Psychology and psychical research in France around the end of the 19th century

Abstract

During the last third of the 19th century, the ‘new’ French psychology developed within ‘the hypnotic context’ opened up by Charcot. In spite of their claims to the scientific nature of their hypnotic experiments, Charcot and his followers were unable to avoid the miracles that had accompanied mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. The hysterics hypnotized in the Salpêtrière Hospital were expected to have supernormal faculties and these experiments opened the door to psychical research. In 1885 the first French psychology society was founded. The research carried out by this society may seem surprising: its members – Charles Richet in particular – were interested in strange phenomena, like magnetic lucidity, ‘mental suggestion’, thought-reading, etc. Very quickly, psychologists applied themselves to finding rational explanations for these supposedly miraculous gifts. Generally, they ascribed them to unconscious or subconscious perceptual mechanisms. Finally, after a few years, studies of psychical phenomena were excluded from the field of psychology. However, during the 4th International Congress of Psychology, which took place in Paris in 1900, the foundation of an institute devoted to the study of psychical phenomena was announced, but Pierre Janet and Georges Dumas founded within it the Société Française de Psychologie, from which psychical research was excluded. As for Charles Richet, disappointed by the psychologists, he devoted himself to the development of a new ‘science’ which he called ‘Métapsychique’. Several hypotheses have been put forward to account for this early research undertaken by the French psychologists, pertaining as much to parapsychology as to scientific psychology.

Keywords

hypnotism magnetism mental suggestion metapsychicals psychology and psychical research subconscious

Introduction

French psychology emerged at the end of the 19th century, as did psychology in all industrialized countries, and defined itself as scientific, as opposed to philosophical psychology associated with metaphysics (Danziger, 1990; Brooks, 1998). Yet it also differentiated itself from other forms of psychology by favouring the ‘pathological method’ considered as experimental. Following on from Hippolyte Taine and Théodule Ribot, the new psychologists adopted the hypothesis of continuity between normal and pathological states formulated by doctors François Broussais and Claude Bernard, which they applied to psychology: the excesses and defects occurring in pathological states enable the formulation of a psychology of normal functions and processes (Carroy, Ohayon and Plas, 2006). Some of these new psychologists, notably Ribot and Pierre Janet, also referred to John Hughlings Jackson’s Spencer-inspired evolutionist neurology. According to Jackson, diseases of the nervous system were dissolutions of the superior functions, a process that was the reverse of evolution. However, it was the extraordinary success of hypnotism at this time, notably in France, that enabled these psychologists to put the pathological method into practice, opening hospital doors to them in the late 1880s. In this context, their early works, though satisfying all scientific criteria, surprise the contemporary reader, for they seem more closely linked to parapsychology than to psychology as we know it today. Moreover, the first French psychology societies were founded with the active participation of supporters of psychical research, or at their instigation. These rather nefarious beginnings are not usually mentioned in most contemporary histories of psychology which tend to perpetuate a salutary narrative tradition, in which psychology became scientific by breaking with philosophy and adopting methods used in the natural sciences.

‘Scientific supernatural’ at the Salpêtrière

The facts are well known: in the late 1870s Charcot, already a celebrated neurologist, ‘rehabilitated’ hypnotism by turning it into a method for studying hysteria (Barrucand, 1967; Roudinesco, 1986; Carroy, 1991; Gauld, 1992). He considered hypnosis as an ‘artificial neurosis’ and, consequently, a nervous state allowing the symptoms of hysteria to be reproduced at will. In confining himself to the study of physical signs, and thus attempting to produce objective phenomena, Charcot claimed to rid hypnotism of the superstitions clinging to its forerunner, animal magnetism. Indeed, he believed that animal magnetism had sunk into superstition and charlatanism precisely because it produced psychological phenomena that were not objectivizable. In fact, we owe the ‘discovery’ of ‘artificial somnambulism’, a term which was to become more or less synonymous with hypnosis, to the Marquis de Puységur rather than to Mesmer, who centred his cures on the convulsive crisis. In 1784, having magnetized a young peasant named Victor Race, Puységur noticed that the young man did not have convulsions, but fell into a deep sleep. During his magnetic sleep, he described his illness and how it should be treated. Victor was the first ‘magnetic’ or ‘clairvoyant’ somnambulist and he started a tradition. Throughout the 19th century, magnetic somnambulists – often women – were believed to possess fantastic gifts and became familiar figures of popular culture. Like Victor, they claimed to see inside their bodies and determine the cause and treatment of their disease, but they also ‘saw’ from a distance, read thoughts and forecast the future; they were consulted to find missing persons and stolen jewellery (Edelman, 1995, 2006). Magnetic somnambulists prepared the way for another popular figure, the spirit medium, which originated in the United States and spread across Europe in the second half of the 19th century. It is easy to understand why Charcot wished to differentiate himself from animal magnetism and rid hypnosis of its fantastic element. However, as the old magnetizing doctor Durand (de Gros) wrote in 1894, ‘All the fantastic aspects are connected. … In opening the door to hypnotism on the basis of its credentials, a whole, much less reassuring troop rushes into the house in its wake and settles in beside it’ (Durand [de Gros], 1894: 5).

Indeed, the experiments carried out by Charcot and his epigones soon began to look like miracle-working, and their authors were unable to avoid the same pitfalls which, in their opinion, had led to the failure of animal magnetism. We can trace the paths that led Charcot to a neo-mesmeric conception of hypnosis: in 1877, he had taken part in a commission set up to examine the validity of Dr Victor Burq’s theory claiming that metals, applied externally, had a therapeutic effect on various disorders. The commission had concluded that this ‘metalloscopy’ did indeed exist. While conducting these experiments, Charcot had exhumed some earlier studies by Thouret and Andry concerning the curative action of magnets on certain pathological states. Finally, magnets, metal plates and other ‘esthesiogenes’ (agents supposed to restore sensitivity) were systematically applied to the bodies of hemianaesthetic hysteria patients at the Salpêtrière. They were reputed to restore sensitivity to anaesthetic zones, but with a corresponding loss of sensitivity on the healthy side. This phenomenon was known as ‘transfer’ by analogy with banking transfers, for it was interpreted as a movement of nervous energy from one side of the body to the other. Esthesiogenes were also supposed to have an effect on other hysterical disorders (blindness, paralysis, muteness, etc.). When Charcot resorted to hypnosis, studies were obviously carried out to determine which esthesiogenes were likely to suppress (or induce) hypnotic states and symptoms. We can thus see a direct relationship between Charcot’s experiments and animal magnetism, both producing strange, even extravagant effects, as the master of the Salpêtrière’s detractors were not slow to point out (Harrington, 1988; Gauchet and Swain, 1997). Other still more surprising neo-mesmeric experiments were conducted by metalloscopy enthusiasts. In particular, Jules Bernard Luys (1828–97), head doctor at the Parisian hospital La Charité, became famous for his numerous demonstrations of action carried out from a distance by toxic and medicinal substances: he sealed up these substances in corked bottles and claimed to observe their effects by placing the bottles near hypnotized hysteria patients. Alcohol, for example, was supposed to induce drunkenness, opium, sleep, etc. He went so far as to maintain that distilled water could bring about a reaction of characterized hydrophobia from a distance (Escalard, 1984; Plas, 2000).

As for Joseph Babinski, who was to pull apart Charcot’s conception of hysteria in the early 20th century, he claimed in 1886 to have proved in a number of experiments that hysterical symptoms, either spontaneous or induced through hypnosis, could be transferred from one subject to another under the influence of a magnet. For example, if two hemianaesthetic hysteric patients were brought close together and a magnet placed near them, he noticed that one of the two became totally anaesthetic and the other recovered feeling in both sides of the body.

As concerns psychology, Alfred Binet, future author of the famous Intelligence Scale La mesure du développement de l’intelligence chez les jeunes enfants (1905) and many other works, published a book in 1887 together with Dr Charles Féré, significantly entitled Le Magnétisme Animal [Animal Magnetism]. The book presented the research they had carried out at the Salpêtrière, part of which had already appeared in 1885 in the Revue philosophique, founded and edited by Ribot. The two authors emphasized that they used magnets to transfer phenomena produced by verbal suggestion, in order to undertake a scientific study of those psychological events rejected (as we have seen) by Charcot. To give but a few examples, they first transferred hallucinations and unilateral paralysis, and also suggested acts.¹ Considering that magnets could not only bring about transfer but also invert the state of a function, they claimed to change coloured hallucinations into their complementary colour, and emotions into their opposites by means of the magnet. For instance, having suggested a feeling of irritation against a doctor to their subject, they noticed that this state could be transformed into its opposite via the magnet, so that the subject now wanted to kiss the doctor in question. Several years later, Binet admitted that these results were only artefacts arising from suggestion, and warned future experimenters never to underestimate their effect (Binet, 1903).

All this research clearly demonstrated the fluidic conception of hypnotism in practice at the Salpêtrière (Barrucand, 1967) and its links with mesmerism – the difference being that this conception took progress in physics and nerve physiology into account: Charcot hypothesized that esthesiogenes exerted an electrical action of unknown origin on the central nervous system and was convinced that transfer phenomena were ‘in complete support of science’ (Charcot in Dumontpallier, 1881: 396).

Nevertheless, during these same years at the Salpêtrière School, other forms of research developed which, unlike those studying the effects of esthesiogenes, were not in the fluidic tradition of animal magnetism. Their authors did not seek to emphasize objective signs allegedly corresponding to nervous states, but rather to explore the extraordinary mental capacities of subjects considered exceptional. Much later, Pierre Janet would attribute this research to the ‘psychological school’ of hypnotism (Janet, 1925[1919]: 149).² He credited Charles Richet with the creation of this school, linking his first studies to it, and those of a few others such as Myers and Ochorowicz, who will be mentioned later. As we shall see, their experiments were no less strange than those discussed earlier and in fact, Richet played a major part and was the central figure in the development of these experiments.

Charles Richet and the early days of the psychological school of hypnotism

Charles Richet (1850–1935) was an extraordinary character and a scientist with multiple identities (Carroy, 1993; Marmin, 2001; Edelman, 2007). He was a brilliant doctor, winning the Nobel Prize for physiology for his work on anaphylaxis in 1913. He was also involved in the political events of the period: as a supporter of Dreyfus and co-founder of the League of Human Rights in 1898, he campaigned against war and defended pacifism. He was also a novelist and poet,³ an aviation enthusiast and champion of Esperanto. As far as we are concerned, he was the author of several psychology books, and, in 1905, founded the science of ‘metapsychics’ which he defined as ‘the study of mechanical or psychological phenomena arising from seemingly intelligent forces or unknown latent powers in human intelligence’ (Richet, 1923[1922]: 5).

In 1875, as a young intern at the Salpêtrière, he had published an article on provoked somnambulism in a medical journal (Richet, 1875). He later claimed that this article, and a demonstration of hypnotism carried out by one of his friends in the presence of Charcot, caused the latter to become interested in hypnosis (Wolf, 1993; Marmin, 2001). However, it seems that Charcot’s participation in the ‘Burkism Commission’ had a more decisive influence than young Richet’s article, in a context where magnetism, on several accounts, was once more attracting the interest of other respected doctors, such as Paul Broca (Carroy, 1993).

In 1885, Richet contributed actively to the creation of the Society of Physiological Psychology. Charcot was made president, and the vice-presidents were Ribot and Pierre Janet’s uncle Paul Janet, a spiritualist philosopher open to scientific progress. Richet was general secretary. In 1922, he wrote that he had founded this society with Ribot and Léon Marillier,⁴ modelling it on the London Society for Psychical Research (SPR) (Richet, 1923[1922]: 38). Ribot was probably unaware of this aim, as his correspondence with his friend Espinas⁵ shows; in a letter dated 6 March 1885, he wrote: ‘there is a lot of talk here about founding a Society of Physiological Psychology’ without any mention of objectives in common with the SPR (Ribot, 1975: 160). From 1886 onwards, this society published a bulletin containing the papers presented during meetings. As we will now see, a considerable number of them were in fact concerned with the supranormal fringe of hypnotism rather than the psychology promoted by Théodule Ribot.

As it happened, in November 1885 Paul Janet presented a paper to the society in the name of his nephew Pierre, who at the time was a young teacher in Le Havre, Normandy. In this paper Pierre Janet reported on his experiments with somnambulism, carried out with Dr Gibert, from Le Havre, on Mme B, an ‘honest countrywoman’. He said that he and Gibert had by chance noticed that Mme B could be willed to sleep, even from a distance. Moreover, she obeyed hypnotic and post-hypnotic suggestion, conducted mentally. He credited her with ‘a kind of ability … to perceive the thoughts of others’ (Janet, 1885: 32) and even led his audience to believe that she also had the gift of clairvoyance. Janet’s paper prepared the way for a long series of studies and publications on mental suggestion,⁶ in the society’s bulletin and elsewhere, and made Mme B – better known by her first name Léonie – famous throughout Europe. Indeed, in 1886, a sort of self-proclaimed commission came to Le Havre to verify Janet and Gibert’s experiments. It notably featured Frederic W. H. Myers and his brother, representing the SPR in London, and the Polish philosopher, psychologist and physicist Julian Ochorowicz, who lived in Paris. In an article published in the Revue philosophique in 1881, which attracted some attention, Ochorowicz had suggested that an international psychology congress should be organized (Ochorowicz, 1881).⁷ He later became an acknowledged specialist in psychical research.

The commission found the ‘Le Havre experiments’ convincing, and afterwards Richet had Léonie brought to Paris several times, between 1886 and 1889. He even took her to Cambridge, where she lodged with Myers. He conducted many experiments with her, which were published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and in that same society’s Proceedings.⁸ He not only wished to demonstrate the true facts of mental suggestion, but also to emphasize the somnambulists’ clairvoyance. As Wundt wrote in 1892:

Gravitation, optical effects and the laws governing our psychophysical organization give ground as soon as Madame Léonie of Le Havre falls into her magnetic sleep – not to forecast some cataclysm, but to sense whether or not some small misfortune has happened to one of the little Richets. (Wundt, 1893[1892]: 17)

In fact, in most of his clairvoyance experiments, Richet placed playing cards in sealed envelopes (not always opaque enough, as he admitted himself) and hypnotized Léonie, who then had to guess which card was being used. He wanted his experiments to be measurable, and used probability calculations to compare the likelihood of getting a correct answer by chance with the results obtained.

Yet, while being Richet’s experimental subject gifted with exceptional abilities, Léonie had also become one of the pathological subjects in Janet’s famous doctoral dissertation, L’Automatisme psychologique, defended and published in 1889. Janet had been greatly vexed to find that Léonie, whom he thought he had discovered through Dr Gibert, actually had a long history of somnambulism.⁹ In his dissertation, Janet presented Léonie as suffering from hysteria, and described the three successive personalities he had observed during her hypnotic sleep. Afterwards, he remained obstinately silent about his early research. Admittedly, in Les Médications psychologiques (1925[1919]) Janet paid tribute to the spiritualists for having supplied psychologists with collections of meticulously described pathological events, and underlined the role of forerunner played by animal magnetism and spiritualism in the history of experimental psychology. However, from then on he considered that all strange phenomena produced by hypnotism or spiritualism were products of mental pathology, and adopted once and for all Charcot’s expression Nihil admirari, that students of ‘neuropaths’ were advised never to forget (Janet, 1912).

The year 1889 was also the one when the first international congress of physiological psychology was held in Paris, organized under the aegis of the Society of Physiological Psychology. France was celebrating the centenary of the French Revolution, and many congresses took place in Paris during the summer.¹⁰ In his memoirs, written around 1916, Richet recalled the congress and assigned himself the chief role in organizing it:

I had come up with a very rash idea: to bring together at the same congress professional psychologists, philosophers and men of letters, doctors working with mental illness, and men who, like Myers, Ochorowicz and myself, were interested in metapsychics (a term I was not to invent until a long time later). In 1889, Charcot was in a dominant position; he occupied first place. He was considered as the great hypnotist, and was reputed to be a semi-magician by the masses and a creator by scientists. Charcot was the obvious choice for president. … In fact I sent out the invitations; I led the discussions, and it must be acknowledged that it was a complete success. The existence of metapsychical phenomena was almost – at least partially – officially recognized. In any case, occult psychology (animal magnetism, hypnosis, telepathy etc.) was seriously discussed, and some genuinely scientific-looking papers given. For the first time, hypnotists, mesmerists and spiritualists sat next to psychologists, doctors and physiologists. … As often happens, everyone has forgotten who founded the congress. It was I alone, and no-one else. (Richet, c.1916: 133–4)

We cannot know whether the participants in the congress had realized the importance of Richet’s role as he described it in his memoirs, or of his aims. Nevertheless, a few signs seem to indicate that certain members of the Society of Physiological Psychology had started to doubt the fertility of research into mental suggestion and other supranormal phenomena. For in 1890, having published the congress proceedings in a final bulletin, the society ceased to exist. Durand (de Gros) explained its disappearance in his book, presuming with irony that the dose of supernatural administered by Charles Richet ‘was stronger than the subject’s constitution’ (Durand [de Gros], 1894: 6). In his Traité de métapsychique [Treatise of Metapsychics] Richet himself recalled that psychologists, physiologists and doctors lost interest in the research, adding that, following this setback, he founded the Annales des Sciences Psychiques with Xavier Dariex in 1890. He intended this journal to be the French equivalent of the Proceedings of the SPR.

Why did the majority of those scientists who had studied these supposedly extraordinary phenomena for several years lose interest? In correlation with the blossoming of research into mental suggestion, a few sceptics and half-believers were quick to link the phenomena to well-known events, thus defining them in terms of natural occurrences. Paradoxically the way had been prepared by some believers in mental suggestion – which, like their English counterparts, they were beginning to call telepathy.¹¹ Ochorowicz, Richet, Myers and the philosopher Henri Bergson had undertaken to distinguish apparent mental suggestion from the real thing, and had formed the following hypothesis to explain it. Without knowing it, the hypnotist could convey signs, used unconsciously by the somnambulist all the more easily because the two were used to working together, and complicity had developed between them, so that unconscious strategies were developed not only by the experimental subjects but also by the experimenters. Julian Ochorowicz summed it up in the felicitous expression ‘unconscious confederates’ (Ochorowicz, 1887: 78). At the end of the 1880s, several authors developed the idea that unconscious psychical activity could explain not only mental suggestion and telepathy but a whole number of phenomena that had hitherto defied scientific explanation. It was the case with Marillier (Le Maléfan, 2008) and also with the physician Jules Héricourt, a friend and collaborator of Richet’s. In 1889 he wrote an article entitled ‘L’activité inconsciente de l’esprit’ [The Unconscious Activity of the Mind] in which he asserted that ‘very often, the unconscious directs the conscious self and moves it to action’ (Héricourt, 1889: 220). Others developed the hypothesis of subconscious or subliminal rather than unconscious activity, in other words, underlying normal conscious activity. It was the case of Janet, who took up Myers’ notion of the subconscious – except that unlike Myers, he made it an inferior, even pathological, psychical activity – and of the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy, who devoted his celebrated book Des Indes à la planète Mars [From India to the Planet Mars] (1900a) to a psychological study of the medium Hélène Smith (whose real name was Elisa Muller). While in a state of somnambulism, Hélène produced ‘subliminal novels’ rich in imagination. She had apparently been a 14th-century Indian princess in a former life, and claimed to be the reincarnation of Marie-Antoinette; she also ‘travelled’ on the planet Mars. Yet, like Myers, Flournoy did not consider subliminal activity as necessarily pathological, and credited it with creative potential that could explain products of the imagination and sudden or brilliant inspiration. He denounced the ‘blinkered physicians’ ‘too quick to qualify as sick, pathological or insane everything which deviates from the norm of human nature as they have conceived it, modelled on their small personalities’ (Flournoy, 1900a: 41–2).

Towards delimiting the boundaries of psychology

After the first psychology congress, French psychologists were no longer involved in psychical research, although they did not totally lose interest in it: from time to time, French psychology journals would mention work devoted to psychical research, or publish articles dealing with certain psychical phenomena. However, a few enthusiasts with a passion for supranormal phenomena went on trying to associate them with psychology until the end of the century. In 1900, the 4th International Congress of Psychology was held in Paris. A large number of spiritualists attended, upsetting more than one psychologist. As president of the congress, in his opening speech, Ribot reluctantly announced the creation of an institute for psychological research. For his part, Ochorowicz proclaimed triumphantly that this institute would be ‘a permanent international centre for all kinds of psychological research (including those which are yet to enter the official field of psychology)’ (Ochorowicz, 1901: 137). Flournoy championed the project in public, requesting the institute to place ‘the study of alleged supernormal phenomena’ at the centre of its investigations, with the application of ‘rigorous experimental methods’ (Flournoy, 1901: 103). In fact, the institute had been set up two months earlier, and named the Institut psychique international [the International Psychical Institute], at the instigation of Russian embassy attaché Serge Youriewitch, and Oswald Murray, member of the National Liberal Club in London. An interesting letter from Flournoy to William James ironically confirms that certain participants, already exasperated by the presence of spiritualists at the congress, were more than reticent about the creation of a psychical institute.

As for the International Psychical Institute,¹² that great joke straight from the brain of a crank, it has had the short lifespan of a rose – or a two-headed monster. It was solemnly presented to the Congress in excellent terms by Ochorowicz, supported by Richet; I too laid on the flattery. … The next day, at the organization committee session where the statutes and rulings of the newborn Institute were supposed to be finalized, the conclusion was reached that everything should be adjourned until the Institute possessed 300 or 500 000 francs of capital – which in my opinion means indefinitely. In short, a first-class funeral. … The Institute was born of misunderstandings and died as soon as we began rather to suspect it. Its initiators, Youriéwitch, Murray etc., thought of it as a collective undertaking destined to study spiritualist–occult–supernormal phenomena with scientific rigour; but in order to do that, it would have needed … leaders of undisputed scientific reputation, like Janet, rather than suspicious personalities (like Rochas etc.). Moreover, Janet only consented to take charge with the firm idea that the Institute would not be involved in the occult and spiritualism. This contradiction became apparent, in form and on the surface, during the discussion about the title, some of us wanting Psychical Institute, since this word alone would interest the general public and provide funds for the Institute – and others insisting on Psychological Institute, so as to make it clear that the studies would be psychological in general, to the complete exclusion of the occult. (Flournoy, 1900b, letter dated 27 August 1900)

In fact, the psychologists were in the minority among all the scientific, literary and society personalities who had supported its creation. Nevertheless, the institute was immediately renamed ‘International Psychological Institute’ and the following year, according to Janet himself, he used part of the loans obtained to establish a completely independent Society of Psychology within the institute, made up almost exclusively of physicians, physiologists and philosophers rather than by ‘a great diversity of society people who are interested in all mental phenomena’ (Janet, 1901: 138). This society later became the Société française de psychologie (French Society of Psychology) and is still active today. As for the institute, which did its best to survive until 1933, it was divided into four study groups: Collective Psychology, Moral and Criminal Psychology, Zoological Psychology and Psychical Phenomena. The least one can say is that this last group was not the most active of the four. However, it took part in the long controversy over the hypothetical N-rays¹³ and above all, from 1905 to 1908, it devoted over 40 sessions to the study of the famous physical medium Eusapia Palladino (or Paladino), already very famous and studied all over Europe.¹⁴ Many well-known scientists participated in the experience, in particular the physicists Arsène d’Arsonval, Édouard Branly and Pierre and Marie Curie, the physiologist Étienne Jules Marey, and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Jules Courtier, a former head of research in Alfred Binet’s laboratory, was secretary and drafted the final report, but the psychologists did not take part in these sessions.¹⁵ We can thus see that the institute’s psychical research concentrated on the study of physical phenomena produced by mediums (ectoplasm, table-turning, displacing or apport of objects). The scientists, physicists and physiologists who took part in this research hoped to find a scientific explanation for these phenomena – for example, in terms of the emission or reception of unknown radiation in certain conditions by the human body (Blondel, 2002). The interpretation of psychological phenomena – automatic writing, telepathy, clairvoyance, premonitions – in terms of the unconscious or the subconscious, was considered as a matter for the psychologists, and then for the psychoanalysts, and so was left to them. Certain psychologists did indeed pursue research into these exceptional phenomena. One particularly illustrative example is the case of Nicolas Vaschide (1873–1907), a young Romanian psychologist who, after working with Alfred Binet, became head of research in the experimental psychology laboratory established by the psychiatrist douard Toulouse at Villejuif Asylum near Paris. Vaschide was the author of a great number of works pertaining to scientific psychology, like his research into the psychophysiology of sleep, or the relationship between muscular and tactile sensitivity. Yet he also published many articles and books on subjects that Henri Piéron, who worked under his orders before becoming an eminent representative of French psychology, described as ‘vague spheres where he tried to substitute the scientific for the purely metaphysical mind’ (Piéron, 1907b: 484). In fact, Vaschide was interested in telepathy, the psychology of the dying, the ‘mental life of xiphopaguses’ (in other words, Siamese-twin brothers and sisters), palmistry and dreams, especially prophetic dreams. In his posthumous work on telepathic hallucinations, which he ascribed to ‘pre-established intellectual harmony’ between two people who knew each other intimately (Vaschide, 1908: 84), he recommended psychologists to pay greater attention to ‘our self’, this ‘sphynx’ (sic), this ‘subconscious [which constitutes] the depths of our being, our waking and sleeping thoughts’ (ibid.: 96). While studying prophetic dreams and the interpretation of dreams, he offered to draw up a ‘philosophy of belief’ (Vaschide, 1901 [a letter to Piéron, 28 August]), which we would call anthropology of belief today, but his premature death prevented him from carrying out this project.

As for Charles Richet, definitively disappointed with the official psychology principally represented at the time in France by Ribot and Janet, he continued his metapsychical research, chiefly characterized by the famous ‘Villa Carmen episode’ in Algiers. Richet went there twice, in 1903 and 1905 (during which year he was president of the Society for Psychical Research). In this villa, home of General Noël and his family, an apparition ‘materialized’ during spiritualist seances. The medium was most often Marthe Béraud, whose parents were friends of the Noël family. According to the general’s wife, this was the ‘ghost’ of a former Hindustani high priest, named Bien-Boâ (Marmin, 2001; Le Maléfan, 2002; Brower, 2010). Richet took photographs of Bien-Boâ, which he published in the Annales des sciences psychiques on his return in 1905. He did not express an opinion on the spiritualist belief in the survival of the spirit after death, but believed he had provided proof that the ‘materialization’ of a ‘new being’ originated in the medium’s substance, and maintained that such a phenomenon could disrupt current knowledge of the laws of matter. A long controversy followed, in which psychologists like Ribot, Janet and Flournoy, while rather sceptical about the existence of the phenomena, laid stress on Richet’s scientific integrity. Finally, it was proved that he had been the victim of a hoax, and this episode played an important role in the de-legitimation of psychical science. According to Pascal Le Maléfan, ‘The Villa Carmen episode was indubitably a significant moment in the division within the western episteme, a divisionary process that determined what should be known or remain unknown in experimental science, and particularly, within psychology’ (Le Maléfan, 2002: 174).

After the First World War with its millions of dead, there was a revival of interest in spiritualism, and, in close correlation, psychical research. In France, an International Metapsychics Institute was set up, sponsored by a spiritualist patron. Its aim was the scientific study of metapsychical phenomena using recognized experimental methods.¹⁶ In 1922, Richet published his metapsychics treatise with the support of this institute. Faced with this resurgence, psychologists themselves began to study mediums. Thus, for example, in 1922, Henri Piéron and Georges Dumas took part in experiments at the Sorbonne on an ectoplasm medium named Eva Carrière, and accused her of fraud once their investigations were completed (Parot, 1993; Lachapelle, 2005). Shortly afterwards, a journalist revealed that Eva Carrière was none other than Marthe Béraud, who had made ghosts appear in Algiers 15 years earlier. In fact, it is clear that from then on, those psychologists who took an interest in supranormal phenomena were intending to flush out frauds and to demonstrate the unscientific nature of experiments claiming to prove that these phenomena were real.

Conclusion

Why did the first psychologists become so involved in this dangerous research, and why, conversely, did they later dismiss it so vigorously?

It is certain that a ‘science fiction culture’ existed at the end of the 19th century (Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, 2002) as the success of Jules Verne’s novels in France showed. New techniques such as the telephone, then wireless telegraphy, and discoveries like cathode and X-rays substantiated the idea that still-undiscovered energies might provide a scientific explanation for strange phenomena that the psychologists wished to bring to the fore. Like Richet and others, one might also think that all the physiological potential of living organisms had not yet been explored.

It is also likely that some of them were disappointed with the results obtained by the new psychology, and, like Richet, thought it would not make any further decisive progress (Richet, 1892, 1905). In 1905, for example, he wrote that he ‘found it hard to see what considerable new progress might be accomplished by [the] major branches of psychology’ (Richet, 1905: 167). Remember that William James, who was also an eminent representative of psychical research, seems to have felt the same sense of dissatisfaction.

Yet the main reason seems to be elsewhere. This research by the early psychologists, which aimed to materialize the intangible and to fix something transient, played a part in the emergence of the indicial model analysed by Carlo Ginzburg in his still-famous article. According to him, at the end of the 19th century different disciplines were using a method based on the collection of details and indices generally considered to be negligible. He took as his starting point an analogy noticed by several authors between the methods used by the art historian Morelli (who, when authenticating a painting, recommended the examination of details carelessly neglected by the imitators in their reproductions), Conan Doyle’s hero Sherlock Holmes, and Freud. The idea originated in the art of game-hunting, with the observation of the minutest, even infinitesimal tracks. This hunter’s knowledge cannot be formalized, but enables complex reality to be reconstructed from details unnoticed by the lay observer. Ginzburg linked to this paradigm indicial approaches to disciplines like phrenology, palaeontology and graphology. Yet according to him, the model established itself above all in medical semiotics during the 19th century.

It seems to me that for a time, psychologists also tried to objectivize the signs and indices that might enable them to elucidate the mystery of thought, using the instrument of ‘moral vivisection’ (as they called it) supplied by hypnosis. Yet, from the neo-mesmeric angle that was Charcot’s, and with the support of nerve physiology, they tried hard to objectivize and reproduce phenomena that were labile and difficult to detect. They thought transient and evanescent psychological states could be materialized and recorded, and they set themselves the impossible task of observing regularity in the realm of the strange and the unpredictable (Méheust, 1999). In doing this, they produced artefacts, for conjectural knowledge obtained through collecting indices is characterized by its individual, subjective dimension, in other words, by its singularity. In the end, the psychologists gave up their attempts to explain these phenomena, by means of imaginary physiology, and they chose to interpret the mediums’ gifts of lucidity and manifestations in terms of indicial strategies used more or less by everyone. They would finally admit that their ‘supernatural’ subjects were perhaps better able than others to interpret those indices provided involuntarily by the protagonists of any intersubjective exchange (Plas, 2000). However, from the beginning of the 20th century, French psychologists were to give up studying strange and exceptional subjects in order to develop the psychology of the average human being. They abandoned the indicial model to psychoanalysis in order to submit to another scientific model, taken from the field of hard sciences, and, to their minds, more respectable. Nowadays, probably in the name of this selfsame respectability, scientific psychology in the French university rejects every evocation of parapsychology more violently than need be, as though fearing that this ‘false’ science might tarnish its image, and thereby – perhaps – revealing its own vulnerability.

Footnotes

Notes

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