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At about the time at which the clinic was established and at which he gave up the Chair of Pathological Anatomy, a change occurred in the direction of Charcot’s scientific pursuits, and to this we owe the finest of his work. He now pronounced that the theory of organic nervous illnesses was for the time being fairly complete, and he began to turn his attention almost exclusively to hysteria, which thus all at once became the focus of general interest. This, the most enigmatic of all nervous diseases, for the evaluation of which medicine had not yet found a serviceable angle of approach, had just then fallen into thorough discredit; and this discredit extended not only to the patients but to the physicians who concerned themselves with the neurosis. It was held that in hysteria anything was possible, and no credence was given to a hysteric about anything. The first thing that Charcot’s work did was to restore its dignity to the topic. Little by little, people gave up the scornful smile with which the patient could at that time feel certain of being met. She was no longer necessarily a malingerer, for Charcot had thrown the whole weight of his authority on the side of the genuineness and objectivity of hysterical phenomena. Charcot had repeated on a small scale the act of liberation in memory of which Pinel’s portrait hung in the lecture hall of the Salpêtrière. Once the blind fear of being made a fool of by the unfortunate patient had been given up - a fear which till then had stood in the way of a serious study of the neurosis - the question could arise as to what method of approach would lead most quickly to a solution of the problem. A quite unbiased observer might have arrived at this conclusion: if I find someone in a state which bears all the signs of a painful affect - weeping, screaming and raging - the conclusion seems probable that a mental process is going on in him of which those physical phenomena are the appropriate expression. A healthy person, if he were asked, would be in a position to say what impression it was that was tormenting him; but the hysteric would answer that he did not know. The problem would at once arise of how it is that a hysterical patient is overcome by an affect about whose cause he asserts that he knows nothing. If we keep to our conclusion that a corresponding psychical process must be present, and if nevertheless we believe the patient when he denies it; if we bring together the many indications that the patient is behaving as though he does know about it; and if we enter into the history of the patient’s life and find some occasion, some trauma, which would appropriately evoke precisely those expressions of feeling - then everything points to one solution: the patient is in a special state of mind in which all his impressions or his recollections of them are no longer held together by an associative chain, a state of mind in which it is possible for a recollection to express its affect by means of somatic phenomena without the group of the other mental processes, the ego, knowing about it or being able to intervene to prevent it. If we had called to mind the familiar psychological difference between sleep and waking, the strangeness of our hypothesis might have seemed less. No one should object that the theory of a splitting of consciousness as a solution to the riddle of hysteria is much too remote to impress an unbiased and untrained observer. For, by pronouncing possession by a demon to be the cause of hysterical phenomena, the Middle Ages in fact chose this solution; it would only have been a matter of exchanging the religious terminology of that dark and superstitious age for the scientific language of to-day.