Reaction and Thoughts on “Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere”

This might just be a picture, but it portrays a lot more inside it and shows a lot of what would go on in Sigmund Freud’s lectures. In this picture, Freud is basing his lecture on this woman that he is using to teach the men in the room a lesson on psychoanalysis. More specifically, he is talking about hysteria and the symptoms that are associated with this mental problem. When I first looked at this picture, I felt very intrigued and curious to see what all those men are doing and why there is only one woman up there with Sigmund Freud. This caused me to raise questions like “Is she the lesson plan?’ or “Why choose a woman to teach the class with?” These questions also made me look deeper into the picture and encouraged me to find out what was really going on here and why Sigmund Freud chose to give the lecture in this very weird and unorthodox manner. Multiple emotions were drawn from me when I looked at this picture because I didn’t know whether to feel bad for the woman or to be kind of enraged at the men for treating this woman this way and using her more as an object than a human being. The picture not only shows how men treated women, and their sexism at the time, but also the fact that they thought only women were vulnerable to hysteria and its symptoms.

The questions that came into my head that I have already mentioned are not the ordinary questions that would come up in a picture from today, which I found to be both intriguing and disturbing in this photo. The woman seems to be the center of the lesson and it is extremely belittling of females because there is a considerable number of men staring at this woman, she probably didn’t give any consent for her to be studied in this manner. This also makes me think that this emphasizes the men’s masculinity and ego in a sense because they think that they can just educate themselves at the cost of this woman’s dignity and humility. It also shows that they had very little respect for women with problems like hysteria and used them as experiments or tools for education and the advancement of science. These are the things that I can infer just by looking at the picture as a whole.

One emotion that I felt when I looked at this picture was sympathy for the woman and wanted to really see what she was feeling at that moment. She probably felt very humiliated and embarrassed because all those men are staring at her and judging her most likely because she has a very special and mysterious condition that Freud is revealing and teaching about. The only people in the room concerned about her seemed to be the two women behind her because they had shocked and disturbed looks on their faces. That’s one way I felt about the picture from the woman’s point of view. Another thing I felt was a sense of enragement because of what the men accepted as being normal, as well as the thought of it being okay to treat a woman like she’s a tool in the classroom or for research without her consent. This is not the way a gentleman should behave, and it says something about Freud’s character. He seems to care more about proving his points on hysteria and furthering his research on the subject than caring about how this woman feels or how she should be treated. These particular emotions and feelings hit me right away when I looked deeper into this picture and it’s not very pretty to say the least.

Considering this is a picture, it’s impressive how much I felt from just looking at this one painting of Freud’s lecture. The idea that women can be used for educational and research purposes like that is very disturbing and raises the question “Why should women be the only ones studied for hysteria? Why can’t a man be looked at for the same symptoms?” This proves the fact that men at the time were very sexist and thought men to be superior to women which is unacceptable construct to go by in any society. The picture showed a lot of insight into how Freud and men, in general, viewed women and mental problems as well. This is a very wrong way of portraying hysteria and females in general.

Literacy Narrative: Reflection

This is a thematic essay that portrays my reaction and thoughts on the picture “A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière”. It has a theme and main points that support the theme which are then supported by evidence from the picture. The evidence also serves as details for the reader to be able to visualize the picture in their head if they’ve never seen it. The picture was very intriguing which is what got me to write the essay because I wanted to express how I felt about the picture and the inferences I made from looking at the details of the picture. This is what prompted me to write about Sigmund Freud’s lesson in the picture. I hoped to accomplish the reader’s full understanding of my thoughts on this picture and what I personally thought the picture portrayed. I also wanted to give the reader a new perspective and a different way to look at the picture, which could’ve been different from the way they were looking at it. This way, the reader has got some new insight into Sigmund Freud’s lecture. The audience of the essay was meant to be anybody who was interested in looking into one of Sigmund Freud’s methods or ideals at the time. It’s also directed towards people who haven’t seen the picture because the essay contains a lot of details on the picture, so that even if the reader hasn’t seen the painting, they can still have a vivid image of what it looks like. The relationship I was trying to establish was an informative one and to try to get the audience to know and understand as much as possible on what I thought of the picture. I assumed that the reader has never seen the picture and doesn’t know what was going in Sigmund Freud’s lecture. That’s why I added a good amount of details into the essay so that the reader can get a full image of what the painting looked like as well as what I understood and inferred from the picture just based on the details. This was the whole point of writing the essay from the beginning and what I had in mind from the first time I saw “A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière”.