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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2019
This article uses the work of French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his contemporaries to explore the central role played by internal or mental images in late nineteenth-century understandings of mental function. It argues that the assumed existence of internal images allowed scientists and clinicians of the time to integrate experimental psychological work on mental pathologies such as memory dysfunction, hysteria, hypnosis, and hallucination into contemporary research on brain physiology. The internal image—a general term that embraced concepts such as “memory images,” “sensory images,” and multi-faceted “language images”—linked older ideas about how memory, perception, and consciousness worked with new research on cerebral localization that dominated studies of the brain throughout Europe and the United States. For practitioners of the new physiological (also called experimental) psychology, internal images offered a physiological mechanism for explaining how sensory perceptions are transformed into memories, how memories create perceptions of the self, how the brain generates ideas, and how all these processes can go awry.
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84 According the Charcot's student Henri Meige, the doctor was fascinated with the workings of his own imagination and at one point recorded the images that flashed through his mind while under the influence of hashish. Henri Meige, Charcot artiste (Paris, 1925); Debora L. Silverman argues that Charcot's elaborately hand-decorated home was “animated by private memories and ‘exteriorized dreams’.” Silverman, Debora L., Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, 1989), 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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91 Taine, De l'intelligence, 108.
92 Ibid., 102.
93 Ibid., 95.
94 Ibid., 97.
95 Taine's work built upon the mid-century insights of Baillarger, Jules Gabriel François de, Des hallucinations: De l'influence de l’état intermédiaire à la veille et au sommeil sur la production et la marche des hallucinations (Paris, 1846)Google Scholar.
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