Cover

Download PDF
 

Title Page

Download PDF
 

Copyright

Download PDF
 

Table of Contents

Download PDF
pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

Download PDF
pp. ix-xiv

Nineteenth-century spiritists believed that through table rapping, automatic messages, and other methods they had discovered ways of communicating with a vast spirit world and tapping directly into an unlimited reservoir of human knowledge. ...

Introduction: Psychical Research and French Science

Download PDF
pp. xv-xviii

If “psychical research” is an expression that has limited currency among contemporary Anglophones, the French equivalents, les sciences psychiques and la métapsychique, are even less obvious to French ears. A quick analysis of any of these terms would not be incorrect in concluding that they have something in common with the field of psychology. ...

1. From Religious Enthusiams to Reluctant Science: Psychical Research, 1848-1882

Download PDF
pp. 1-26

On 29 May 1853 the famed physicist François Arago submitted a letter to the assembled body of the French scientific elite reporting a most unusual phenomenon. The letter, written by the celebrated rail and bridge engineer Marc Seguin, began with a reference to the astonishing rumors then circulating throughout Paris of mundane household objects being moved by a mysterious invisible force. ...

2. The Development of Psychical Research in France, 1882-1900

Download PDF
pp. 27-44

In 1886 Pierre Janet, a young lycée professor in the northern town of Le Havre, addressed a report to the Parisian Société de Psychologie Physiologique that described a series of experiments in which he had placed an illiterate rural woman called Léonie B. into a state of somnambulism by, it seemed, mental suggestion alone. ...

3. The Measure of Uncertainty: The Institut Général Psychologique, 1900-1908

Download PDF
pp. 45-74

As much as the debate about mediumism focused on the reality or absence of reality in mediumistic phenomena, it also raised the question of what reality exactly the study of mediumism should commit itself to testing. In France this question was in large part a product of the institutional and methodological divisions ...

4. The Master and His Double: Charles Richet and the Literary Unconcious

Download PDF
pp. 75-92

In 1889, in one of the many accounts he presented over the course of his career on the subject of somnambulism, the eminent physiologist Charles Richet wrote of a Parisian doctor named Laurent Verdine. Verdine had discovered a young woman in the provincial town of Plancheuille who appeared receptive ...

5. In the Wake of War: The Institut Métapsychique International

Download PDF
pp. 93-111

The years between 1918 and 1923 were marked by several important events in the development of psychical research. Interest in spiritism was dramatically renewed in this period among the millions seeking messages of redemption and rehabilitation in the aftermath of the great catastrophe of the First World War. ...

6. The Limits of Method: The Question of Good Faith and the Decline of Psychical Research

Download PDF
pp. 112-142

In spite of the increased enthusiasm for psychical research in the years immediately following the end of the First World War, the field would fail to find acceptance within the realms of official science and skeptical popular opinion. This is not to say that psychical research was simply dismissed or ignored. ...

Conclusion: Indeterminacy and the Discourse of Tables

Download PDF
pp. 143-148

In the history of the psychoanalytic movement, talking furniture has had, at least on one occasion, something quite important to say. It was in 1955, before the neuropsychiatric clinic in Vienna, that Jacques Lacan would allow himself to be figuratively upstaged by a talking desk. ...

Notes

Download PDF
pp. 149-176

Bibliography

Download PDF
pp. 177-194

Index

Download PDF
pp. 195-202