Sexual Trauma at the Salpetriere

Jean-Martin Charcot who studied hysteria at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris late in the nineteenth century is often portrayed as a great neurologist. According to standard accounts, his female hysterical patients imitated the seizures of epileptic patients at the Salpetriere in order to get attention because of their dramatic, self-centered natures. They were also prone to making false allegations of childhood sexual abuse. In fact, the so-called hysterical seizures were often abreactions of rapes. The patients commonly had extensive childhood sexual abuse histories, and sexual misconduct by doctors was endemic at the Salpetriere. The pathological counter-transference towards "hysterical women" at the Salpetriere has been repeated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in attitudes expressed towards dissociative identity disorder.