Unruly Spirits: The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France (review)

Cartesian dualism—the separation of mind from body—long continued to preoccupy French psychologists, who found themselves contending with the scientific validity of spiritism right into the 1930s. “Rejecting the divine provenance of the soul,” M. Brady Brower writes, “psychical researchers set out to demonstrate that intelligence was a faculty of nature. At the same time, however, they were drawn to phenomena that indicated that intelligence was, in its willfulness, creativity, and capriciousness, not completely bound by the deterministic forces that much nineteenth-century science had attributed to the natural order” (p. xvii). The resulting paradox of “official science” in France was that its own representatives regarded mediumism—table rapping, clairvoyance, spirit materializations, and telepathy—as a legitimate object of study, misdirecting expertise and resources for independent psychological research in order to substantiate untestable activities on the part of spiritists, thereby delaying the development of important new fields of inquiry such as psychoanalysis. Brower’s book traces the history of these distractions from a modern science of the mind.

At its inception in 1848, psychical research was tied more to religious enthusiasms than to scientific rigor. Spiritism itself became a scientific faith in the pages of Allan Kardec’s journal La Revue Spirite, underwritten by the Société Parisienne des Etudes Spirites, with considerable influence on research during the French Second Empire (1852–70). Later during the Third Republic (1870–1940), whose ideological linking of knowledge with democratic morality favored this sort of work, reputable scientists like Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Théodule Ribot, and Charles Richet supported the Société de Psychologie Physiologique, which studied the empirical bases for somnambulism as well as mediumism for five years (1885–90), leaving France with no independent association for the scientific study of psychology until the end of the century. In 1900 the Institut Général Psychologiue took up the same cause and soon attempted to verify the paranormal activities of Eusapia Palladino, “the ‘Sarah Bernhardt of the mediums’” (p. 62). Writes Brower, “[I]n the final analysis, the technical apparatus employed in the experiments fell far short of the assurances sought by the men” studying her mystical activities (p. 70).

The second half of the book considers the denouement of such efforts before and after World War I. The eminent physiologist Charles Richet studied the literary unconscious, first as a novelist, then as a scientist attempting to explain the strange happenings at Villa Carmen in Algiers involving the flamboyant spiritist Bien Boa in 1905. Richet failed. Meanwhile, the Institut Metaphysique International helped the living communicate with the dead during the war and investigated the ectoplasmic emissions from the medium Eva Carrière, again without success despite wealthy patrons and renewed popular interest in the paranormal. Such efforts marked the decline of psychical research in France, which for a host of reasons Brower explores, came to an end in the 1930s. “It was in the gaps produced by the opposition of journalistic, historical, and juridical methods of investigation, on the one hand, and experimental methods, on the other, that the traditional doubts surrounding mediumistic phenomena intensified” (p. 113). Psychical research waned, and in its wake would arrive an interest in Freud’s work on the unconscious, eventually at the hands of Jacques Lacan after World War II.

Brower’s book analyzes deftly the history of this troubled transition from “a philosophy of the mind to a science of the mind” (p. 147) in modern France. “French psychical researchers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would continue to look on the errors, failures, uncertainties, and frauds encountered in their investigations not as revelations of truth but as obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of truth” (p. 146), which were resolved only when French psychologists came to understand that subjectivity and indeterminacy were themselves objects of scientific knowledge in psychology. For this...