The Power of Suggestion: Conrad, Professor Grasset, and French Medical Occultism

Any investigation of Joseph Conrad and the occult should probably begin with healthy skepticism. One can't imagine Conrad, who had "an instinctive horror of losing [his] sense of full self-possession," behaving like the theosophist W. B. Yeats, who fell into a composing trance on a London public bus (Personal 112; Chapman 204). Moreover, Conrad seems to express contempt for spiritualists, most notably in Under Western Eyes and less prominently in a short essay "The Life Beyond," in which he ridicules several spiritualists, including Cesare Lombroso's famous medium, Eusapia Paladino (Notes 58).¹ Finally, the phrase "Conrad and the occult" vaguely alliterates, and that in itself is enough to arouse suspicion in a rationalist. But the topic is important because one of the prominent physicians in Conrad's career, Professor Joseph Grasset of the University of Montpellier, was not only a highly respected expert in nervous disorders but was also an occultist, who published on the topic shortly before he treated Borys Conrad in the spring of 1907. How would Conrad have reconciled his penchant for distinguished physicians with his seeming distrust and ridicule of the flaky world of the spiritualist and with the practice of medical hypnotism? The answer to this question may be found in the fiction Conrad was writing when he met Grasset in the spring of 1907 during the rewriting of The Secret Agent and also in later texts such as "The Black Mate" (1908), "The Secret Sharer" (written in 1909), and Under Western Eyes (1910).

Conrad had numerous doctors, many of whom were highly esteemed in their profession, and some became close friends. John Hackney, Conrad's first physician at the Pent, became vice president of the balneological section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Rayner Derry Batten, who attended the Conrads in London in 1904–5, would become a leading specialist in diseases of the eye and vice president of the Ophthalmological Society. Sir Robert Jones, who performed numerous surgeries on Jessie's knee, was the president of both British and international societies of orthopedic surgery and an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Distinguished as these friends and physicians were in their respective fields, they did not address the full range of Conrad's medical needs, for each was trained in a medical era when British medicine assumed that most, if not all, forms of disease were caused by an underlying organic pathology. Like many other modern writers, Conrad suffered from a variety of vague nervous disorders that were viewed with great skepticism by the medical establishment in England in the 1890s and early twentieth century; as a result, he turned either to the odd English physician who recognized male neurasthenia or to European physicians who accepted the plausibility of functional nervous disorders—that is, nervous disorders with no apparent organic cause. It is for this reason, I think, that Conrad often chose to retire to the continent for travel and therapy.

Conrad received medical treatment in England from the European-trained physicians at the German Hospital in North London and care from Italian physicians on the Isle of Capri, but Conrad and his family were most intensely attended to by French physicians—Dr. Grasset and Dr. Paul Glatz—who were both students of the renowned Parisian psychologist, Jean Martin Charcot, an expert on hysteria. While the study of hysteria dates back to the Greco-Roman world, resurfaced during the Renaissance and again in the middle of the nineteenth century with the work of Pierre Briquet, hysteria studies were brought into medical prominence in the 1880s and 1890s by the flamboyant Charcot and his followers (Micale 41, 50, 88). Charcot's theories on hysteria and his treatment regime with hypnosis attained respectability due to his scientific methodology. Michael Micale surmises that "everything in Charcot's disease model had its place: a uniform etiology, a clear hierarchy of symptoms, and a paroxysm that followed a prescribed developmental sequence" (93). Charcot was also a captivating teacher and adept at staging astonishing clinical demonstrations, one of which was attended by George M. Robertson, a respected...