Charcot e a Escola da Salpêtrière: a afirmação de uma histeria neurológica

Abstract

In the scholarship on the history of hysteria, the career of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), director of the section of pathologies of the nervous system at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, is commonly described as the progression from important early misconceptions in the understanding of the hysterical condition to a belated anticipation of psychoanalytic conceptions. This dissertation proposes that a close reading of Charcot’s work on hysteria disavows such interpretation and that his conception of hysteria remained fully inserted in the clinical field of the nervous diseases. In other words, it is not possible to identify in Charcot’s texts any intent to bring hysteria closer to the field of mental pathology. A chronological revision of his work on hysteria was undertaken, and an analysis of his approach to this disease was made based on the internal logic of the underlying concepts. Charcot’s own writings were the primary and main source for this research. Other sources were the works of his main collaborators and the scholarship dedicated to his biography and work. The years between 1870 and 1893 defined the timeframe of this study, preceded by an examination of previous theories formulated about hysteria from the time it began to be related to a change in the brain and nerves until it was taken by Charcot as an object of scientific interest. The conclusion is that, in Charcot’s work, hysterical phenomena are systematically referred to neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. The new knowledge expressed in Charcot’s theories about this disease remains consistently within the limits of neurology