Enter the Mediums
IN THE séances at the fin de siècle, women became men and men became
women. There was no limit to who one could be or to how many. Terrestrials and
extraterrestrials swapped places and exchanged notes on their habitations. Plato
and Socrates returned to offer courses in postmortem dialectics. The departed
returned to repledge their loves and continue their intrigues. Evidently the
spirits had a rather theatrical way about them and a taste for the decidedly
camp, not to mention for black comedy. Linguistic and aesthetic forms were
broken, which paved the way for the artistic convulsions that were to come.
Religious dogmas came crashing down as new creeds were announced. Before
telecommunications, the mediums were telepathic transatlantic operators,
connecting party lines between the living and the dead. Even then, the
switchboards were jammed. Time and space coupled in new, unforeseen
combinations. Philosophers wondered about the effects of these rappings on the
creaking structures of philosophy. The effects were felt as far away as
therapeutic consulting rooms; yet here, if a subject spoke, wrote, or acted, it
sought no therapy. There was no desire to end the trance, and for a while
psychology itself was entranced.
Psychology at the Séance
At end of the nineteenth century, many of the leading psychologists - Freud,
Jung, Ferenezi, Bleuler, James,
Myers, Janet,
Bergson, Stanley Hall,
Schrenck-Notzing, Moll, Dessoir,
Richet, and
Flournoy - frequented mediums. It
is hard today to imagine that some of the most crucial questions of the "new"
psychology were played out in the séance, nor how such men could have been so
fascinated by the spirits. What took place in the séances enthralled the leading
minds of the time, and had a crucial bearing on many of the most significant
aspects of twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, philosophy,
psychoanalysis, literature, and painting, not to mention psychical research. For
a while crucial issues in these disciplines found themselves played out in the
transports of the mediumistic trance. A form of transvaluation took place.
In psychology's encounter with the séance, there is one remarkable text that
stands out among them all. At the close of 1899 a book appeared bearing the
improbable title From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of
Somnambulism with Glossolalia. It staged the improbable encounter between two
protagonists and the "subliminal romances" that enveloped them. She was Élise
Müller, shop girl, Marie Antoinette, the princess Simandini, and a regular
visitor to Mars: under his gaze, she became Hélène Smith, immortalized as a
psychological case history of multiple personality. He was Théodore Flournoy,
psychologist, professor, and scientist: under her gaze he became her former
love, the prince Sivrouka.
There is today no school of Flournoyian psychology, no training institutes that
bear his name. Furthermore, he is usually absent from histories of psychology in
the English-speaking world, and the term "subliminal psychology" does not even
feature in dictionaries. It is startling to realize that a great deal of what
was supposedly discovered by Freud and Jung was already present in the work of
Flournoy, which, moreover, is extremely pertinent to some of the most vexing
issues in psychology today.
Becoming Sivrouka[1]
[1] For the best work to date on Flournoy, see Mireille Cifali, "Théodore
Flournoy, la découverte de l'inconscient," Le Bloc-Notes de la psychanalyse 3
(1983): pp. 111-31, which together with the reissue of the original edition of
Flournoy's Des Indes à la Planète Mars (Paris: Seuil, 1983), can be said to mark
the advent of the new Flournoy scholarship.
Flournoy was born on August 13, 1854, two years before Freud. Like Janet, he had
the benefit of both a medical and a philosophical formation[2]. In 1878 he
received his M. D. from the University of Strasbourg. He then went to Leipzig
where he studied experimental psychology with Wilhelm Wundt for two years.
Fortuitously, this coincided with Wundt's founding of the psychological
laboratory at the University of Leipzig. On Flournoy's return, as Henri
Ellenberger puts it, he "introduced psychological science into Switzerland."[3]
[2] The best study of Flournoy's early formation is R. Goldsmith, "The Life and
Work of Théodore Flournoy," Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University, 1979. This
study is the most comprehensive work on Flournoy in English to date, and
deserves to be better known.
[3] Ellenberger, "The Scope of Swiss Psychiatry'' (1957), in Beyond the
Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry, ed.
Mark S. Micale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 181.
In 1891 he was appointed professor of psychophysiology at the University of
Geneva. At his insistence he was placed in the Faculty of Sciences, rather than
the Faculty of Philosophy. The following year he founded a psychological
laboratory at the University of Geneva. However, it was not as an experimental
psychologist that Flournoy was to make his mark. In an almost identical manner
as his lifelong friend William James, Flournoy quickly became disaffected by the
limitations of laboratory psychology and yearned for a psychology that would
embrace the whole personality, including its transcendent dimensions. The issue
for Flournoy was how to get there. In 1896, in an article on the psychological
laboratory, Flournoy noted:
an hour passed in the nursery or at a so-called spiritist séance poses many more
psychological problems, and more vital ones, which one wouldn't resolve in
several years consecrated to specifically laboratory work[4].
[4] Flournoy, Notice sur le laboratoire de psychologie de
l'université de Genève
(Geneva: Eggiman, 1896), p. 24, cited in Cifali, "Théodore Flournoy, la découverte de l'inconscient," 115, trans. mine. In this article, Cifali traces
the mode in which Flournoy moved from introspective, experimental psychology to
a dynamic psychology of the subliminal.
Psychology in Need of a Subject
For psychology to establish itself, it required subjects. Applicants for the
role of principal subject were duly forthcoming, including the hysteric, the
criminal, the genius, the mentally defective, the child, and the medium, not to
mention the frog.
It is hard to imagine that the medium played a similar role to that played in
psychology today by the child. This was principally due to William James,
Frederic Myers, and Théodore Flournoy. How did this take place? What was it
about mediums that qualified them to serve as the subject for psychology?
The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of modern
spiritualism. Through spiritualism, the cultivation of trances - with the
attendant phenomena of trance speech, glossolalia, automatic writing, and
crystal vision - became widespread. While for spiritualists interest in the
phenomena lay solely in the messages conveyed, rather than in the mode of their
conveyance, it was the latter that was to provide Psychologists with their
subject matter.
Prominent psychiatrists and psychologists condemned the spread of spiritualism
as a psychic epidemic, and the spiritualists locked horns with the medical and
psychiatric communities. In 1885 Eduard von Hartmann wrote: "Spiritism is at
present threatening to become a public calamity, to which every government has
to direct its attention"[5]. Wilhelm Wundt proclaimed: "No man of science, truly
independent and without parti pris, could be interested in occult phenomena."[6]
[5] Eduard von Hartmann, "Spiritism," Light, August 22, 1885, p. 409, (trans. C.
C. Massey). On the conflict between the medical and spiritualistic communities,
see J. P. Williams, "Psychical Research and Psychiatry in Late Victorian
Britain: Trance as Ecstasy or Trance as Insanity," in The Anatomy of Madness:
Essays in the History of Psychiatry, ed. W. Bynum, R. Porter, and M. Shephard,
vol. 1 (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1985); E. Brown, "Neurology and
Spiritualism in the 1870's," Bulletin for the History of Medicine 57 (1983): pp.
563-77; and S. Shortt, “Physicians and Psychics: The Anglo-American Medical
Response to Spiritualism, 1870-1890," Journal of the History of Medicine and
Allied Sciences 39 (1984): pp. 339-55. The debates in the Anglo-American context
were broadly similar to the debates in Europe.
[6] Cited by Flournoy, Spiritism and Psychology, trans. H. Carrington (New York:
Harper Bros., 1911), p. 21.
In 1900, Flournoy stated that it was precisely due to the enormous place of
spiritualist, mediumistic, and occult phenomena in the preoccupations of the
public at large that psychology should concern itself with such phenomena and
subject them to rigorous experimental study[7].
[7] Flournoy, "Observations psychologiques sur le spiritisme," IV
Congrès
International de Psychologie, ed. P. Janet (Paris: Alcan, 1901), pp. 103-4.
Through spiritualism a new social role, and indeed a profession, came into
being: that of the medium. In the 1850s a book appeared entitled The Mediums'
Book by Allen Kardec, which had, and indeed continues to have, a tremendous
influence. It was a "how to do W' guide to becoming a medium, containing
everything from practical suggestions to an all-encompassing worldview of
reincarnation. Kardec claimed that "everyone possesses the germ of the qualities
necessary for becoming a medium."[8] He defines a medium in the following way:
"Every one who is in any degree influenced by spirits is, by that very fact, a
medium"[9]. The omnipresence of spirit influence leads Kardec to claim that
"there are few persons in whom some rudiments of medianimity are not found. We
may therefore assume that everyone is a medium."[10] Hence the observation of
mediums held center stage, through those who wished to materialize spiritualist
hypotheses.
[8] A. Kardec, The Medium's Book, trans. Anna Blackwell (São Paulo: Lake, 1975),
p. xv.
[9] Ibid., p. 172.
[10] Ibid.
Kardec's theory of mediumship facilitated its subsequent psychological
interpretation. For Kardec, mediumship was an exemplary way of understanding the
human condition; hence the study of a fully developed medium would provide the
best insight into it. He claimed that the phenomena of mediumship were due to
the intervention of spirits. Thus, his taxonomy of the forms and grades of
mediumship resulted in a pneumatology. In the psychological study of mediums the
exemplary status accorded to them was retained, though now their phenomena were
no longer primarily disclosive of the actions of the spirits, but of the
"subconscious" or "subliminal" imagination. By attempting to find an
intrapsychic source for mediumistic communications, these investigators
decisively contributed to the discovery of the unconscious.
Gothic Psychology
The pioneer of the psychological study of mediumship was Frederic Myers. Andre
Breton wrote:
In spite of the regrettable fact that so many are unacquainted with the work of
F.W.H. Myers, which anteceded that of Freud, I think we owe more than is
generally conceded to what William James called the gothic psychology of F.W.H.
Myers which, in an entirely new and still more exciting world, led us to the
admirable explorations of Théodore Flournoy.[11]
[11] Breton, "The Automatic Message," in
What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings
(London: Pluto, 1989), p. 100. For a reappraisal of Myers, see my -Automatic
Writing and the Discovery of the Unconscious," Spring 54 (1993): pp. 100-131.
For Myers, whom Flournoy called the founder of subliminal psychology, psychology
itself was merely a vehicle to approach what he claimed was the only question
worth asking: namely, does love survive the grave? William James claimed that
Myers's work would be the most important psychology in the twentieth century. In
a series of brilliant articles in the 1880s, Myers charted out the whole domain
of abnormal and supranormal psychology. For Myers, in contradistinction to his
contemporaries such as Freud and Janet, the unconscious, or as he termed it, the
subliminal - the secondary personalities revealed in trance states, dreaming,
crystal gazing, and automatic writing - potentially possessed a higher
intelligence than one's waking or supraliminal personality and often served to
convey messages of guidance.
A critical shift took place through the work of Myers, James and Flournoy. They
argued that the crucial issue was no longer the simple question of whether the
alleged spiritualist experiences were valid or not. Either way, they claimed,
such experiences seemed to promise greater insight into the composition of the
subliminal, and hence into human psychology as a whole.
The investigations of Myers paved the way for Flournoy and provided him with an
initial orientation. Myers ended up embracing the spiritist hypothesis and
attempted to unite science and religion in an overarching synthesis in his
posthumous volume Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Flournoy,
by contrast, attempted to maintain a purely Psychological viewpoint and stressed
that one needed to distinguish between subliminal psychology and Myers's philosophico-religious system. Flournoy saw himself as continuing the former.
Who were the mediums? Flournoy provides a description of the "Current or average
type of ordinary medium":
A person, ordinarily of the feminine sex, who has never experienced psychic
phenomena (except, perhaps a little somnambulism or day-dreams and some
presentiments) experiences a great sorrow, such as the death of a dear one, and
soon after attends a séance for the first time. She tries the table or automatic
writing. Rapidly she becomes a typtological medium, or automatic writer, and
obtains communications which do not surpass, in any way, her own capabilities,
but which strike her and enchant her in the beginning by reason of their
so-called emanation from the dead. Little by little, however, the monotony of
the messages, their intrinsic mediocrity, the rarity or even absence of all
proof convincingly supernatural, sometimes the obsessional or lying character of
the pretended revelations, deprive her of her first enthusiasm, and at the end
of several months, or even years, the medium ceases to practice. Nothing is
usually left to her either of good or evil as the result of this "phase" of
mediumship except a certain latent predisposition which renders her capable of
practicing mediumship with more or less case whenever she tries; and at the
basis of her nature a real inclination for spiritist doctrines, with the desire
to see them one day scientifically demonstrated.[12]
[12] Flournoy, Spiritism and Psychology, p. 46.
For the spiritualists the capacity to receive messages from spirits was the
defining characteristic of mediums. While Flournoy rejected this claim, he
nevertheless argued that mediums formed a specific psychological type. Flournoy
described their distinguishing trait in the following manner:
All the difference between mediums and ordinary people, is that with the latter
there is practically a very marked trench between dream and waking... With the
mediums on the contrary ... there is not a stable barrier between sleep and
waking.[13]
[13] Flournoy, "Nouvelles Observations sur un cas de sonmambulisme avec
glossolalia," Archives de Psychologie 1 (1902): p. 127, trans. mine.
Flournoy described Myers' notion of the subliminal as follows:
Between our ordinary consciousness [the supraliminal] and our latent
consciousness [the subliminal] there are perpetual changes and fluctuations
along their border; the level of separation is not constant; the partition is
not impervious; the threshold is not fixed between these parts of our being;
there occur phenomena of osmosis from one to the other, or mingling, as between
liquids or varying density, when the bottle is shaken... constantly, also,
messages are sent from our subliminal regions to our personal consciousness,
carrying with them, in the most diverse forms (as sensory automatisms) contents
of the most varied value - visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations,
submerged ideas, emotions, irrational impulses, etc.[14]
[14] Flournoy, Spiritism and Psychology, pp. 57-58.
Hence for Myers and Flournoy, the medium represented someone in whom the
threshold between the supraliminal and the subliminal was particularly
permeable, and it was for this reason that mediums became the pre-eminent
subjects of subliminal psychology. They enabled the study of the subconscious
imagination with much greater ease than other subjects.
Medium or Hysteric?
In The Principles of Psychology William James wrote: "Mediumistic possession in
all its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special type of alternate
personality."[15] Mediumship was viewed as a special subset of multiple
personality. The significant difference was that in cases of mediumship the
state of "possession" usually took place only within the séance and seemed
compatible with psychological "health." The question of the interpretation of
mediumship was a contested and divisive issue. The similarity with cases of
hysteria and multiple personality led prominent psychologists such as Charcot,
Binet, and Janet to assimilate it under those headings. In Alterations of the
Personality, while discussing experiments on hysterical subjects, Binet wrote:
"There is no essential difference between the experiments which I have now
described and the more spontaneous experiments that the spiritists practice upon
themselves."[16]
[15] James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890/London:
Macmillan, 1918), p. 393.
[16] Binet, Alterations of the Personality, trans. H. G. Baldwin (London:
Chapman Hall, 896), p. 325.
For proponents of the new French psychopathology, the assimilation of the
mediumistic trance to the trances observed in hysterics rendered superfluous the
specific interpretive paradigms that Myers and Flournoy erected around it. In
1895, Janet argued that the medium was a pathological type and that the
phenomena exhibited: "have laws and are explained in the same manner by a
serious trouble in the mental operation of perception, which we have described
under the name of psychological disaggregation."[17]
[17] Janet, "Le Spiritisme Conteinporain,"
Revue Philosophique 33(1892): p. 419,
trans. mine.
The question that remained for Janet was whether or not the medium was always a
hysteric. He suggests not. He cites a case he observed while in Charcot's
service, with somnambulism and automatic writing, which was clearly not a
hysteric. Concerning mediumship, the following questions remained for Janet
"What are these forms? What is their relation with hysteria? How does automatic
writing modify itself in these cases? These are the problems that one could
resolve by the observation of numerous mediums."[18]
[18] Janet, ibid., p, 424, trans. mine.
Hence for the psychopathologists the cultivation of dissociation that
spiritualism propagated was deplorable, leading them to regard it as a psychic
epidemic. In 1899 Flournoy addressed this issue. He stated that it was
insufficient to simply refer to the phenomena of hypnotism, hysteria, and
dissociation to explain mediumship-though on the surface, such an assimilation
was easy to make. Flournoy argues that mediumship could be accompanied by the
best of health. Hence the public at large was quite right to resist viewing the
phenomena of mediumship as the result of hysteria or autohypnotization. In
addition, he notes that there were Anglo-Saxon scientists who, on the contrary,
saw hysteria as a pathological degeneration of mediumistic genius. Hence
Flournoy argues that mediumship and its distinct manifestations and particular
conditions of appearance should be studied in their specificity, without simply
being classified in pre-existing psychopathological categories.[19]
[19] Flournoy, "Genèse de quelques prètendus messages spirites,"
Revue Philosophique 47 (1899): p. 145.
In Search of a Medium
I found much that was moving, when I had climbed to the top storey of some house
in Soho or Holloway, and, having paid my shilling, awaited, among servant girls,
the wisdom of some fat old medium. That is an absorbing drama, though if my
readers begin to seek it they will spoil it, for its gravity and simplicity
depend on all, or all but all, believing that their dead are near.[20] -
William Butler Yeats
[20] William Butler Yeats, "Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places" (1914)
in Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 30-31.
The seeress is now more common in the land... Modern seeresses are of two
classes: the Bond street class, who divine for the fair sex; and the class who
are studied by eminent psychologists, like Professor James, Professor Richet and
Professor Flournoy.[21] -
Andrew Lang
[21] Andrew Lang, "Three Seeresses," Anglo-Saxon Review, Sept. 1900, p. 63.
From the outset, the task for Flournoy was how to find a medium. Once he had
found her, she would so mark his life, that he would have great difficulty
forgetting her.
In 1892 Flournoy wrote: "We only wait the appearance in our country of a Eusapia
[Palladino] or of a willing Mrs. Piper whom we would welcome with open
arms."[22] Flournoy's casting call for such a figure is well documented in his
letters to William James. On December 18, 1893, Flournoy wrote to James:
[22] Flournoy, Notice sur le laboratoire, p. 17, trans. Goldsmith in "The Life
and Work of Théodore Flournoy," p. 148.
I try to penetrate into the spiritualistic world of our city, but it is rather
difficult. At present they do not have very outstanding mediums; I should be
very content, indeed, if I were only able to observe closely those who
experience the phenomena about which I hear, but they surround themselves with
solitude and darkness.[23]
[23] The Letters of William James and Théodore Flournoy, ed. R. Le Clair
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 29.
After several months without a sign, Flournoy wrote to James on March 18, 1894:
"The few mediums and subjects of telepathic hallucinations etc. whom I have been
able to reach in the last three months in Geneva have not furnished me with
decisive phenomena. "[24]
[24] Ibid., p. 33.
Eighteen months later he had finally found her. On the September 4, 1895, he
wrote to James:
I was forgetting to tell you what has interested me most during the last six
months: it is a certain medium (non-professional, unpaid) of a spiritualist
group, into which they have agreed to accept me in spite of my neutral position,
I have attended about twenty of the séances... psychologically, it is very
interesting, because this woman is a veritable museum of all possible phenomena
and has a repertoire of illimitable variety: she makes the table talk, - she
hears voices, - she has visions, hallucinations, tactile and olfactory, -
automatic writing - sometimes complete somnambulism, catalepsy, trances, etc.
All the automatism, sensory and motor, of Myers, - all the classical hysterial
phenomena - present themselves in turn, in any order and in the most unexpected
fashion, Varying from one time to another. The contents of these phenomena are
always of former events, going back a few or many years, being perfectly
correct, generally having to do with the ancestors of the persons present. The
good faith of the medium is indisputable, and the strangeness of her revelations
are calculated to convince the spiritualists of this group. However, in the 5 or
6 cases which concerned deceased members of my family, I finally had proof that
these persons all had, some fifty years ago, personal contact with the parents
of the medium; and the most natural supposition is that these revelations,
invariably exact and dealing with odd facts, are reminiscences of accounts which
the medium had heard from the mouth of her parents in childhood... The great
majority of the phenomena were evidently the automatic reproduction of forgotten
memories - or memories registered unconsciously. There is actually in the nature
of this medium a second personality who perceives and recalls instants which
escape ordinary awareness... I have the definite impression that the
extraordinary revelations obtained in the séances, for the most part ... are
phenomena of "Cryptomnesia." - What is irritating in this kind of observation is
the difficulty of making it precise, the medium and the members of the group
having a holy terror of everything which resembles an "experiment."[25]
[25] Ibid., pp. 47-48, In a landmark article, "Psychiatry and Its Unknown
History," in Beyond the Unconscious, Ellenberger depicted a recurrent pattern in
which a psychologist encounters a patient, usually female, and develops a long,
complex, and ambiguous relation, which forms the basis of his theories, and
discusses Flournoy and Hélène Smith as a case in point.
Who did Flournoy encounter? Was it really Élise Müller, a Genevan
shop assistant? Or was she someone who at that moment was still malleable,
capable of becoming someone, of taking on any role - including that of a subject
for a yet to be founded psychological science - of becoming a veritable museum
of all possible phenomena," which had already been taxonomied, classified
dissociated" through the analytic lenses of the
new psychology - for whom his text would be her spectacular genesis?
Becoming Hélène
Who was she - who became Hélène Smith? She was born Élise-Catherine Müller on
December 9, 1861, in Martigny, Switzerland. At the time that Flournoy
encountered her, she worked as a salesperson in a silk shop. He was introduced
to her séances by August Lemaitre. At that time, there were two main types of
mediums: professional mediums, who charged a fee, and amateur mediums, who
performed for free. She was of the latter variety, which was to have a marked
effect on what ensued. Lemaitre was the first to write about her. In 1897 he
published an article entitled "Contribution A I'etude des phenomenes psychiques,"[26]
in which Élise Müller appeared; intriguingly, Lemaitre gave her sex as male. She
had not yet become "Hélène Smith." Lemaitre stressed the quality of her
character: "Our medium is a medium of good faith, a medium who says the truth
and in whom I have full confidence."[27] Lemaitre seemed to support the
spiritist interpretation of her material. His article was critically responded
to by M. Lefebure, who deplored the lack of material that Lemaitre published:
[26] Lemaitre, Annales des Sciences Psychiques 7 (1897): pp. 65-68.
[27] Ibid., p. 69, trans. mine.
If, in effect, M. L ... has kept several phrases or speeches of the mediums, if
he will publish them, and if the Indianists would show there, supported by
proofs, a real dialect and an appropriate sense, spiritism would certainly have
made a great step.[28]
[28] Lefébure, "Remarques sur les experiences de M. Lemaitre,"
Annales des
Sciences Psychiques 7 (1897): p. 180, trans. mine.
Thus the stage was already set. In a subsequent issue Flournoy wrote to the
editor to explicitly distance himself from the viewpoint of Lemaitre, who had
cited him by name. In doing so, he announced his project by writing that he
planned to give a purely psychological interpretation "of the so curious"
phenomena of the medium "without recourse to spirits, notions of incarnations, anteriorities, etc. "[29] Thus Flournoy's reading was already from the outset a
revisionist reading.
[29] Flournoy, Annales des Sciences Psychiques 7 (1897): p. 256, trans. mine.
The question remains as to how she acquired her pseudonym. Olivier Flournoy,
Flournoy's grandson, notes that according to the opinion of Denise Werner,
Flournoy's granddaughter, Élise Müller probably chose it herself. He notes,
significantly enough, that Hélène was the name of one of Flournoy's own
daughters, born in 1891, whom Élise would have met.[30]
[30] O. Flournoy, Théodore et Léopold: De Théodore Flournoy
à la Psychanalyse.
Correspondance et documents de Hélène Smith - Ferdinand de Saussure - August
Barth - Charles Michel (Neuchatal: A La Bacconiere, 1986), p. 35.
Entrancing Psychology
The question of trance states has been taken up in many discourses, in the
course of which countless definitions have been proposed and properties adduced.
In The Principles of Psychology William James wrote:
The three states of Charcot, the strange reflexes of Heidenhain, and all the
other bodily phenomena which have been called direct consequences of the
trance-state itself, are not such. They are products of suggestion, the
trance-state having no particular outward symptoms of its own; but without the
trance-state there, those particular suggestions could never have been
successfully made.[31]
[31] James, Principles of Psychology, p. 601. On James's dynamic psychology of
the subliminal, see Eugene Taylor, William James on Exceptional Mental States:
The 1896 Lowell Lectures (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
James trenchantly points out the pitfalls that this held for the development of
psychology:
Any sort of personal peculiarity, any trick accidentally fallen into in the first
instance by some one subject, may, by attracting attention, become stereotyped,
serve as a pattern for imitation, and figure as the type of a school. The first
subject trains the operator trains the succeeding subjects, all of them in
perfect good faith conspiring together to evolve a perfectly arbitrary result.
With the extraordinary perspicacity and subtlety of perception which subjects
often display for all that concerns the operator with whom they are en rapport,
it is hard to keep them ignorant of anything he expects. Thus it happens that
one easily verifies on new subjects what one has already seen on old ones, or
any desired symptom of which one may have heard or read.[32]
[32] James, Principles of Psychology, p. 601.
Thus for James it was psychology itself that was in a state of "heightened
suggestibility," or highly prone to "autosuggestion." James was here backing up
Josef Delboeuf's views. In 1886, Delboeuf wrote:
Without any doubt there is an undeniable influence of the hypnotizer on the
hypnotized-like master, like disciple. But the subjects themselves, principally
the very first one, train the experimenter who directs them, and, without being
aware of it, determine his method and his maneuvers. In a way then, turning the
proverb around, one could say: like disciple, like master. This action of first
disciple on the master is then reported to other disciples who report his
procedures, and thus are created the schools that have the monopoly of special
phenomena.[33]
[33] J. Delboeuf, "De l'influence de l'education et de I'imitation dans le
sonmambulisme provoqué," Revue Philosophique 22 (1886), quoted in Theta Wolf,
Alfred Binet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 149. For recent
elucidations of the significance of Delbouef, see Jacqueline Carroy, Hypnose,
suggestion et psychologie: L'invention de sujets (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1991); and François Duyckaerts, Joseph Delboeuf: Philosophe et
hypnotiseur (Paris: Les Empecheurs de penser en rond, 1992).
For James and Flournoy, the investigation of trance states was a central
question if a psychology worthy of the name was to develop.[34] Within this
enterprise, the investigations of mediums held pride of place. For Flournoy the
crucial issue was the differential interpretation of trance states. Was there a
specificity to the mediumistic trance, in revealing capacities that outstripped
waking consciousness? The possibility of subliminal psychology rested upon an
affirmative answer to this question.
[34] On the issue of trance states, see especially Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen,
"Mimetic Efficacity," in The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, Affect
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
From the time of the Marquis de Puységur, the trance state had been attributed
remarkable properties, such as clairvoyance, telepathy, hypermnesia and
lucidity. These attributes were further explored in the remarkable case of
Justinus Kerner, the "seeress of Prevost," which in many ways forms the main
precursor to Flournoy's study. From Puységur through Kerner came the notion of
the trance as possessing properties that outstripped one's waking self This
tradition differed markedly from the view of the trance held by Charcot, for
whom the capacity to be hypnotized was a symptom of hysteria, which crucially
shaped the views of Freud.
The mediumistic trance is an instance of the cultivation of trance states, which
have been cross-culturally known. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen differentiates two main
approaches to the therapeutics of the trance, one represented by psychoanalysis,
the other by "traditional" therapies. In his reading, the telos of
psychoanalysis resides in attempting to put an end to the trance (the
dissolution of transference, etc.). Such an approach may be termed "allopathic."
In contrast to this lies the "homeopathic" approach of "traditional" therapies,
whose strategies do not take the form of a war against the trance, but attempt
to achieve an altered relation to it. Borch-Jacobsen writes:
It is not a question, in the "traditional" therapies on which hypnosis models
itself, of suppressing the evil of which the patient suffers (his absence of
identity, his mimetic madness), but of attesting to the limit of its
spectacular, ritual aggravation. A few examples, forcibly simplified. The Thonga
"mad of the gods," once having exorcised the evil spirit that possessed them,
became the "mad" of a beneficent spirit.[35] Sister Jeanne of the Angels, at
first possessed by the "demon" Unbain Grandier, became a sort of professional
mystic.[36] Gilberte Rochette, ex-"neurotic," became the great priestess of the
magnetic lodge of Lyon.[37] Bertha von Pappenheim, ex-"case" of double
personality, became the pythoness of Breuer. (Must one add: the analysands, at
the end of the transferential "pass," become analysts?) Consequently, little
matter whether the socalled "symptom" disappeared or not. Above all it is
important that it was taken in charge, raised up, “cultivated" by the so-called
"therapy."[38]
[35] L. de Heutsch, "La folie des dieux," in
Pourquoi l'epouser? (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
[36] M. de Certeau, La Possession de Loudun (Paris: Juillard, 1970).
[37] F. Rausky, Mesmer on la revolution therapeutique (Paris: Payot, 1977).
[38] Borch-Jacobsen, "Dispute," in Hypnose et Psychanalyse: Reponses a Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen, ed. Leon Chertok (Paris: Dunod, 1987), p. 211, trans. mine.
The latter history of Hélène Smith may be adumbrated to the list above in her
'second' life, as a religious painter, Hélène Smith finally found her metier.
Within subliminal psychology there was a valorization of the trance - if the
mediums were not seen as the portal to the beyond, at the very least they were
attributed capabilities and powers far exceeding that accorded to "normal"
psychology.
Flournoy's study was by no means the first lengthy and detailed study of a
medium. The study of Mrs. Piper is usually seen as inaugurating the careful
investigation of the mediumistic trance. These previous studies, such as
Hodgson's of Mrs. Piper, had been primarily motivated by the wish to find and
authenticate genuine proof of the existence of the beyond, and to obtain
veridical communications from the dead. The main alternative paradigms had been
fraud or telepathy, neither of which play a prominent role in Flournoy's text.
The innovation of From India to the Planet Mars was that it was the first major
study of what Myers called pseudo-possession, whose main goal was to disprove
the supernatural origin of the phenomena and to give an account of their
psychogenesis. In such a manner it established a devastating skeptical paradigm
in psychical research.
Discovering the Unconscious
Ellenberger notes that by 1900 four different aspects of the unconscious had
been demonstrated: its conservative function, the capacity of storing a number
of memories and perceptions; its dissolutive function, the tendency for
dissociation and automatic actions; its creative function, and its mythopoetic
function, the capacity to fabricate mythopoetic subliminal romances.[39] It is
significant that Flournoy was a major pioneer in the exploration of all of these
aspects.
[39] Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books,
1970), pp. 315-18.
In From India to the Planet Mars Flournoy often refers almost interchangeably to
the subliminal and the subconscious. While in the case of the former term his
usage denotes a direct continuity with its use by Myers, who coined it, he
vastly expands the meaning of the latter term over its use by its coiner, Janet.
Claparede gives the following account of the advance of Flournoy's conception
over Janet's:
The discovery and psychological and biological interpretation of this creative
activity of the subconscious is that which here seems to me to mark the great
progress of the theory of Flournoy over that of Janet. For the French savant ...
it is above all the normal activity of the spirit which is creative. The other
activity, that of the second self, is only conservatory... To this totally
passive character of the subconscious [Janet's]... Flournoy substitutes a
veritable and original creative activity, often much more powerful than that of
consciousness.[40]
[40] Claparede, "Théodore Flournoy: Sa vie et son oeuvre,"
Archives de Psychologie 17 (1923): p. 58, trans. mine.
In 1900 Flournoy noted that while there was much work on the role of unconscious
perception and latent memories, the subliminal imagination had not been studied
with the care it merited. For Flournoy the subliminal imagination was the source
of the conscious imagination, rather than the other way around. He notes:
This imaginative process of foreign personification has already unfurled itself
in the dream, in hypnotism, and in many pathological obsessions, etc.; but it
acquires a wholly particular practical importance in the phenomena called
mediumistic.[41]
[41] Flournoy, "Observations psychologiques stir le spiritisme," p. 107, trans.
mine.
Because mediumship presented in an exemplary way the workings of the subliminal
imagination, Flournoy held that its study of mediumship could in turn illuminate
the psychology of dreams, hypnosis, and obsessions.
Flournoy emphasized four main functions of the unconscious: its creative
activity, its protective function, its compensatory function, and its play
tendency. These four feature prominently in Flournoy's interpretation of
Hélène's trances: Léopold, her spirit guide, is seen to represent the protective
function or teleological automatism, that intervenes and assists Hélène when she
is in difficulty; her anterior and extraterrestrial existences are seen as
providing a compensation for the vicissitudes of her circumstances; her
creations of the Martian and "Hindu" languages are seen as remarkable acts of
creativity. For Flournoy her trances represent a reversion to an earlier
developmental stage of childhood that, he argues, following the work of Karl Groos, is characterized by play. As play has a preparatory function, this
reversion is compensatory, and enables access to a level of creativity that has
been lost. One could say that Hélène's trances were Flournoy's unconscious,
which he would never again find so fully revealed.
The material for this subliminal activity was provided by the phenomenon of
cryptomnesia.
Cryptomnesia
Since the time of the magnetists, attention has been paid to the hypermnesic
properties of the trance. These capacities seem to suggest that there was a
great deal of information that, although once perceived, now lay outside of the
reach of conscious attention. The unconscious was designated as the location of
these hidden memories. It was principally Flournoy who attempted to map the
extent of this phenomena and trace the transformations that such memories were
subject to while in a latent state.
Cryptomnesia plays a crucial role in Flournoy's analysis as the main alternative
paradigm to the spiritualistic hypothesis. The significance of the phenomenon
had been noted by Janet, who refers to a piece in the Revue Spirite by M. Goupil
on automatic writing that presents an example of cryptomnesia. Janet notes that
he has seen and described similar facts and can supply an explanation:
When a certain sensation finds itself bound to subconscious acts, there is, at
that moment, a particular and corresponding anesthesia for the ordinary
personality. When automatic writing manifests a certain memory with persistence,
there is a corresponding amnesia for the normal consciousness.[42]
[42] Janet, "Le Spiritisme Contemporain," p. 428, trans. mine.
Janet finds such descriptions valuable and regrets that there are not more like
it. It was precisely this lacuna that was filled preeminently by From India to
the Planet Mars.
Flournoy's account of cryptomnesia presented a model of memory that attempted to
account for the interrelation of memory and fantasy. For Flournoy what was
presented as a memory - in the case of Hélène, of an anterior existence - in
actuality represented a hidden and forgotten memory that had been through a
process of subconscious elaboration.[43] Significantly enough, this was
presented in the interregnum between Freud's confessional retraction of his
seduction theory in private to Fliess and his public retraction several years
later.
[43] For a review of the literature on cryptomnesia, see
Ian Stevenson, "Crytomnesia
and Parapsychology," Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 52 (1983):
pp. 1-30; for recent experimental work on cryptomnesia, see Alan Brown and Dana
Murray, "Cryptomnesia: Delineating Inadvertent Plagiarism," Journal of
Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory and Cognition 15 (1989): pp. 432-42.
Flournoy's work on cryptomnesia is also shadowed in the current preoccupation
with "False Memory Syndrome."
Flournoy's Reception
On the first of January, 1900, James wrote to Flournoy:
Upon my word, dear Flournoy, you have done a bigger thing here than you know;
and I think that your volume has probably made the decisive step in converting
psychical research into a respectable science. The tone and temper are so
admirable, the style so rich and human, the intellectual equipment so complete,
that it is a performance which must strike every reader, whatever his antecedent
presuppositions may have been, as of first-rate quality... The great thing about
your writing is your charming style. You and Delboeuf are the only worthy
successors to Voltaire. Your book has only one defect and that is that you don't
dedicate it to me... As I am passing off the scene ... it would have been
pleasant to have my name preserved for ever in the early pages of your immortal
work.[44]
[44] The Letters of William James and Théodore Flournoy, pp. 90-91.
Subsequently, in response to Flournoy's follow up study, "Nouvelles
Observations," on June 13, 1902, James wrote to Flournoy:
It completes an invaluable monograph which puts into our possession for all time
a term of compassion, which all future discussers of "psychic" individuals will
have to take into account of in their conclusions. I need hardly repeat that
your conclusions seem to me to be the only legitimate ones to draw. But what a
wonderful extension the case gives to our notion of subconscious activities and
to cryptomnesic activities... I do wish that someone could continue work with
Miss Smith. Some of her phenomena have grazed so closely upon the supernormal
that one would like to see whether she ever does pass the barrier, as I believe
it can be passed... All that you say about method, etc. is simply splendid,
classic, masterly.[45]
[45] The Letters of William James and Théodore Flournoy, pp. 127-28.
Flournoy's book received a glowing notice in the Bibliothéque Universelle:
"There has been a long time since a new work has produced in our French
Switzerland as great a sensation as the book recently published by Théodore
Flournoy."[46] Claparede notes that due to its success, Flournoy acquired a vast
popularity. After only three months the book went into its third edition. The
Figaro noted: "The world of psychologists has been overturned by the appearance
of a book by M. Théodore Flournoy. It is the history of a case probably unique
in science."[47] Flournoy's successful combination of a literary and
"scientific" style led to extremely laudatory reviews in both the popular press
and in psychological journals. It was read both as a treatise in psychology and
as a novel.
[46] April, 1900, p. 197, trans. mine.
[47] March 7, 1900. Cited by Claparède, "Théodore Flournoy," p. 47, trans. mine.
The following notices give further indication of its reception. The Dial stated:
"To all who can take a serious interest in its subject matter Professor
Flournoy's book will doubtless appear as important as interesting."[48] The
Popular Science Monthly observed:
[48] September 16, 1900, p. 180.
M. Flournoy has been unusually successful in revealing the starting points of
the several automatisms and of connecting them with intelligible developments of
the medium's mental life... This case has many analogies with other cases that
have been recorded, but goes beyond most of them in the complexity and bizarre
character of the unconscious elaborations and feats of memory and creative
imagination which it entails... The special value of this account thus lies in
the accuracy of the description and the success with which the account has been
made thoroughly intelligible and significant.[49]
[49] October, 1900, pp. 662-63.
The Nation noted:
A very few years ago the production of this remarkable book would have been
impossible. Its heroine ... would have excited only scientific aversion or
contempt; and, the superstitious interpretation of the curious phenomena she
exhibits being left unopposed, her case would have served only to confirm the
religious dogmas of spiritualism, or would perhaps have started a new sect whose
faith would have baffled any attempt to ascertain the actual facts. As it is,
the case has had the good fortune to fall into the hands of a singularly
competent, unprejudiced, and tactful investigator in M. Flournoy.[50]
[50] June 14, 1900, p. 462.
The book was favorably reviewed in the American Journal of Psychology by G. W
Patrick, who noted:
As an example of method this book is to be highly commended, and method is what
is needed now in the study of automatism. Any one who should complain that the
case of Mlle. Smith is not sufficiently "remarkable" to merit 420 pages of
minute description fails to understand the importance of the study of secondary
personality. The author's intimations of the infantile and reversionary
character of the secondary personality are of interest in the light of recent
theories.[51]
[51] April 1900, p. 430.
Several months later a second review of the book appeared in the American
Journal of Psychology, this time by E. B. Titchener. He commented that as the
book was attracting so much attention on the part of psychologists as well as
the general public, he would take the opportunity of the publication of the
English translation to discuss it further. Titchener wrote that Flournoy:
had done his work with extreme acumen. Indeed, when one remembers the almost
infinite possibilities of suggestion to which "Mdlle. Smith" has been exposed in
the confines of her trances [a point sufficiently stressed by the author], one
marvels at the high measure of success in explanation that M. Flournoy has
attained. Few psychologists will dispute his conclusion that the "secondary
personalities" "do not have their existence outside of Mdlle. Smith," but have
their genesis within her mental life. And even those who, like the present
writer, have no great affection for the "subliminal self" ... even they will
readily admit that M. Flournoy's methodical study proves the high value of
subconscious imagination as a working hypothesis. [52]
[52] January 1901, p. 267.
In the Psychological Review, Joseph Jastrow praised the book, writing:
We have a truly classical instance of the psychological comprehensiveness of the
automatic self in exceptional cases. M. Flournoy has thus accomplished a
valuable task and has presented his material with unusual skill.[53]
[53] 1900, p. 491.
Jastrow welcomed the skepticism of the book and looked forward to the day when
the phenomena of mediumship would be completely explained through psychological
means alone. He was critical of Flournoy's acceptance of the reality of
telepathy and telekinesis, which he felt was out of harmony with the rest of
Flournoy's skeptical analysis.
Extraterrestrial voyages were all the rage. In the Revue Philosophique, Albert
de Rochas noted:
Today, with the great interest that there has been among the spiritists for the
writings of Flammarion on the planet Mars and the revelations of the
theosophists on the Hindu Masters, it's Mars and the Orient which are
fashionable. For two years I too have studied a distinguished lady who likewise
makes her way in an etheric body on the planet Mars. She moreover describes it
totally differently than Mlle. Smith... This lady had also been an Arab princess
of great beauty, engaged to a sheik, of whom I was then the brother. One sees
that apart from the language, we find here the same psychological details as in
the case of Mlle. Smith.[54]
[54] 49 (1900), pt. 1, p. 652, trans. mine.
Spiritualists were up in arms about the book, for understandable reasons. They
published a whole brochure against Flournoy: Autour "Des Indes a la Planete
Mars."[55] In "Nouvelles Observations," Flournoy trenchantly replied at length
to their critiques. Yet not all spiritualists criticized the book. It received a
lengthy positive review in Light. The reviewer welcomed it as a "mostvaluable
contribution," noting:
[55] Société d'Etudes Psychiques de Genève (Geneva: Georg & Cie, 1901).
It is worthy of consideration by the Spiritualists of England and America,
especially with regard to the fact that it shows how large a part of the
phenomena usually attributed to "control" may be referred to involuntary
emergings from the sub-conscious of the medium. Supposing even that some readers
may differ from the author's conclusions in this respect, yet this book
unquestioningly demonstrates to what a large extent the telepathic transmission
is conditioned and controlled by the medium's subconsciousness.[56]
[56] June 2, 1900, p. 255.
Flournoy's study was used to illuminate similar cases in history. Andrew Lang,
in "Three Seeresses" boldly undertook a comparative historical study of Joan of
Are, Mrs. Piper, and Hélène Smith. He argued that the psychological study of
these later cases enables us to understand their illustrious predecessor, and to
see her apparitions - analogous to Hélène's Léopold, or Mrs. Piper's Phiniut, as
her dream-selves.
In Mind, F. C. S. Schiller hailed the book as a classic. He wrote: "Prof.
Flournoy's medium well deserved the study he has bestowed upon her ... her case
has greatly extended our knowledge of the nature and capacities of the
subliminal consciousness."[57]
[57] 1900, p. 549.
However, Schiller found Flournoy's explanations unsatisfactory. He wrote:
They neither account for the persistence with which such cases assume a
spiritistic form, nor do they supply a principle to account for the selection of
recondite and pseudo-evidential memories in lieu of those which ordinary paths
of association would normally reproduce.[58]
[58] Ibid.
Reviewers highlighted the discrepancy between Flournoy's interpretation of
Hélène's material and her value system. In his review of "Nouvelles
Observations," Schiller noted:
To reduce the ex-Ranee Simandini of Chandraghiri, the ex-Queen of France,
the protégée of discarnate Cagliostro, the recipient of telepathic communication from trusty correspondents throughout the solar system, to a mere dreamer
of dreams constructed by an ill-regulated sub-consciousness must be painful to
the least sensitive vanity.[59]
[59] Schiller, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1903), p. 246.
For some commentators, the powers that Flournoy was claiming for the subliminal
creative imagination seemed to require no less of a leap of faith than the
spiritualist hypothesis. Schiller takes issue with Flournoy's recourse to the
subliminal consciousness to explain her material, and writes: "I cannot feel
there is so much to choose between it and Spiritism."[60]
[60] Ibid., p. 248.
Myers's response took the form of a characteristically nuanced article entitled
"Pseudo-Possession." Describing Flournoy's book as brilliant, he writes: "Few
writers on matter of difficult controversy have ever produced so delightful an
impression of absolute, instinctive candour as Professor Flournoy."[61] Myers
opens his discussion by noting:
[61] Myers, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1901), p. 385.
Professor Flournoy's book indicates in a remarkable way how things have moved in
the psychology of the last twenty years. The book, - a model of fairness
throughout, - is indeed, for the most part, critically destructive in its
treatment of the quasi-supernormal phenomena with which it deals. But what a
mass of conceptions a competent psychologist now takes for granted in this
realm, which the official science of twenty years ago would scarcely stomach
hinting at![62]
[62] Ibid, p. 396.
The spectrum of laudatory response is impressive. Historians have been much
taken with the contemporary response (or lack of response) to Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams. Initially at least, it was quite eclipsed by
Flournoy's exploration of Hélène's subliminal dreams.
Multiple Personality - Part I
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was an epidemic of multiple
personality. In a pivotal study, lan Hacking studied the history of Multiple
Personality Disorder, focusing on the various hosts that facilitated it.[63]
Hacking argues that at the end of the nineteenth century spiritualism was one of
the main hosts for multiple personality, due to the possibility that one of the
secondary personalities was in actuality a discarnate entity, or, in other
terms, the dead. This transition from spiritualism to multiple personality is
very clearly depicted in From India to the Planet Mars. While Flournoy rejects
the extrapsychic existence of the figures in Hélène's trances, and regards them
as intrapsychic, he still regards them as personalities. In this way, the
psychologization of mediumship leads to a multiple personality model.[64]
[63] Hacking, "Multiple Personality Disorder and its Many Hosts,"
History of the
Human Sciences 5 (1992): pp. 3-31.
[64] The transition from spiritualism to multiple personality in the American
context is well depicted by Michael Kenny in The Passion of Ansel Bourne:
Multiple Personality in American Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1986), which, however, omits to take account of the significance of From
India to the Planet Mars, which provides the crucial link between the
spiritualistically inspired investigations of Mrs. Piper and Morton Prince's
Purely psychological study of Miss Beauchamp.
From India to the Planet Mars was the first psychological study of multiple
personality that became a best-seller, which played a key role in its
dissemination. Further, its dramatic novelistic style presented the prototype
for Morton Prince's classic study of multiple personality, The Dissociation of a
Personality.[65] In this regard, Flournoy's book was stylistically innovative,
as it established the genre of the novelistic book-length treat merit of
multiple personality, which has continued to play a crucial role in its cultural
dissemination to this day.
[65] See especially Ruth Leys, "The Real Miss Beauchamp: Gender and the Subject
of Imitation" in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. J. Butler and J. Scott
(New York, Routledge, 1992). Leys's analysis of interplay between Prince and
Miss Beauchamp, particularly the manner in which she depicts Prince's relegation
and objectification of mimesis, in modeling the psychological subject, is very
pertinent in relation to the interplay between Flournoy and Hélène Smith.
The Bride Stripped Bare, by her Bachelors Even
In "Nouvelles Observations," Flournoy gave a lengthy supplementary account of
the subsequent development of her mediumship. He wrote: It seemed to me certain
on the whole that the close reading of From India by Hélène influenced the
subsequent development of her mediumship."[66] Her Martian and ultra-Martian
cycles were followed by Uranian and Lunar cycles, that broadly speaking, had the
same structure.
[66] Flournoy, "Nouvelles Observations," p. 105, trans. mine.
The clamorous reception of the book was not without effects on its heroine. She
felt betrayed by Flournoy and particularly incensed at the mockery that she was
subject to in some of the press notices.[67] She barred Flournoy from attending
her séances. The aftermath of the book led to a bitter and prolonged dispute
between Flournoy and Hélène, which ended in a complete rupture. The overriding
reason for this was Flournoy's completely counter-posed interpretation of her
mediumship. In their correspondence, Flournoy addressed his letters to Élise
Müller. She usually replied as Hélène Smith. She demanded the royalties for the
book. Flournoy eventually gave her half the royalties and donated the other half
to the Archives de Psychologie, which he founded. Flournoy protested that she
was having all the benefits of being both a fee-paying and a non-fee-paying
medium.[68]
[67] See Hélène Smith's letter in the Gazette de Lausanne, January 8, 1902, in
reply to a review, in 0. Flournoy, Théodore et Léopold, pp. 134-35.
[68] Flournoy to Charles Pospech, March 29, 1902, in O. Flournoy, Théodore et
Léopold, p. 152.
Her instant celebrity, however, was not without its benefits. Hélène Smith
attracted the attention of a wealthy American benefactress whose patronage
enabled her to leave her job and devote herself to her calling. For a while she
continued to give séances, but she eventually ceased to do them altogether, and
increasingly she developed a new orientation and devoted herself to religious
paintings. In 1907, Lemaitre wrote a study of this new turn, in which he
claimed:
In its essential lines, the current artistic phase of Hélène remains
sufficiently
comprehensible to our eyes and does not differ appreciably from her other
somnambulic productions... This automatic activity is set up by the same
process.[69]
[69] Lemaitre, "Un Nouvelle Cycle Somnambulique de Mlle Smith: Ses peintures
religieuses," Archives de Psychologie 7 (1907): pp. 66-67, trans. mine.
After her death on June 29, 1929 in Geneva, her paintings were exhibited in
Geneva and Paris, and were the subject of a lengthy volume by Walter Deonna, De
la Planete Mars en Terre Sainte: Art et Subconscient. Un medium peintre: Hélène
Smith, which also chronicles the subsequent events in her life. Deonna notes
that she dreamed of writing a second volume of From India to the Planet Mars,
which she would publish herself, written in a wholly other spirit. He claims
that the rupture with Flournoy was one of the causes of her new mystical
orientation, as she sought to add another coloration to her fantasies to evade
his critique. Hélène herself wrote in 1912:
This man constantly tormented and agitated me. He brought troubling waves in my
life... The work of the tableaux would never have been executed if I had
remained in Flournoy's entourage, I am persuaded of it. God delivered,
precipitating events, opening a new way for me.[70]
[70] De la Planète Mars en Terre Sainte: Art et subconscient. Un médium peintre:
Hélène Smith (Paris: De Boccard, 1932), p. 54, trans. mine.
Claparède contested Deonna's view of her new turn, stating on the contrary that
she always had a penchant for painting, which she was able to pursue due to her
newfound financial freedom.[71]
[71] Claparede, review of De la Planete Mars en Terre sainte, Archives de
Psychologie 23 (1932): p. 376.
In the aftermath of their involvement, she felt persecuted by Flournoy. After
being observed by him for years, she felt that he was spying on her. In 1909,
she wrote: "M. F... continues to send me spies. To what end, I don't know.
Perhaps he wants to make an article concerning me."[72] Her experiences with
Flournoy clearly left a mark. She refused to exhibit, sell, or even let her
paintings be photographed, though she did eventually donate them to a museum in
Geneva. Her work continued to attract the interest of psychologists and the
popular press. In 1927 she wrote:
[72] De la Planète Mars en Terre Sainte, p. 52, trans. mine.
I am not someone who loves to exhibit herself. I do not wish at any price to be
a subject. I have ... suffered too much, been too maltreated because of this
gift of mediumship, which I did not seek out.[73]
[73] Ibid., p. 56, trans. mine.
Hélène claimed that she had no need of the control of men, which would be like a
profanation, and that in her religious mission she felt only the need of the
control of God.
Deonna notes that while she renounced her belief in the reality of her Hindu and
Martian existences, she remained convinced that she had been Marie Antoinette,
and she remained an adept of spiritualism. She remained unmarried, never meeting
the "dreamed of being, the fiancé of the soul," whom she awaited. Deonna noted
that friends and visitors saw her as a "priestess of the beyond", and that
entering her apartment on the rue Liotard felt like entering a chapel. In 1927,
to the great loss of posterity, she declined the invitation of Charles Richet to
write her memoirs.[74]
[74] Cited in ibid., p. 4.
Dreaming of Hélène
After the publication of From India to the Planet Mars, Hélène claimed that she
was the cause of Flournoy's notoriety[75] and the "modest instrument" of his
glory.[76] If Flournoy had "made" Hélène Smith, she, nevertheless, would claim
that she had made him. Flournoy, no less than Hélène, was irrevocably marked by
their encounter. For Hélène this took the form of a turning away from anything
that resembled her time in "Flournoy's entourage." On his part, Flournoy never
ceased to search, unsuccessfully, for another Hélène, This very search seemed to
suggest that he was attempting to decipher something about their encounter that
he had missed at the time. He ended "Nouvelles Observations" on a less than
sanguine note. His reflections highlight a phenomena for which Martin Orne would
later coin the term "demand characteristics":
[75] Hélène Smith, letter to the editor, Gazette de Lausanne, January 7, 1902,
in 0. Flournoy, Théodore et Léopold, p. 135.
[76] Hélène Smith to Flournoy, March 4, 1901, ibid., p. 121.
It is not good that a medium be studied for too long by the same investigator,
because the latter, despite his precautions, inevitably ends by shaping the so
suggestible subconscious of his subject... In other terms, a sort of
ossification menaces the medium who knows - or believes - herself to be an
object of continual surveillance from near and far, puts her little by little in
a quasi-impossibility to furnish other categories of phenomena than that which
she sub-consciously imagines to be waited for by him.[77]
[77] Flournoy, "Nouvelles Observations," p. 116, trans. mine.
From India to the Planet Mars was Flournoy's masterpiece. Never again would he
find such a subject, though he went to great lengths attempting to do just that.
In 1911, not long after he had finally come to a settlement with Hélène,
Flournoy published his last major work on mediums, which can in part be read as
his response to their embroilment, and as an auto-critique.
In March 1898 Flournoy had sent out a questionnaire on mediumship to the members
of the Société d'Etudes Psychiques de Genève, and received seventy-two replies.
Ten years later he did a follow-up study. Flournoy's survey was one of the most
detailed qualitative surveys that had been conducted up till then in psychology.
However, he did not get the results he hoped for:
This was hardly the mine of exceptional cases and marvellous phenomena which I
had dreamed of... nothing for example that approaches the beautiful subliminal
imagination, creator of languages and myths, which at the same time I saw unfold
in the somnambulisms of Mlle Smith.[78]
[78] Flournoy, Espirits et Médiums: Mélanges de Métapsychique et de psychologie
(Geneva: Kundig, 1911), p. 2, trans. mine.
Flournoy found the replies "perfectly indigestible." However, he found himself
morally obliged to his respondents to publish the material. He was faced with
the ethical dilemma of how to maintain his critical freedom and respect the
rights of the respondents, who were deprived of replying in the volume. As a
solution he published the book in two parts: the first containing the verbatim
replies, and the second his general reflections. While Flournoy had obtained the
permission from each individual to publish their replies, he notes that the
practical impossibility of maintaining the anonymity of subjects will continue
to be the great obstacle to publications of mediumistic phenomena. These
questions still vex psychologists and clinicians today. Flournoy's discussion
and attempt to resolve them remains one of the most sophisticated.
Flournoy's survey shows his sensitivity to the problem of using a single case as
a paradigm, in marked contrast to Freud and Jung. His scrupulous documenting of
a failed experiment that undercuts his thesis shows his integrity. The survey
suggested that Hélène Smith was an atypical case and it questioned the theories
he had developed from her case. Flournoy had hoped that his study of the
development of her mediumship would in turn shed light on psychological
development in general: such was the dream of subliminal psychology.
The singularity of the encounter was missed by Flournoy, yet it continued to
haunt him. The threat was posed - could his psychology itself be a subconscious
subliminal romance, one which equally had to dissimulate its origins? Was his
"science" the mirror image of her subliminal romances?
The Unconscious: Structured like Martian?
A dramatic moment ensued, when, faced with the "Hindu" language of Hélène,
Flournoy called upon the services of his friend the linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure. The linguist Roman Jakobsen was later to describe their collaboration
as:
a beautiful example of collaboration between psychologists and linguists that
should be imitated and inspire new researches in the topic of the structural
analysis of the delirious, individual manifestations of glossolalia.[79]
[79] Cited by Jean-Jacques Courtine, 'Tour Introduire aux glossolalies: Un
hommage àMichel de Certeau," Langages 91 (1988): p. 5, trans. mine. This
special issue shows the paradigmatic role that is still played by Hélène Smith
in the study of glossolalia.
Her Martian language attracted the attention of another linguist, Victor Henry,
who devoted a whole book to it.[80] In his review of Henry's book, Flournoy
noted: It is very poignant to see a professional linguist consecrate a volume to
the analysis of an idiom that does not exist, or at least only exists in the
subconscious imagination of a somnambulist."[81]
[80] Henry, Le Langage Martien (Paris: J. Maisonneuve, 1901). For a commentary
oil Henry's text, see Marina Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary
Languages and Their Inventors, trans. C. Slater (London: Athlone, 1991).
[81] Flournoy, Archives de Psychologie 1 (1901): p. 99, trails. mine.
In his book, Henry argued that the processes that underlay the creation of
Martian were the same processes that underlay natural languages. Hence the study
of Martian provided the unique opportunity for catching a glimpse into the
genesis of languages.
Hélène's linguistic practices continue to attract the attention of linguists
today and feature at the forefront of debate in part, but not only on account of
the role of Saussure. Marina Yaguello notes that at the turn of the century
there was massive outbreak of speaking in tongues, or glossolalia. This has a
contemporary parallel in the emergence of the Pentecostalist church, with
currently around eight million members, mostly in the United States, which
serves as the contemporary host for glossolalia and xenoglossia (speaking in
unknown languages). Yaguello notes the significance of Hélène Smith for
linguistics as follows:
Her case is exemplary for two reasons. In the first place, there is the quality
of the phenomenon observed. The languages devised by the medium, especially
Martian, reach a level of sophistication, consistency and permanence which gives
them, in spite of their infantile character, a sufficiently convincing
pseudo-linguistic character to have caught the attention of linguists as
distinguished as Saussure and V. Henry. This formal perfection is rarely
attained by other subjects recorded in history. The second reason has to do with
the observer and the quality of his observations. If cases of pathological
glossolalia have benefited from the attention of psychiatrists, those involving
mediums or members of religions sects have for the most part only been described
by believers. It is only recently that scholars with a neutral stance towards
the phenomena have begun to study it using the methods of experimental
psychology... Flournoy's study, in spite or rather because of the ambiguity of
the author's relationship to the medium, remains a model of its kind.[82]
[82] Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language, p. 88. Yaguello presents a detailed
discussion of' Hélène's Martian, locating it ill the context of the invention of
imaginary languages. See also her appendix "Psychanalyse et linguiste: première rencontre" in the 1983 edition of
Des Indes à la planète Mars.
Yaguello notes that crucial linguistic questions arise from Hélène's languages:
first, are they, properly speaking, languages, and if so, do they point to a
universal linguistic competence, such as Noam Chomsky might claim? She answers
the first question, like Flournoy and Henry before her, in the affirmative:
However poor it is both in structure and vocabulary, Martian does seem to fulfil
the double function of language postulated by Benveniste: 1) semiotic: it is a
system with identifiable signs; 2) semantic: these signs can be combined in
utterances in such a way to produce meanings.[83]
[83] Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language, p. 95.
The significance of Saussure's reading of Hélène's "Hindu" is taken up by Tzetan
Todorov. He seizes upon Saussure's comments on the genesis of her languages,
seeing them as a window onto the genesis of Saussure's own linguistics. Saussure
is struck by the remarkable fact that one feature of her "Hindu" language, its
absence of the letter "f," exactly duplicates the structure of Sanskrit. Todorov
focuses on this episode of the missing f. He writes that Saussure (who for
Hélène was the reincarnation of the Hindu "Miousa") is more prepared "to
acknowledge the supernatural (transmigration of Mlle. Smith's soul) than to
modify his method of investigation - which here touches upon the principle of
symbolic functioning."[84]
[84] Todorov, "Saussure's Semiotics," in
Theories of the Symbol (London:
Blackwell, 1982), p. 259.
Todorov claims that Saussure fails to admit the existence of a "logic of
symbolism other than that of language." Todorov argues that it is here that
Henry's interpretation of the missing "f," surpasses Saussure's. For Henry, her
Martian and Sanskritoid productions are subconsciously governed by an injunction
to entirely avoid French. Hence as the word "French" begins with the letter "f,"
she avoids this as much as possible. For Todorov, the significance of this
episode lies in the fact that:
it prefigures in a remarkable way Saussure's relations with symbolic phenomena
to the very end of his career ... his impasses have exemplary value: they
anticipate those of a large sector of modern linguistics.[85]
[85] Ibid., p. 265.
One reviewer of Henry's book put forward a more prosaic alternative
interpretation for the missing "f": "I should rather ascribe it to a peculiar
paralysis of certain muscles of the lips which may beset her in her abnormal
states of consciousness.[86]
[86] Fred Corybeare, review of Le Langage Martien,
Hibbert Journal, July 1903,
p. 54.
Hélène's languages feature prominently in Michel de Certeaus's work on
glossolalia, for whom she again takes on the role of a paradigm case. For de
Certeau, "What utopia is to social space, glossolalia is to oral cornmunication."[87]
He notes:
[87] Michel de Certeau, "Utopies Vocales: Glossolalies,"
Traverses 20 (1980): p.
28, trans. mine.
This fiction of language never ceases to be taken for a language and treated as
such. It never ceases to be compelled to mean something. It excites an impulse
to decrypt and decipher which never wearies and which always supposes the
organization of meaning lurking behind the series of sounds.[88]
[88] De Certeau, "Utopies Vocales," p. 30, trans. Dan Rosenberg, in "Linguistic
Utopias: Michel de Certeau, Glossolalia and the Martian Language," paper
presented to the Theory, Culture and Society Tenth Anniversary Meeting, August
18, 1992.
De Certeau argues that glossolalia has continually been interpreted "as if one
must write in the place where it speaks."[89] For de Certeau, such
interpretations are marked by a "hermeneutic morality," in which the privileged
terms of sense, reality, and work replace those of masks, fiction, play, atopia.
He notes however, that there exists a troubling equivocation between glossolalia
and its interpretation:
[89] De Certeau, "Utopies Vocales," p. 30, trans. mine.
But the explication, a stranger to the glossolalic saying, is at the same time
necessary: a stranger, because in absenting itself of all effective language,
this saying abandons to the commentary all the burden of meaning... It
implicates already the exteriority of a commentary, strangeness necessary to its
proper autonomization.[90]
[90] Ibid., p. 32, trans. mine. For a study of Hélène Smith's glossolalia in the
context of its scene of enunciation, see Mireille Cifali, "Une glossolale et ses
savants: Élise Müller alias Hélène Smith," in La Linguistique Fantastique, ed.
J. Clims (Paris: De Noel, 1985).
De Certeau's analysis has been taken up and critically extended recently by Dan
Rosenberg, who challenges de Certeau's reading, arguing:
It is outstandingly clear that the desire operative here was not de Certeau's
unfettered desire to speak but rather a desire to (linguistic) structure... The transgressiveness of Smith's séances lay not, as de Certeau contends, in their
trajectory out of language and toward pure vocalization but in their repeated
competence at producing convincing simulacra of language outside of the
legitimating places where language ought to have been.[91]
[91] Rosenberg, "Linguistic Utopias," p. 6.
The issues raised in these linguistic discussions by implication concern not
only the interpretation of Hélène's linguistic productions, but also of all her
material. As such they pose questions concerning the status of psychology itself
and the equivocal interrelation between Hélène's material and Flournoy's
psychology - the one designated as fantastic, the other sanctioned as "science."
The subsequent dispute between Flournoy and Hélène over copyright, authorship,
and property, staged this issue in a spectacular fashion.
In his reading of Hélène's languages, Courtine writes:
To the simple interrogation: "who speaks and to whom?", the glossolalist
replies, "It is an Other than me who speaks; and this other is again she/he to
whom my speak addresses itself, since it is his/hers."[92]
[92] J-J. Courtine, "Les Silences de la Voix,"
Langages 91 (1988): p. 9, trans.
mine.
The mode in which this question of "who speaks" is played out in glossolalia is
taken up by Marina Yaguello. She writes:
What distinguishes the glossolalist from someone speaking an ordinary language
is that he or she isn't the person speaking. The relationship of person is
missing, there is no I standing at the source of the utterance at the centre of
the discourse, no I taking responsibility for the act of utterance and involved
by virtue of this in a spatio-temporal continuity. Hélène Smith speaks at the
dictation of spirits and extra-terrestrial beings... And yet in glossolalia
there certainly is an ego at the centre, but it is a non-linguistic ego, which
unlike the I of a language system, the I acting as a "shifter" pronoun in
speech, cannot pass from one individual to another. It is outside the social
system, and belongs to the speaker, who takes possession of language by this
means.[93]
[93] Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language, p. 96.
The temptation would clearly be felt to assign another subject to the site of
enunciation, to put an end to this troubling equivocation-hence the nomination
of multiple personality - which is Flournoy's move. This other speech becomes a
site around which another scene becomes nominated, organized and cartographized
- the unconscious. However, this annexation restores this speech to the type of
intelligibility that it would exceed. Here, the possibility of a psychology that
exceeded classical introspective psychology, with its self-transparent locutor
at the center, was glimpsed, only for it to be subsumed by the interpretive
strategies that would install another subject as the source of this other
speech.
In respect to this endless game of commentary on Hélène Smith, Rosenberg aptly
comments:
The example of Hélène Smith indicates that the compulsion to mean, to signify,
does not only elide the desire to speak, to vocalize, to articulate. It also
elides the desire to language, desire to structure, to invention ... we thus
need to examine our own tendency to put back up the boundaries that Hélène Smith
did us the service of breaking down.[94]
[94] Rosenberg, "Linguistic Utopias," p. 7.
Life After Mars: Flournoy's Decline
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychological interest in
mediums waned dramatically. While the public interest in mediums was safeguarded
by the perennial nature of the question of life after death, the interest of
psychologists was not.
The mode in which the psychological study of mediums contributed to its own
decline is apparent in Stanley Hall's 1918 article, "A Medium in the Bud."[95]
Hall narrates how he was consulted by a young woman of twenty, in an Incipient
stage" of mediumship, which included an account of life on Mars. Following
Flournoy, he saw her fantasies as an outcome of adolescent developmental
processes, a compensation for what was lacking in her environment. In addition,
Hall puts forward the following motive for the cultivation of such states. Hall
highlights the:
[95] Hall, American Journal of Psychology 29 (1918): pp. 144-58.
love of the utter abandon involved in this state. Inhibitions are thrown to the
wind. While the normal ego is controlled, the control can let itself go and
express the very deepest and most secret things in the soul, often with a
frankness that ordinary social conventions would make impossible. Thus there is
a sudden freedom from responsibility and sensitive, shrinking, repressed
natures, who would above all things dread to shock or violate convention in
phrase or manner, are freed from the necessity of even being agreeable or primly
proper, which must often become irksome, hedged about as they are by so many
senseless taboos. In the trancoidal state these are all removed, for the nonce,
from one level of her soul, and she can blurt out things which ordinarily
maidenly modesty would never permit her to say or hear. Such tender and delicate
girls often feel themselves possessed by some rugged, potent and uncouth male
spirit, and delight to swagger in diction and manner, to be blunt, slangy, to
uncork and vent elements of conduct for which nothing in normal experience gives
such opportunity or such incentive. The girl is thus using new powers and some
sense may be the better for it.[96]
[96] ibid., p. 154.
Hall's interpretation significantly valorizes the freedom from social
constraints and taboos occasioned by the trance, in offering young women
opportunity to circumvent traditional gender stereotypes. Hall's essay provided
one of the swan songs of the psychological study of mediums. For once the
productions of the mediumistic trance are seen as simply the manifest level of
latent, repressed sexuality, the specific interest occasioned by them is lost.
The study of mediums would then have little specific to recommend it, nor would
it shed light in turn on the general patterns of development, as Flournoy
dreamed. In 1909, in his "The Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'," while
expounding the unexplained residuum of metaphysics, James concludes:
Vast, indeed, and difficult is the inquirer's prospect here, and the most
significant data for his purpose will probably be just these dingy little
mediumistic facts which the Huxleyan minds of our time find so unworthy of their
attention.[97]
[97] James, "The Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher,'" in
William James on
Psychical Research, ed. Gardner Murphy and Robert Ballou (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1961), p. 325.
However, James's prospectus was not to be, and it was his rival Stanley Hall who
provided what could be taken as the epitaph for this epoch in psychology:
The next generation will be hardly able to believe that prominent men in this
way wasted their energies in chasing such a will-of-the-wisp as the veracity of
messages or the reality of a post-mortem existence, which they no more prove
than dreams of levitation prove that man can hover in the air at will.[98]
[98] Hall, "A Medium in the Bud," p. 154.
The 1909 Congress of Experimental Psychology in Geneva, over which Flournoy
presided, was the last at which mediumship featured on the agenda. A whole
section was devoted to mediumistic phenomena. Flournoy opened the section by
defending its inclusion, which some suspected was a dangerous intrusion of
occultism and spiritualism into the discussion. Flournoy claimed that it was no
longer possible for scientific psychology to be disinterested in the material
phenomena of mediums, such as Eusapia Palladino. Five persons were invited. but
only one accepted.[99] From 1900 to 1909, the tide had clearly turned. The
mediums were the exemplar of subliminal psychology. With the decline of
psychological interest in mediums, subliminal psychology found itself without a
subject. Within psychical research, the paradigm shifted away from the detailed
investigation of mediums, with their lack of replicability, to the controlled
experimental studies in telepathy under laboratory conditions, predominantly
associated with J. B. Rhine.[100]
[99] Compte-Rendu du Sixème Congrès internationale de psychologie, ed. Edouard
Claparede (Geneva: Kundig, 1909), p. 827.
[100] The shift in psychical research from the in-depth study of mediums to the
laboratory-controlled experiments with card-guessing games, which dominated
modern parapsychology, and which ironically reversed Flournoy's intellectual
trajectory, is well depicted in S, Mauskopf and M. McVaugh, The Elusive Science:
Origins of Experimental Psychical Research (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1980).
Geographically speaking, Vienna and Zurich prevailed over Geneva as the leading
capitals for the exploration of the unconscious. The ascendance of
psychoanalysis has in several respects been seen as responsible for Flournoy's
decline. Initially, the paradigm of the hysteric and more critically its
particular interpretative school - psychoanalysis - took over. it was claimed
that Flournoy failed to comprehend the role of the transference and sexuality,
nowhere more so than in his analysis of Hélène Smith. Olivier Flournoy suggests
that compared to psychoanalysis, Flournoy's weakness was a reticence toward
sexuality.[101] In sum, the psychoanalytic critique was that From India to the
Planet Mars was not Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria." Claparede countered this charge by claiming that Flournoy, in seeing
Léopold as
a "hypnoid formation of essentially psycho-sexual origin" grasped the role of
sexuality in hysterical accidents, but dealt with the issue discretely out of a
sense of delicacy for Hélène.[102]
[101] 0. Flournoy, Théodore et Léopold, p. 18.
[102] Claparede ,"Théodore Flournoy. Sa vie et son oeuvre," p. 63.
At a professional level, Flournoy worked within pre-existing institutional
structures. His institutional achievements, such as the Archives de Psychologie
and the psychological laboratory at the University of Geneva, were marked by the
open and pluralistic way in which they encompassed and encouraged psychological
research, rather than forming his own tightly perimetered school of psychology,
in sharp contrast to Freud and Jung.[103] Flournoy's work was marked by an
excessive modesty; rather than introduce new and distinctive terminology,
Flournoy preferred to use existing terms and simply add a new inflection.
[103] On the Freud-Flournoy relation, see Mireille Cifali, "Les chiffres de
l'imtime," in the 1983 edition of Des Indes à la planète Mars; on Flournoy's
pivotal role in the Freud-Jung break, see Mireille Cifali, "Le fameux couteau de
Lichtenberg," Le Bloc-Notes de la psychanalyse 4 (1984): pp. 171-88. Flournoy's
influence on Jung was greater and more lasting than Freud's. On their relation,
see James Witzing, "Théodore Flournoy: A Friend Indeed," Journal of Analytical
Psychology 27 (1982): pp. 131-48; and my "A Woman Called Frank," Spring 50
(1990): pp. 26-56, which reconstructs the biography of Frank Miller, Flournoy's
student who became Jung's key paradigm case.
Mireille Cifali states that Freud triumphed over Flournoy because he offered a
therapeutic practice.[104] Clearly, not the least of the attractions of
psychoanalysis was its provision of a new professional identity and means of
acquiring an income. Flournoy, together with Myers and James, felt that a purely
clinical approach was an inadequate basis from which to develop a psychology of
the personality. Flournoy attempted to establish a comparative psychology based
on the in-depth study of lives, rather than a psychotherapy. This agenda was
eclipsed in psychology until it was revived by Gordon Allport and, in
particular, by Henry Murray, who can be seen as implicitly arguing for a return
to Flournoy's agenda.[105]
[104] Cifali, "Théodore Flournoy, la decouverte de l'inconscient," p. 127.
[105] Gordon Allport, The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science
(New York: Social Science Research Council, 1942); Henry Murray et al.,
Explorations in Personality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938).
In the Archives de Psychologie, one can graphically see another reason for
Flournoy's decline, as the figure of the medium becomes increasingly replaced by
that of the child, notably through the early publications of ,Jean Piaget.[106]
[106] On Flournoy's influence on Piaget through his psychology of religion, see
Fernando Vidal, "Jean Piaget and the Liberal Protestant Tradition," in
Psychology in Twentieth-Century Thought and Society, ed. M. Ash and W Woodward
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
For Flournoy the pre-eminent tool for psychological exploration was hypnosis, and
in From India to the Planet Mars he presented one of the most detailed
investigations into trance states. After the turn of the century, interest in
hypnosis greatly declined. While hypnosis was rehabilitated through the behaviorist methodology of Clark Hull, it was not until the work of Charles Tart
and others on "altered states of consciousness,"[107] that the creative
potentiality of trance states that so interested Flournoy returned to the
psychological agenda, though without reference to his work. Likewise while
Flournoy's "play theory" of mediumship antedates the now-fashionable
interpretations of hypnotic phenomena in terms of role playing, with Flournoy
this led to a dynamic psychology of the subliminal, rather than to a
sociobehavioral perspective.
[107] See Charles Tart, ed., Altered States of Consciousness, rev. ed. (New
York: Harper-Collins 1990).
From India to the Planet Mars was one of the classic paradigm cases of multiple
personality. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the reported
incidence of multiple personality, together with the interest in dissociative
phenomena in general, dramatically declined. The recent revival of Multiple
Personality Disorder looks to Janet, rather than Flournoy, as its patron, in
line with its psychopathological cast.
Hélène Smith: The Patron Saint of Surrealism
While Flournoy and Hélène were largely forgotten by psychology, they were
regarded as patrons by surrealism. Breton notes, commenting on the heroine of
his novel Nadja:
The magic Nadja surrounded herself with was the mind's compensation for the
heart's defeat. We see something similar in the case of the celebrated medium
Hélène Smith, whose marvellous peregrinations from planet to planet ... seemed
to be aimed mainly at capturing the attentions of Théodore Flournoy, who was
caring for her, and whose love she had not managed to win.[108]
[108] Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. M. Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993), p. 108.
Throughout From India to the Planet Mars, Flournoy never ceases to marvel at the
artistic and dramatic powers of Hélène's subconscious creative imagination. On
one reading what is left of her romances when shorn of their spiritualistic garb
is precisely art. Flournoy was indeed extremely interested in the artistic
capabilities that could be released through trance states and he pursued these
questions in his report on Magdeleine G., and her somnambulist
choreographies.[109] While hypnotized, the untrained Magdeleine performed
exquisite dance settings to musical accompaniments, such as by Chopin. The
interest that Magdeleine held for Flournoy resided in the fact that the artistic
potentiality revealed seemed to transcend her normal capabilities. His
descriptions suggest that he was enchanted by her choreographies. Flournoy was
interested in the question of whether this hidden creative self might exist in
everyone. He argues that hypnosis removed the conscious inhibitions, which
enabled the latent creative capacity to emerge. In "The Automatic Message,"
Breton explicitly acknowledges the debt of surrealism to the explorations of
Myers and Flournoy, and credits subliminal psychology as providing one of the
conditions of possibility of surrealism. Breton states that Surrealism
highlighted "what remained of mediumistic communication once we had freed it
from the insane metaphysical implications it otherwise entailed."[110] It was
clearly Flournoy who paved the way for this liberation. In "The Automatic
Message," Breton clearly states the indebtedness of modern art to mediumship,
asking, for instance, 'What is Art Nouveau if not an attempt to generalize and
adapt mediumistic drawing, painting and sculpture to the art of furniture and
decoration?"[111] At a stylistic level, mediums could flagrantly transgress
artistic and linguistic conventions, since their productions usually were not
presented as artworks. More significant was the utilization of automatic writing
and drawing as a means of production.[112] From this perspective, Breton
described "the prodigious" Hélène Smith quite simply as "the richest case of
all.[113]
[109] Flournoy, "Chorégraphie somnambulique; le cas de Magdeleine G.,"
Archives
de Psychologie 3 (1904): pp. 357-74.
[110] Breton, Conversations, p. 64.
[111] Breton, "The Automatic Message," p. 104.
[112] On this issue, see my "Automatic Writing and the Discovery of the
Unconscious.
[113] Breton, "The Automatic Message," p. 102.
Feminists Reclaim the Mediums
Recent feminist historiography has done a great service in opening up a
reappraisal of the social and psychological construction of mediumship. Their
work has done a great deal in recovering from oblivion many lost heroines. They
have depicted the service rendered to the struggle for women's rights by the
spiritualist movement. Alex Owen argues that "Victorian spiritualism was another
of the hidden or forgotten factors in women's long struggle for increased
effectiveness, status and autonomy."[114] Through these readings a new
consensual view of the role of mediumship has recently developed. Arm Braude
argues that "Spiritualism's greatest contribution to the crusade for women's
rights probably lay in the new role of spirit medium.[115] The accessibility of
this new role lay in the congruence between Victorian ideals of "true womanhood"
and the qualities required for mediumship. Vieda Skultans claims that:
[114] Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late
Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989), introduction.
[115] Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in
Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 82.
Victorian stereotypes of femininity bear a remarkable resemblance to the ideal
medium. The following adjectives can equally well describe the ideal woman as
the ideal medium: unsophisticated, innocent, passive, young, tender, feeling,
intuitive and so on.[116]
[116] Vieda Skultans, "Mediums, Controls and Eminent Men" in
Women's Religious
Experience, ed. Pat Holden (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 23.
Arm Braude argues:
The very qualities that rendered women incompetent when judged against norms for
masculine behaviour rendered them capable of mediumship. Mediumship allowed
women to discard limitations on women's roles without questioning accepted ideas
about women's nature.[117]
[117] Braude, Radical Spirits, p. 83.
Similarly, Judith Walkowitz suggests that the value of the séance was that it
allowed women "to engage in a subtle subversion - but not repudiation - of the
'separate sphere' construction of true womanhood."[118] The value of mediumship
is seen here in its provision of a specific social setting, the séance, that
permitted transgressive behaviors. Alex Owen claims that:
[118] Judith Walkowitz, "Science and Séance: Transgressions of Gender and Genre
in Late Victorian London," Representations 22 (1988): p. 9.
within the séance, and in the name of spirit possession, women openly and
flagrantly transgressed gender norms. Female mediums, with the approval of those
present, often assumed a male persona which was at total odds with the Victorian
Idea of respectable womanhood. Whilst male mediums were also known to assume a
female spirit voice or personality, their séances did not involve the dramatic
and theatrical representations for which the women became famous.[119]
[119] Owen, The Darkened Room, p. 11.
This emphasis on the transgression of gender roles leads to a highlighting of
the role of sexuality in the séances. Janet Oppenheim writes:
There may also have been a potent element of sensual enjoyment, possibly
subconscious, that enhances the séances. Without exaggerating the extent of
sexual repression in Victorian society, one can surmise that the holding of
hands and the caressing of spirit forms might have been stimulating not only to
the sitters, but also to the young women whose emerging sexuality was denied
natural means of expression.[120]
[120] Janet Oppenheim, The Other World. Spiritualism and Psychical Research in
England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 21.
An implicit Freudian teleology organizes such readings: beneath the manifest
level of a concern with the other world lies the latent level of repressed
sexuality, which psychoanalysis would eventually unmask. This narrative provides
an account for the demise of mediumship: clearly, when sexuality comes out of
the darkened room the subterfuge of invoking departed spirits in order to hold
hands is no longer required. However, there is a problem in this approach: at
times it fails to adequately take into account the specificity of the practices
involved, in particular the phenomena of trance states. Significantly, the
feminists have concentrated upon the role of mediums in the spiritualist
movement, and so far not dealt at length with such cases as that of Hélène
Smith, where the study of mediumship itself gave rise to a psychology. For
something different begins to emerge when the mediums are turned to not only to
mediate the dead, but to mediate a new psychology. The trance takes on another
form. Janet perceptively notes that the psychological study of mediums itself
had a profound effect on the spiritualists. He notes: "Despite their affected
indifference, the spiritists have submitted to the influence of the
psychological researches and have been profoundly changed."[121] More
critically, such "historical" readings, which present a silent recapitulation of
Stanley Hall's reading of the social significance of mediumship, fail to see
that they themselves arose at a particular historical juncture, at the close of
psychology's fascination with the mediums.
[121] Janet, "Le Spiritisme Contemporain," p. 427, trans. mine.
Multiple Personality, Channeling and Past Lives:
Three Cases of Deja-vu
While Flournoy's work became completely forgotten after his death, psychology
today ironically finds itself grappling with many of the issues that were
Flournoy's prime concerns. This is nowhere more apparent than in three
contemporary movements: multiple personality disorder, channeling and past-life
regression therapy. Significantly, we find Hélène Smith's cycles forming the
ghostly template of these movements.
Multiple Personality II
Recent years have seen the rise of a massive epidemic of Multiple Personality
Disorder, largely in North America. This has taken place on a far larger scale
than its nineteenth-century predecessor, with advocates claiming that up to one
in ten of the population is in fact a "multiple." This clinician-launched
epidemic provides a capital lesson in how not to read history, as syndromes are
selectively revived and the same errors amnesiacally repeated, but this time on
a far larger scale. As lan Hacking puts it, in the late twentieth century child
abuse came to play the role of the host for multiple personality, and it was
this that led to its current epidemic explosion.[122] As two recent advocates of
MPD, as it is called, put it:
[122] Hacking, "Multiple Personality Disorder and Its Many Hosts." On the
current multiple personality epidemic, see especially Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen,
"Pour introduire la personnalite multiple," in Importance de l'hypnose, ed.
Isabelle Stengers (Paris: Les Empecheurs de penser en rond, 1993).
The new paradigm of MPD states that it is a complex, chronic form of
developmental posttraumatic dissociative disorder, primarily related to severe,
repetitive childhood abuse or trauma, usually beginning before the age of five.
In MPD, it is thought that dissociative defenses are used to protect the child
from the full psychological impact of severe trauma, usually extreme repetitive
child abuse. Under the pressure of developmental factors, secondary structuring
and personification by the child of the traumatically induced dissociated states
of consciousness leads to development of multiple "personalities."[123]
[123] R. Loewenstein and D. Ross, "Multiple Personality and Psychoanalysis: An
Introduction," Psychoanalytic Inquiry 12 (1992): p. 7.
Aspects of Flournoy's work have been (cryptomnesically?) rediscovered -such as
the "protector personalities" and the "inner self helpers" which mirror
Flournoy's descriptions of teleological automatisms.[124]
[124] See Frank Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder
(New York: Guildford Press, 1989), pp. 109-10.
A critical new development took place when MPD began increasingly to be seen as
resulting from Satanic Ritual Abuse. The "memories" recovered, usually under
hypnosis, of Satanic Ritual Abuse led therapists to believe in the veracity of
the accounts and to argue that such cults truly exist.[125] At the same time,
one finds a rash of accounts of UFO abductions, again usually solicited under
hypnosis. For Flournoy no doubt the Satanic rumor and its extraterrestrial
counterpart would be seem akin to Hélène's romances - the subliminal elaboration
of cryptomnesias.
[125] See especially Sherrill Mulhern, "Satanism and Psychotherapy: A Rumour in
Search of an Inquisition," in Richardson, Best, and Bromley ed., The Satanism
Scare (New York: Social Institutions and Social Change Series, 1991).
Channeling: Léopold's Revenge?
In the twentieth century, psychology and the mediums largely went their separate
ways. The spiritualist churches continued to be the host for traditional
mediumship, and those that sought to contact the dead. However, recent times
have seen a remarkable return of mediums, now rebaptized as "channelers." The
host responsible for this has been the New Age movement. The mode in which the
messages are conveyed remains remarkably the same as in nineteenth-century
mediumship - automatic writing, trance speech, inner dictation, etc. A critical
shift in emphasis has taken place, however, concerning the nature of the
disembodied entities. Now the entities that communicate are usually taken as
spiritual beings, as opposed to the deceased. A fair sprinkling of
extraterrestrials completes the population clamoring to get their messages
across. Thus, while in the context of nineteenth-century mediumship Hélène Smith
was somewhat atypical - as Flournoy found out through his survey - her case
takes on a surprising exemplarity when set against the exploits of contemporary
channelers.
Now, as then, trance states played a crucial role. Jane Roberts, the channeler
for the bestselling Seth books, describes "becoming Seth" in a manner that
evokes Hélène "becoming Léopold":
Each time Seth spoke, I was in trance, and it was Seth who smiled out at
students through my opened eyes... I "turned into Seth" time and time again,
taking off my mental clothes and exchanging them for psychological Olympian
garb; Olympian only in that Seth displays a superabundance of energy,
compassion, wisdom, and exuberance.[126]
[126] Jane Roberts, Conversations with Seth, vol. 1, ed. Susan Watkins
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), p. 1
In the channelled literature, the entities are invariably wise figures who have
come to aid struggling humans. The descriptions of the channeled entities bear a
close resemblance to Flournoy's description of the teleological automatism: the
helpful, protective, and guiding figure who is the personification of wisdom and
knowledge. From Flournoy's perspective, one could typify channeling as the
cultivation of teleological automatisms. Flournoy's text still forms the most
devastating skeptical psychological paradigm against the insistence of the
channelers that their messages stem from outside their psyches. After Hélène,
Flournoy was disappointed not to find similar phenomena evinced by other
mediums. Perhaps late twentieth-century California would have been a better
stomping ground for him.
How does one account for the different profiles of late nineteenth-century
mediumship and late twentieth-century channeling? Nineteenth-century spiritualism
arose out of the erosion of Christianity through the rise of secularization and
the concomitant concern for personal immortality and the post-mortem survival of
the soul.[127] In the current new age, by contrast, personal survival is less of
an issue; it has been replaced by the quest for the transcendence of Western
culture, and the search for spiritual guidance through alternate philosophies
and cultures.[128] The different nature of these respective hosts in part
elucidates the different configurations of the trance.
[127] See especially J. P. Williams, "The Making of Victorian Psychical
Research: An Intellectual Elite's Approach to the Spiritual World," Ph. D
thesis, Cambridge University, 1984. See also John Cerullo, The Secularization of
the Soul: Psychical Research in Modern Britain (Philadelphia: Institute for the
Study of Human Issues, 1982); and Oppenheim, The Other World.
[128] For a characterization of the current new age that establishes its linkage
with the new age at the end of the nineteenth century, see Martin Green,
Prophets of a New Age: The Politics of Hope in 1800, 1900 and 2000 (New York:
Scribner, 1992).
The concurrent re-emergence of multiple personality and mediumship under the
guise of channeling presents us with a recapitulation of precisely the issue of
the differential interpretation of trance states that preoccupied Flournoy. The
differential traits of channeling and MPD broadly replicate those of their
nineteenth-century precursors.[129]
[129] See Dureen Hughes, "Differences between Trance Channeling and Multiple
Personality Disorder," Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 24 (1992): pp.
181-92.
In channeling, the trance states are deliberately cultivated. Hence while MPD
has been an epidemic launched by clinicians, channeling has been launched by the
channelers themselves. Channelers tend to access their "sources" in prescribed
sessions, without the fugue states and amnesias that are taken to characterize
MPD. Channelers insist on what Breton termed the "exogeneity of the dictating
principle." Most critically, while MPD is regarded as a pathology, channeling,
in its circles, is a socially sanctioned activity that is taken as promoting
spiritual well-being. Dureen Hughes notes that: "Trance-channeling is best
described as a personal-growth or developmental activity," which she argues can
be seen as representing the quest for a personalized, revealed religion.[130]
[130] Hughes, "Blending with an Other: An Analysis of Trance-Channeling in the
United States," Ethos 19 (1991): pp. 161-84. See also Jon Klimo, Channeling:
Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1987).
Marie Antionettes, or Past-Life Regression Therapy
Recent years have also seen an astonishing rise in past-life regression therapy,
which in most instances resembles a curious grafting of the notion of
metempsychosis onto an early Breuer-Freud model of trauma and catharsis. The
personalities that emerge, often under the influence of hypnosis, are claimed to
stem from previous incarnations of the subject. Roger Woolger, a contemporary
champion of past-life regression therapy, notes that Flournoy:
established a skeptical paradigm, namely cryptoamnesia [sic], which remains to
this day one of the positivist's most devastating weapons in dismissing the
claim that past life memories are in fact derived from historical events unknown
to the subject.[131]
[131] Woolger, Other Lives, other Selves: A Jungian Psychotherapist Discovers
Past Lives (New York: Doubleday/Wellingborough, U.K.: Crucible, 1987), p. 64.
It is strange to hear Flournoy described as a positivist! Woolger notes that he
"naturally" entertains the notion of cryptomnesia on those "rare" occasions when
someone presents a past life as a well-known historical personage. Even in these
cases, Woolger notes that he makes no attempt to discount it via research, as
the therapeutic value of such "reminiscences" are what is claimed to be
important. Clearly, Flournoy's attempt to provide a dynamic explanation of such
fantasies - in terms of their compensatory value, etc. - is not taken into
account.
Rediscovering the Unconscious
The subliminal psychology that Flournoy established fell into oblivion in the
early decades of the twentieth century, and the subjects that he had fought so
hard to place on the mainstream psychological agenda returned to the fringe. Is
it going too far to say, that with the rise of these epidemic movements, we see
some of the unfortunate consequences of this?
If this is indeed the case, then the study of the history of psychologythe
questioning of the standards of legitimation by which particular psychologies
became regnant, rescripting history in the process, while others are relegated
to psychology's "unconscious" - the depiction of how psychology constructs its
fabulous genesis, its subliminal romances-is of critical importance to today's
psychological agenda.
It was Ellenberger who initially rescued Flournoy from oblivion in The Discovery
of the Unconscious. It is appropriate to leave the final words to him:
Flournoy was a great explorer of the mythopoetic unconscious, particularly in
his book From India to the Planet Mars... Today, we seldom hear of the
mythopoetic unconscious. What psychoanalysts call fantasies represent a minute
part of mythopoetic manifestations. We have lost sight of the importance of this
terrible power - a power that fathered epidemics of demonism, collective
psychoses among witches, revelations of spiritualists, the so-called
reincarnations of mediums, automatic writing, the mirages that lured generations
of hypnotists, and the profuse literature of the subliminal imagination...
unfortunately neither Freud nor Jung became aware of the role of the mythopoetic
unconscious.[132]
[132] "Freud in Perspective: A Conversation with Henri F. Ellenberger,"
Psychology Today, March 1973, P. 56. For an account of Ellenberger's work and
the current historical research in this vein, see Mark Micale, "Henri F.
Ellenberger and the Origins of European Psychiatric Historiography," and his
bibliographic essay in Beyond the Unconscious.
Note:
The above article was taken from Théodore Flournoy's "From India to the Planet
Mars" (reprint: Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994.).
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