How was the mind conceptualized at the end of the nineteenth century in psychology, psychiatry and medicine, and how did photography and film affirm or subvert dominant views? To what scientific and medical uses were photography and film put in mental asylums and research laboratories, what was their diagnostic and treatment value, and how did they provide the foundations for the new ‘sciences of mind’?

The eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century were dominated by physiognomic theories of madness, which posited a one-to-one correspondence between mental states and body states: the body was seen as an undistorted image of the mind. Paradoxically, at a time when an objective recording device (the camera) had not yet been invented, skepticism had not yet proven itself as serious a problem as it would become after the invention of photography. Indeed, I would argue that precisely the absence of an external recording/mirroring device (the camera) made it possible to assume the presence of an internal mirror; that is, to conceive of the body as an ‘image’ of the mind.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the new media of photography and film contributed to a shift in the understanding of attention, thereby influencing the development of the new sciences of mind (psychology and psychiatry). Challenging the assumption of the mind and the body as ‘coexpressible’ ‒ functioning as ‘mirrors’ of each other ‒ photography and film foreshadowed the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious and were instrumental in the reconceptualization of pathology and the transition from physiognomic to psychological theories of madness. As materialist theories constructing madness as purely organic and visually inscribed gradually gave way to a new understanding of consciousness and sanity in terms of attention, it became increasingly clear that inattention, distraction, automatism or absence from oneself, are, in fact, primary rather than secondary states. Paradoxically, precisely when a sophisticated technology for providing visual records of pathology was introduced, theories of pathology as visually inscribed became obsolete and pathology came to be seen as inherent in normal psychological processes.

Photography and film undermined physiognomic theories of insanity, thus blurring the distinction between sanity and insanity and contributing to the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious in three significant ways.