Ferdière has been somewhat on my mind since a letter that Hans Bellmer wrote to him on his strange codependent relationship with Unica Zürn came to my attention. It appears that he was the psychiatrist of Unica Zürn, Antonin Artaud and Isidore Isou. Here is an excerpt from a 1995 article by British academic Stephen Barber:

“Under Ferdiere’s supervision, Artaud received 51 sessions of electroshock between June 1943 and December 1944. The treatment had been invented only five years earlier, by the Italian doctor Ugo Cerletti, who had observed the pacifying effect of electric shocks applied to the skulls of pigs in a Rome slaughterhouse and adapted the strategy for human application. The treatment was surrounded by an aura of discovery and excitement at the time Ferdiere began to use it, and he embraced it enthusiastically. Ferdiere’s assistant, Jacques Latremoliere, included an account of the treatment Artaud underwent in his doctoral thesis, Incidents and Accidents Observed in the Course of 1200 Electroshocks. He writes of the “theatrical reactions of the subject in the face of his hallucinations” and notes that one of Artaud’s vertebrae was shattered during the third of the unanesthetized sessions. Artaud himself would write of his having been taken for dead at the end of this same session, and of watching the orderlies prepare to take his “corpse” to the mortuary before he suddenly awakened after a coma of 90 minutes. Ferdiere, while not denying that such an incident took place, told me that, with such a volume of electroshocks being applied, it was difficult to remember this particular event. … Ferdiere, building on his reputation as the “rehabilitator” of Artaud, would subsequently become the psychiatrist of the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer and his companion, the poet Unica Zürn (who committed suicide in 1970 while under his care). He also treated the leader of the Lettrist art movement, Isidore Isou, during the events of May 1968 in Paris. Isou and his fellow Lettrist Maurice Lemaitre subsequently wrote an entire book of outrageous insults against Ferdiere, titled Antonin Artaud Tortured by the Psychiatrists. They asserted: “Dr Gaston Ferdiere is one of the greatest criminals in the entire history of humanity: a new Eichmann,” and demanded his immediate arrest …” —Art in America