazes me to think that just a century and a quarter ago in France this was the cutting edge of medical science: staged theatrics photographed for sale while fantasizing on wandering, uncontrolled uteri. I wad drawn this fascinated by the fact that "hysteria" shares an etymology with "hysterectomy". The hysteric is under control of the disordered womb. Freud put Charcot, the conductor of this symphony of female mistreatment, on a pedestal, making pilgrimages for education, cocaine, and autopsies. This is a translation of a work originally in French and it feels as if the poetry and metaphor from the original is at times awkward and difficult in translation. While the on site photographic studio captured psychic aurae and seizures for sexualized description, Charcot's lectures featured dramatic demonstrations of triggered throes and coercion under hypnosis. The detailed story of one unfortunate inmate is that of Augustin, sexual victim turned star performer for special freedoms, really tells the whole story of women locked away and then subsumed into kaleidoscope of proto-psychiatric patriarchal fantasy.