Jean-Martin Charcot

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology, often called the founder of modern neurology, who from 1862 built the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris into the leading neurological clinic in Europe.

Alongside his pioneering descriptions of multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and many other disorders, he turned in his later career to the systematic clinical study of hysteria and hypnosis. In a period gripped by public fascination with “animal magnetism,” Charcot took the disreputable phenomena of mesmerism into the laboratory, staging famous Tuesday demonstrations in which hysterical patients were hypnotised before audiences and shown to pass through reproducible stages of suggestibility.

Charcot matters to the mind-power lineage as the figure who made suggestion and the divided, suggestible mind a respectable object of scientific medicine, directly seeding the dynamic psychology that followed. He argued that hysterical symptoms—paralyses, contractures, anaesthesias—could be both produced and removed by hypnotic suggestion, demonstrating that an idea impressed on the mind could govern the body without conscious consent.

Though his theory that hypnosis was itself a pathological state of hysteria was later overturned by the rival Nancy school of Bernheim and Liébeault, his clinic trained an extraordinary generation: Sigmund Freud, who studied with him in 1885–86 and carried the idea of the dynamic unconscious back to Vienna, and Pierre Janet, whose theory of dissociation and fixed ideas grew directly out of the Salpêtrière work.