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by Corry Shores
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[The following is not summary. It simply catalogs particular parts of the text that I take note of, with a brief summary of all these notes. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive all my various mistakes. Section divisions are my own and do not reflect partitions in the text.]
Notes and Quotes from
Sigmund Freud
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
Volume 1
(1886-1889)
Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts
3
“Report on My Studies in Paris and Berlin”
(1956 [1886])
Very brief summary of these notes:
Freud’s text, “Report on My Studies in Paris and Berlin,” provides an account of his studies at the Hospice de la Salpêtrière in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot, who was using hypnotism and other means to greatly advance our knowledge of the neurosis hysteria. Freud was impressed by how Charcot was dealing with illnesses that have somatic symptoms but no obvious somatic causes. In other words, they seem more to be diseases of the psyche than strictly of the body. As a result of these studies, Freud’s research interests turned away from neuroanatomy toward psychopathology.
Brief summary of these notes (collecting those below):
(3.1) Editor’s Note: Freud began as a medical student interested in neuroanatomy. In 1885-1886, he studied abroad, in France, with a grant from his school, Vienna University. During his intellectual explorations, especially under the influence of Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s interests change from neurology to psychopathology. This text is important for giving us insight into that fateful turn in the history of human culture. (3.2) Freud used his traveling grant to study neuropathology at the Hospice de la Salpêtrière. One thing that attracted him about this school was Jean-Martin Charcot, who was “inclined to study rare and strange material.” Freud’s initial research interests were “anatomical problems” (namely, “the secondary atrophies and degenerations that follow on affections of the brain in children.”) However, Freud found that the laboratory for these studies was inadequate, so he switched to studying something else (namely, “the relations of the nuclei of the posterior column in the medulla oblongata.”) At the same time, Freud became deeply impressed by Charcot’s teachings on neuropathology and began to study almost exclusively under him. (3.3) Charcot claimed that our knowledge of anatomy and of organic diseases was nearly complete, and what remained to be studied were the neuroses (in other words, diseases with no obvious physiological cause). Among the neuroses, Charcot specialized in hysteria. Historically, this illness had been poorly studied up until then. Charcot demonstrated that its causes are not so strongly linked to the genitals (for, it was long thought to be linked to the uterus), because it occurs in men too, who may have traumatic hysteria. He also determined the precise physiological symptoms for properly diagnosing hysteria. (3.4) Charcot also used hypnotism to arrive “at a kind of theory of hysterical symptomatology.” He treated it with full scientific rigor. At the same time, it was amazing to behold, and Freud was deeply impressed by the technique.
[Editor’s Note: This Text as Marking Freud’s Turn from Neurology to Psychopathology]
[Freud’s Initial Anatomical Interests and His Attraction to Charcot’s Teachings]
[Charcot’s Advancing the Studies on Hysteria]
[Charcot’s Amazing and Scientific Use of Hypnotism]
Text Information
BERICHT ÜBER MEINE MIT UNIVERSITÄTS-JUBILÄUMS REISESTIPENDIUM UNTERNOMMENE STUDIENREISE NACH PARIS UND BERLIN
(a) German Edition:
(1886 Date of composition.)
1960 In J. and R. Gicklhorn’s Sigmund Freuds akademische Laufbahn im Lichte der Dokumente, 82, Vienna.
(b) English Translation:
‘Report on my Studies in Paris and Berlin’
1956 Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 37 (1), 2-7. (Tr. James Strachey.)
The present translation is a slightly corrected reprint of the one published in 1956.
(3)
Summary
[Editor’s Note: This Text as Marking Freud’s Turn from Neurology to Psychopathology]
[Editor’s Note: Freud began as a medical student interested in neuroanatomy. In 1885-1886, he studied abroad, in France, with a grant from his school, Vienna University. During his intellectual explorations, especially under the influence of Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s interests change from neurology to psychopathology. This text is important for giving us insight into that fateful turn in the history of human culture.]
The editor, James Strachey, says that Freud’s report here marks “a historic event: the diversion of Freud's scientific interests from neurology to psychology” (3). Freud is reporting on his accomplishments during a trip funded by Vienna University in 1885 (p.3), where he was studying medicine. He finished writing the report on the 22nd of April, 1886 (p.3). This text gives us insight into the way that Freud’s interests turned from neuroanatomy to psychopathology, by means of his work with Jean-Martin Charcot at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Strachey marks that turning point as happening early December, 1885.
The high importance which Freud himself always attributed to his studies under Charcot is a matter of common knowledge. | This report marks his experience at the Salpêtrière with the utmost clarity as a turning point. When he arrived in Paris, his ‘chosen concern’ was with the anatomy of the nervous system; when he left, his mind was filled with the problems of hysteria and hypnotism. He had turned his back on neurology and was moving towards psychopathology. It would even be possible to assign a precise date to the change – in early December, 1885, when he ceased his work in the pathological laboratory of the Salpêtrière; but the inconvenient arrangements at that laboratory, which he himself puts forward as the explanation, were, of course, no more than a precipitating cause of the momentous shift in the direction of Freud's interests. Other and deeper factors were at work, and among them, no doubt, the great personal influence which Charcot evidently exercised on him.
(3-4)
[Freud’s Initial Anatomical Interests and His Attraction to Charcot’s Teachings]
[Freud used his traveling grant to study neuropathology at the Hospice de la Salpêtrière. One thing that attracted him about this school was Jean-Martin Charcot, who was “inclined to study rare and strange material.” Freud’s initial research interests were “anatomical problems” (namely, “the secondary atrophies and degenerations that follow on affections of the brain in children.”) However, Freud found that the laboratory for these studies was inadequate, so he switched to studying something else (namely, “the relations of the nuclei of the posterior column in the medulla oblongata.”) At the same time, Freud became deeply impressed by Charcot’s teachings on neuropathology and began to study almost exclusively under him.]
[ditto]
In my application for the award of the Travelling Bursary from the University Jubilee Fund for the year 1885-6, I expressed my intention of proceeding to the Hospice de la Salpêtrière in Paris and of there continuing my studies in neuropathology. Several factors had contributed to this choice. [...] there was the great name of J.-M. Charcot, who has now been working and teaching in his hospital for seventeen years.
(5)
In consequence of the scarcity of any lively personal contact between French and German physicians, the | findings of the French school – some of them (upon hypnotism) highly surprising and some of them (upon hysteria) of practical importance – had been met in our countries with more doubt than recognition and belief; and the French workers, and above all Charcot, were obliged to submit to the charge of lacking in critical faculty or at least of being inclined to study rare and strange material and to dramatize their working-up of that material. Accordingly, when the honourable College of Professors distinguished me by the award of the Travelling Bursary, I gladly seized the opportunity which was thus offered of forming a judgement upon these facts based on my own experience [...].
(5-6)
J.-M. Charcot, when he was an ‘interne’ at the Salpêtrière in 1856, perceived the necessity of making chronic nervous diseases the subject of constant and exclusive study, and he determined to return to the Salpêtrière as a médecin des hôpitaux and never thereafter to leave it.
(7)
The man who is at the head of all these resources and auxiliary services is now sixty years of age. He exhibits the liveliness, cheerfulness, and formal perfection of speech which we are in the habit of attributing to the French national character; while at the same time he displays the patience and love of work which we usually claim for our own nation. The attraction of such a personality soon led me to restrict my visits to one single hospital and to seek instruction from one single man. I abandoned my occasional attempts at attending other lectures after I had become convinced that all they had to offer were for the most part well-constructed rhetorical performances. The only exceptions were Professor Brouardel's forensic autopsies and lectures at the Morgue, which I rarely missed.
(8)
My work in the Salpêtrière itself took on a different shape from what I had originally laid down for myself. I had arrived with the intention of making one single question the subject of a thorough investigation; and since in Vienna my chosen concern had been with anatomical problems, I had selected the study of the secondary atrophies and degenerations that follow on affections of the brain in children.
(8)
The laboratory was not at all adapted to the reception of an extraneous worker, and such space and resources as existed were made inaccessible owing to lack of any kind of organization. I thus found myself obliged to give up anatomical work3 and rest content with a discovery concerned with the relations of the nuclei of the posterior column in the medulla oblongata.
(8)
3. [This was at the beginning of December, 1885 (Jones. 1953, 231)].
(8)
Jones, E. (1953) Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 1, London and New York. (Page references are to the English edition.) (xvii, 3, 8, 9, 15, 20, 24, 64, 157, 175-6, 213, 262, 284, 290)
(409)
In contrast to the inadequacy of the laboratory, the clinic at the Salpêtrière provided such a plethora of new and interesting material that it needed all my efforts to profit by the instruction which this favourable opportunity afforded. The weekly timetable was divided as follows. On Mondays Charcot delivered his public lecture, which delighted its hearers by the perfection of its form, while its subject-matter was familiar from the work of the preceding week. What these lectures offered was not so much elementary instruction in neuropathology as information, rather, on the Professor's latest researches; and they produced their effect primarily by their constant references to the patients who were being demonstrated. On Tuesdays Charcot held his ‘consultation externe’, at which his assistants brought before him for examination the typical or puzzling cases among the very large number attending the out-patient department.
(9)
[Charcot’s Advancing the Studies on Hysteria]
[Charcot claimed that our knowledge of anatomy and of organic diseases was nearly complete, and what remained to be studied were the neuroses (in other words, diseases with no obvious physiological cause). Among the neuroses, Charcot specialized in hysteria. Historically, this illness had been poorly studied up until then. Charcot demonstrated that its causes are not so strongly linked to the genitals (for, it was long thought to be linked to the uterus), because it occurs in men too, who may have traumatic hysteria. He also determined the precise physiological symptoms for properly diagnosing hysteria.]
[ditto]
Charcot used to say that, broadly speaking, the work of anatomy was finished and that the theory of the organic diseases of the nervous system might be said to be complete: what had next to be dealt with was the neuroses. This pronouncement may, no doubt, be regarded as no more than an expression of the tum which his own activities have taken. For many years now his work has been centred almost entirely on the neuroses, and above all on hysteria, which, since the opening of the outpatient department and of the clinic, he has had an opportunity of studying in men as well as women.
I will venture to sum up in a few words what Charcot has achieved in the clinical study of hysteria. Up to now, hysteria can scarcely be regarded as a name with any well-defined meaning. The state of illness to which it is applied is only character- | ized scientifically by negative signs; it has been studied little and unwillingly; and it labours under the odium of some very widespread prejudices. Among these are the supposed dependence of hysterical illness upon genital irritation, the view that no definite symptomatology can be assigned to hysteria simply because any combination of symptoms can occur in it, and finally the exaggerated importance that has been attributed to simulation in the clinical picture of hysteria. During the last few decades a hysterical woman would have been almost as certain to be treated as a malingerer, as in earlier centuries she would have been certain to be judged and condemned as a witch or as possessed of the devil. In another respect there has, if anything, been a step backward in the knowledge of hysteria. The Middle Ages had a precise acquaintance with the ‘stigmata’ of hysteria, its somatic signs, and interpreted and made use of them in their own fashion.
(11)
In his study of hysteria Charcot started out from the most fully developed cases, which he regarded as the perfect types of the disease. He began by reducing the connection of the neurosis with the genital system to its correct proportions by demonstrating the unsuspected frequency of cases of male hysteria and especially of traumatic hysteria. In these typical cases he next found a number of somatic signs (such as the character of the attack, anaesthesia, disturbances of vision, hysterogenic points etc.), which enabled him to establish the diagnosis of hysteria with certainty on the basis of positive indications.
(11)
[Charcot’s Amazing and Scientific Use of Hypnotism]
[Charcot also used hypnotism to arrive “at a kind of theory of hysterical symptomatology.” He treated it with full scientific rigor. At the same time, it was amazing to behold, and Freud was deeply impressed by the technique.]
[ditto]
By making a scientific study of hypnotism – a region of neuropathology which had to be wrung on the one side from scepticism and on the other from fraud – he himself arrived at a kind of theory of hysterical symptomatology.
(11)
Nor did I neglect the opportunity of acquiring a personal acquaintance with the phenomena of hypnotism, which are so astonishing and to which so little credence is attached, and in particular with the ‘grand hypnotisme’ [‘major hypnotism’] described by Charcot. I found to my astonishment that here were occurrences plain before one’s eyes, which it was quite impossible to doubt, but which were nevertheless strange enough not to be believed unless they were experienced at first hand. I saw no sign, however, that Charcot showed any special preference for rare and strange material or that he tried to exploit it for mystical purposes. On the contrary, he regarded hypnotism as a field of phenomena which he submitted to scientific description, just as he had done many years before with multiple sclerosis or progressive muscular atrophy. He did not seem to me to be at all one of those men who marvel at what is rare rather than what is usual; and the whole trend of his mind leads me to suppose that he can find no rest till he has correctly described and classified some phenomenon with which he is concerned, but that he can sleep quite soundly without having arrived at the physiological explanation of that phenomenon.
I have given considerable space in this Report to remarks on hysteria and hypnotism because I had to deal with what was completely novel and the subject of Charcot’s own particular studies.
(13)
Freud, Sigmund. “Report on My Studies in Paris and Berlin” (1956 [1886]). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 1, (1886–1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, edited and translated by James Strachey, 1–15. London: Hogarth, 1966.
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