In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The city of Lyon was in danger, Dr. Philibert Burlet warned in a lecture at the Société des sciences médicales at the end of 1862 in which he reported on the cases of six patients at the Antiquaille hospital who he thought were exhibiting signs of mental illness directly related to the practice of spiritism. Moreover, this situation was not unique, Burlet told his audience—every physician in the region dealing with mental illness had already encountered similar cases. If this was true of the rest of France as well—and there was no reason to think otherwise—spiritism was well on its way to becoming one of the chief causes of mental alienation in the country.1 While more religiously concerned thinkers had focused on the dangers that spiritism represented for the soul, physicians often diagnosed séances as pathological . Spiritism drove the mind to focus obsessively on certain thoughts and rendered the subject unable to function in normal, everyday life. From a medical perspective, Burlet stressed that the practice of spiritism had to be considered a mental illness, caused by the exaggeration of religious ideas, an intense belief in the supernatural, and an unhealthy love of the mysterious.2 Even as groups of spiritists were organizing themselves around the county, the human sciences were developing, professionalizing, and creating their own internal division of labor and specializations. Psychiatry and psychology were becoming increasingly influential in hospitals, universities, other establishments of research and higher education, and even the legal system. By the mid nineteenth century, psychiatry had become a recognized medical discipline. Psychology took somewhat longer to develop. Like psychiatrists, psychologists were interested in human experiences and behaviors, but, unlike psychiatrists, they were neither c h a p t e r t h r e e Pathologies of the Supernatural ji 60 i n v e s t i g a t i n g t h e s u p e r n a t u r a l physicians nor necessarily affiliated with a hospital or an asylum. Rather, psychologists operated within the university system and the establishments of research and higher education. Officially, French psychology began with the creation of a chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France in 1888. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it had become part of the academic landscape.3 Psychology differed from psychiatry in more than just its structural organization . Whereas psychiatrists focused on pathologies and cures, psychologists were interested in formulating explanations of human behaviors in more general terms. No matter what their approach, however, the two groups were never fully independent of each other. With the common aim of explaining human experiences and behaviors rationally, both disciplines were destined to intrude on a domain that had traditionally been the purview of the Church. Not only were physical manifestations of religiosity—possession, visions, cures, and stigmata, amongst others—of interest to them, but they were potentially problematic for sciences constructed on the assumption that the human mind and its productions could be explained physiologically. The success of psychiatrists and psychologists depended in part, not only on their abilities to account for these seemingly supernatural phenomena, experienced by a small portion of the population, but to have their explanations accepted in scientific circles.4 In their race to devise a master explanation of what was really happening at séances, medicine, psychiatry, and psychology each attempted to appropriate the supernatural and, in particular, mediumistic abilities. Each provided a way to accept the phenomena witnessed while rejecting the mystical interpretations usually assigned to them by subjects, audiences, priests, and spiritists. By presenting supernatural experiences as pathological in nature, medical doctors and psychologists legitimized them more than any other group, but they did so by reducing them to the physiological expressions of mental disorder. It was a disease of a few, but provided a window into the condition of all. Observing mediums and their ectoplasmic productions (spirit substances supposedly emerging out of a medium’s body) would bring about a better understanding of the potential of the human mind in some of its most mystifying pathological manifestations. In particular, the psychologists Théodore Flournoy and Pierre Janet and the physician Joseph Grasset each formulated their own theories of the personality based on the experiences of mediums and reported cases of haunting. Then, between 1905 and 1908, the Institut général psychologique organized a series of séances with the Italian...

Share