Individual presentation:
• Suzanne LaLonde:
Contagious Bodies: From Jean-Martin Charcot’s Hysteria to Social Media
(60 min)

Abstract:

This talk examines two moments of apparent “contagion” in the history of psychopathology: the spread of symptoms among patients suffering from traumatic hysteria in Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinic at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century and the recent emergence (2019-2022), particularly in Germany, of socially provoked tic-like behaviors caused by exposure to social media. While separated by both time and place, these two phenomena provoke similar questions about the social production of symptoms. At the Salpêtrière Hospital, different phases of hysterical attacks often proliferated among female patients through mutual observation, clinical demonstrations, and under the watchful eye of medical personnel. Today, images and videos of tic symptoms populate social media, where they take on meaning beyond a traditional medical environment. Instead of interpreting these cases as deception or as exclusively psychopathological, this talk views them as expressions of distress shaped by culture, such as widespread traumatic suffering and alienation, and prevalent clinical practices and dominant technologies. By contemplating Charcot’s clinic alongside contemporary social media, this talk argues that “contagion” stemming from prevalent psychosomatic symptoms is not an outlier but a recurring feature of modernity in which bodies react to social scripts, clinical knowledge, and collective witnessing. It then asks how such collective enactments might be understood in therapeutic terms.

Keywords: Charcot, functional tic-like behaviors, hysteria, mass psychogenic illness, psychohistory, psychosomatic contagion, Salpêtrière, social media

Short Bio:

Suzanne LaLonde is an Associate Professor of French Cultural Studies and Medical/Health Humanities at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She teaches French Literature and French Cultural History, focusing on literary portraits of human trauma and post-traumatic recovery, while her Medical/Health Humanities courses center on theater-informed material, from tragedies to surrealist drama. Her research interests focus on French intellectual history and the intersection between post-traumatic conditions (from PTSD to resilience) and the creative arts. In 2021, she published Paris and Its Revolutionary Ideas: A Guide to French Culture and the Capital (Cognella, 2021), while her other book Trauma, Posttraumatic Growth, and World Literature: Metamorphoses and a Literary Arts Praxis (Routledge, 2022). She has also published over 15 refereed pieces, including two book chapters, “The Plague and Dr. Rieux’s Metaphysical and Narrative Chronicle,” in The Health Humanities and Camus’s The Plague and “Healing and Post-Traumatic Growth,” in Trauma and Literature (2018). Her article “Cultural Trauma Studies and Post-traumatic Protests” is forthcoming in January 2026 in the journal “Literature and Medicine.” She can be reached at .