The synthesis of consciousness and the latent life of the mind: Philosophy,psychopathology,and ‘cryptopsychism’ in fin-de-siècle France

Introduction

In 1899, an article with an enigmatic title – ‘Les phénomènes cryptoïdes’ – appeared in the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger (Boirac, 1899). The author, Émile Boirac (1851–1917), was a respectable member of French academia; he was in fact the president of the Academy of Grenoble and a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, who five years before, after long service as a high school professor, most recently at the lycée Condorcet in Paris, had defended at the Sorbonne a doctoral dissertation on the notion of phenomenon (Boirac, 1894). However, the institutional profile of Boirac – who was also the author of a number of philosophy textbooks for secondary schools (Boirac, 1888, 1890) – concealed a certain irregularity with regard to his intellectual formation and interests. As a young student, he was in fact a disciple at the lycée of Bordeaux of the eccentric figure, Alfred Fouillée (1838–1912), to whom he would remain devoted and would later dedicate his thesis. In the milieu of the Sorbonne however, he was often associated (see Roure, 1894: 737) with the circle of another maverick of the time, who always had a difficult relationship with Fouillée, namely Charles Renouvier (1815–1903), the father of French ‘neocriticism’ and the editor of the popular philosophical and political review La critique philosophique (1872–89). ¹

After his appointment at Grenoble, Boirac gradually departed from philosophy. Despite his administrative duties (in 1902 he was nominated director of the Academy of Dijon), he made time to pursue his multiple and bizarre interests, giving free rein to his innate curiosity. In 1876, while still very young, he wrote a letter for the first issue of the Revue philosophique in which he tried to provide an answer to the phenomenon of the ‘memory of a memory’, which he was the first to call ‘déjà-vu’ [‘Correspondance’, 1876]. In particular, Boirac focused on the exploration of two cutting-edge intellectual fields that in fin-de-siècle Europe drew the attention of many scientists and humanists. The first of these was the creation of an international auxiliary language such as Esperanto, a tool that was seen as necessary for the instauration of an enlarged and peaceful scientific community. ² The second and more problematic field concerned a controversial area of inquiry in psychological research, whose appeal generated a plethora of reactions, ranging from staunch opposition to cautious interest and naïve enthusiasm. This was the field of para- or metapsychical phenomena, which at the time was the subject of extensive study by psychiatrists, physiologists, psychologists, and even philosophers. ³

This is not something that should be dismissed as a mere historical curiosity or trivia. In fact, as Ellenberger (1970: 85) remarks in his classic study, ‘The advent of spiritism…indirectly provided psychologists and psychopathologists with new approaches to the mind’. Therefore, psychical research played a crucial role in the development of the first dynamic psychiatry and more generally in spreading the idea of a fragmented self, affected by subliminal processes and subconscious activities (ibid.: 83–124). Ellenberger goes as far as to sketch out the following historical lineage: ‘Historically, modern dynamic psychotherapy derives from primitive medicine, and an uninterrupted continuity can be demonstrated between exorcism and magnetism, magnetism and hypnotism, and hypnotism and modern dynamic schools’ (ibid.: 48). In terms of cross-fertilization, the case of Boirac provides us with a glimpse into the fluid frontiers and the surprising migrations of concepts and frameworks between philosophy, psychology, and parapsychology in turn-of-the-century France.

In the 1899 article, later reprinted as the first chapter of a book titled La psychologie inconnue (1908) – partially translated into English in 1917 as Our Hidden Forces – Boirac took up the Baconian distinction between instantiæ ostensivæ and instantiæ clandestinæ in order to point to the existence of a realm of ‘clandestine’ and ‘cryptoidal’ phenomena escaping and bypassing the direct observation of our senses, as opposed to ‘phaneroidal’ and ‘ostensible’ phenomena (Boirac, 1917a: 23). According to Boirac, the relativization of human knowledge established by modern rationalism, notably by Kant, and the great scientific advances of the previous 50 years that had made possible the observation of natural phenomena hitherto unknown (he mentioned X-rays, which had been popularized by Röntgen in 1895) had proved wrong the ‘anthropocentric’ delusion according to which the only phenomena worthy of examination – indeed, the only phenomena that existed – were those detectable by our senses, as technologically enhanced as they might be. It was therefore necessary to retranslate into the language of science the metaphysical hypothesis ‘of the unknowable, of the noumenon, or of the thing in itself’ (ibid.: 29), and this was because contemporary science was engaged precisely in making the unknowable an increasingly relative limit: ‘Between the cryptoidal phenomena and the others the difference is but one of circumstances, not one of essence’ (ibid.: 30, original emphasis). It is important to dispel here any possible misunderstanding: The aim was not to rehabilitate ‘pseudoscience’, but rather to enlarge the field of inquiry of positive research. In Boirac’s view, in fact, cryptoidal phenomena abided by the same causal laws as the ‘phaneroidal’ phenomena, which were chained to ‘natural determinism’ (ibid.: 32). The point was rather to enshrine, in addition to the ‘sensations, perceptions, ideas, judgments, reasoning, etc. of which we are conscious’, a ‘latent’ level where such elements of psychic life were coordinated ‘in such manner as to constitute a second personality more or less distinct from and independent of the principal’ (ibid.: 45). Boirac gave to this deep layer of our mental world the suggestive but unsuccessful name of ‘cryptopsychism’ (see Boirac, 1907; later reprised as the sixth chapter of La psychologie inconnue, and the second chapter in the English translation).

The road of psychology between philosophy and science

The examples of cryptoidal phenomena presented by Boirac were multiple: hypnosis, somnambulism, amnesia, hypermnesia, multiple personalities, glossolalia, hallucinations and dissociations, remote mental suggestion, and forms of automatism. The Revue philosophique was not an inappropriate place to address issues of this sort. Indeed, between the 1880s and the 1890s the number of articles and reviews of books on psychopathological or metapsychical phenomena published in the Revue was conspicuous (for an overview, see Alvarado and Evrard, 2013). As is well known, despite its title, the journal – founded by Théodule Ribot (1839–1916), the great passeur of English and German experimental psychology in France (see Ribot, 1870, 1879) – in fact provided the most important platform for debates on scientific psychology, a discipline that was increasingly separating itself from the philosophical psychology originally advocated by Victor Cousin (1792–1867) and his school: a psychology grounded on the mind’s capacity to know itself autonomously through inner intuition. ⁴ This process of emancipation should not be read in purely antagonistic terms, but in the more articulated framework of a system of complex forms of disciplinary negotiation. Of course, the Revue philosophique also featured purely philosophical articles, even some by old metaphysicians such as Étienne Vacherot (1809–97), but still demanded that philosophers ground their work in ‘facts’, with the aim of neutralizing their typical ‘imaginary creations’ and ‘mystical effusions’ (Ribot, 1876: 3).

On the other hand, ministers of education such as Louis Liard (1846–1917), a philosopher trained by Jules Lachelier (1832–1918) and close to Renouvier; broad-minded eclectic mandarins such as Paul Janet (1823–99), professor of the history of philosophy at the Faculté des Lettres in Paris, and new spiritualist recruits including Émile Boutroux (1845–1921), who taught first at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and then at the Sorbonne, had long felt the need – backed at the political level in the climate of prostration following the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) – to establish a dialogue between philosophy and the sciences. ⁵ Psychology – or rather its object, the esprit – represented a decisive contribution in this respect. Not surprisingly, then, it was Paul Janet who in 1880 lobbied for a reform of the philosophy programmes that also included scientific psychology (Poucet, 1999: 136–7) and who, five years later, overcame the opposition of his colleagues at the Faculté de Lettres to entrust Ribot with a course in experimental psychology. ⁶ As further evidence of his open mind, Janet had already authored in 1865 a book titled Le cerveau et la pensée (Janet, 1867) and in 1879 had published the first philosophy textbook for high schools to include, while complying with the hierarchic principle of the autonomy of the mind, large sections devoted to the physiology and the anatomy of the brain (see McGrath, 2015b), with numerous examples of psychic phenomena such as sleep, dreams, personality splits, sleepwalking, and hallucinations (see Janet, 1879a) – a repertoire of phenomena he had become acquainted with while a member (and, since 1867, the president) of the Société Medico-Psychologique: the official association of aliénistes founded in 1852 and another important place of exchange and negotiation between psychologist-philosophers and psychologist-scientists. The textbook achieved a certain amount of success in the early 1880s and was adopted by many young high school professors, including Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Janet’s nephew, Pierre (1859–1947) – who will be discussed shortly – Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and presumably Boirac himself. Confronted with such an important and transversal change in the institutional and intellectual landscape, this new generation of thinkers ‘jettisoned the anti-naturalist thrust of eclecticism in order to revolutionize their spiritualist commitments to the autonomy of consciousness and the reality of free will on the basis of experimental research’ (McGrath, 2015b: 6).

The long-standing and simplistic distinction between spiritualism and positivism by which a large part of the secondary literature has characterized the French 19th century is therefore complicated and partly contradicted by a more sophisticated historiographical mapping that offers plenty of room for syncretism, intermediate positions, and conciliatory attempts. In this regard, we can recall Boirac’s closeness to Alfred Fouillée, who, according to Janet, belonged to a generation of ‘new spiritualists’ who had succeeded in making up for the inability of the first eclectic generation to reckon with the positive sciences (see Janet, 1879b: 9–17, 37–54, 83–95). ⁷ In his many publications, Fouillée had in fact put forward as a solution to the tension between freedom and determination the existence of so-called ‘idea-forces’ (idées-forces) – that is, mental conceptions (for example, the idea of moving) that were capable of converting themselves into intentional states of the nervous system and thence, through a complex system of ‘innervation’, into movements and actions (see, for instance, Fouillée, 1890: 76). Fouillée was thus openly animated by a spirit of ‘conciliation’ between the mental and the organic, between the positivist ‘objective synthesis’ and the spiritualist/idealist ‘subjective synthesis’ (Fouillée, 1896a). He opposed in particular the specious arguments and the ‘logical expedients’ devised by ‘antiscientific reaction’ in order to save the autonomy and the integrity of the self (Fouillée, 1890: 139). However, in his own way, he remained a spiritualist thinker convinced that the task of philosophy was that of tying together the inherently partial fields of scientific research within a ‘grand picture’ where everything was related to the knowing subject. Fouillée believed that in the following century, ‘upon re-establishing the psychic element at the very heart of reality’, the need for something ‘unknowable’ and ‘transcendent’, once symbolized by the Kantian thing in itself, would disappear, because reality would come to be ‘conceived of as homogeneous and one, both in its elements, which are psychical, and in its laws’, which were mechanical and sociological (Fouillée, 1896a: xlvii). The progress of science would do nothing other than set out the internal articulation of this supreme monistic unity where everything is life and consciousness.

Such a ‘panpsychism’ excluded the urgency, widely felt by the major French philosophers of science of the time (think for example of Émile Boutroux and his ‘conventionalist’ circle), to introduce the contingent and the unknowable at the heart of reality (see Fedi, 2006: 41). ⁸ In fact, from the monistic, evolutionary, and vitalistic perspective of Fouillée, which Boirac would take up to the letter, freedom and determinism ultimately coincided (Fouillée, 1896a: 241). In this sense, noting the growing scientific interest in metapsychics, Fouillée believed that phenomena such as ‘remote sympathy’ or the ‘exceptional hypersensitivity of the senses’ were not at all contrary to science: ‘It is possible that there are – or rather, it is impossible that there are not – ways, still unknown to us, to communicate through space’ (Fouillée, 1893: Vol. 2, 394). This was because, as he stated in a text originally published in the Revue philosophique (Fouillée, 1896b), the most recent scientific research had shown how there existed no ‘complete unconsciousness’ but only ‘subconscious states’. In other words,

From the absolute unconscious to the conscious…there would be an abyss that is completely incompatible with the law of universal continuity whose modern form is precisely the theory of evolution.…Like the rays of Röntgen, consciousness penetrates everything and, under conditions that are still unknown, could shed light on everything. (Fouillée, 1896a: 294–6; quoted in Fedi, 2006: 41)

New frontiers or new mysticisms?

Fouillée’s remarks were undoubtedly familiar to Boirac (as is evident at least from the common references to the Kantian noumenon and X-rays). They stemmed from a climate in which, beyond the singular theoretical positions, an enlargement of the field of investigation of the psychological sciences was commonly thought possible and even desirable. Animal magnetism was famously condemned by the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1784 and by the Académie de Médicine in 1842; however, a resurgence of interest in ‘fringe’ phenomena took place in France after 1880 following the opening of new horizons by experimental research into physics, physiology, and psychology (see Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, 2002). ⁹ This explains why, at the turn of the century, psychological research extended not only to the realm of psychopathology but also, and always from a scientific point of view, to what we would now define as paranormal phenomena. This was something that Fouillée himself had pointed out:

The science of our time is…more and more curious about such mysterious facts: magnetism, hypnotism, telegraphy, spiritism or even occultism; but it is only to dispel the mystery.…The psychologist and the physiologist reduce what seems supernatural or miraculous to the laws of nature.…What once seemed to us as impossible can now be proved possible, but on the basis of natural causes, such as Röntgen’s rays. (Fouillée, 1896a: xxvii)

Along the same lines, speaking at the Society of Psychic Research in London almost two decades later, Henri Bergson wondered about the explorations into the ‘terra incognita’ of psychic phenomena that the new science might have launched. According to him, the prejudice against this field of inquiry was due to the young age of psychology and to the fact that our vision of the world was shaped by centuries of study on the nature of the material world. As he notes

I have sometimes asked myself what would have happened if modern science, instead of setting out from mathematics to turn its direction towards mechanics, physics and chemistry, instead of bringing all its forces to converge on the study of matter, had begun by the consideration of the mind – if Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for example, had been psychologists. They would have produced a psychology of which today we can form no idea, just as before Galileo no one could have imagined what our physics would be.…Foreign to every mechanistic idea, science would have studied eagerly, instead of dismissing a priori, phenomena such as those you study.…The most general laws of mental activity once discovered (as, in fact, the fundamental principles of mechanics were discovered), science would have passed from pure mind to life: biology would have been constituted, but a vitalist biology…which would have sought, behind the sensible forms of living beings, the inward, invisible force of which the sensible forms are the manifestations. (Bergson, 1975: 98–9)

Similarly, in the last pages of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), he wrote, ‘Suppose that a gleam from this unknown world reaches us, visible to our bodily eyes. What a transformation for humanity, generally accustomed, whatever it may say, to accept as existing only what it can see and touch!’ (Bergson, 1977[1932]: 316).

In recent studies, Lachapelle (2011) and Brower (2010) have discussed in detail the long-lasting interest in metapsychical phenomena in France from the mid 19th to the early 20th century. ¹⁰ In this period, the overlaps between science and parapsychology were frequent, embodied by eminent figures such as Charles Richet (1850–1935), professor of physiology at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, secretary of the Société de psychologie physiologique, editor of the influential Revue scientifique, and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his studies on anaphylaxis. ¹¹ In the course of his research on somnambulism, Richet had in fact developed a keen interest in mediumistic phenomena (telepathy, psychokinesis, ectoplasms, and so on) that would lead him to found, along with others, the Institut métapsychique international and the Annales des sciences psychiques.

In a text originally published between 1891 and 1892 in the Revue scientifique, with the eloquent title of Dans cent ans, Richet built on the exponential character of scientific progress, drawing the conclusion that it was legitimate to think not only that one day the current laws of physics would be ‘dethroned’ by other, more general principles, but also that our own knowledge of nature would advance in size. Only ‘some forces’ were currently known; the others remained hidden:

What would we know of the force of electricity, had Galvani and Volta not experimented as they did? What could we say about magnetism, if the magnet were not in existence? Certainly, there are in nature all kinds of forces which we cannot see, do not know how to see, and that hazard only, or the genius of a man, will be able some day to discover. (Richet, 1892b: 210; quoted in Boirac, 1917a: 25)

Again, even in this case, the point was not to abandon the goal of experimental verification. Richet was adamant on this point: The phenomena he dealt with did not depend, as he had already written a few years before, on the ‘fantasy of the 7,450,926 devils of Hell’ (Richet, 1884: 296). On the contrary, they had well-determined natural origins. As Wolf remarks,

For Richet the strange achievements of mediums…were aspects of a special capability of certain people with specialized brains. He believed, therefore, that such phenomena should be considered as part of psychology and hence of physiology to be studied by experiment as should any unexplained phenomenon. (Wolf, 1993: 58)

Thus Richet dismissed as unfounded the criticisms of those who, like the German doctor Ottomar Rosenbach (1851–1907) – unsettled by the activities of the London-based Society for Psychical Research, to which Richet had contributed with studies on telepathy – feared the advent of a ‘new mysticism’, a sort of posthumous revenge by Swedenborg on Kant, which passed off fantasies about the supernatural as well-grounded psychological research (Rosenbach, 1892). Incidentally, this theme of ‘Swedenborg’s revenge’ would return a few years later in an article by the philosopher and psychologist Henri Delacroix (1873–1937), future professor of psychology at the Sorbonne (1919), titled precisely ‘Kant et Swedenborg’. Behind his modest intent – to account with a philological eye for the role played by criticisms of the Geisterseher in the development of Kantian thought – Delacroix concealed a more polemical aim: ‘This little historical problem’, he wrote, ‘is still relevant after more than a century’, because Swedenborg had found new acolytes and ‘still inspires those curious minds who search within experience itself for signs and proofs of the existence of another world’ (Delacroix, 1904: 578). Delacroix’s principal target was Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901), author of popular parapsychological studies and founder of the Society for Psychical Research, with which, as we have pointed out, Richet was quite closely associated. Delacroix himself – an intermediary figure between philosophy and psychology, although he never practised in an experimental fashion – had studied at length ‘limit situations’ such as mystical experiences, which he conceived of as modifications of the ‘structures’ of mental life (see Delacroix, 1908, 1922). In this sense, Fruteau de Laclos (2012: 29–53) has aptly described Delacroix’s psychology as a sort of ‘philosophical psychology’ or ‘psychophilosophy’ attempting to lead psychology out of the abstraction of spiritualist metaphysics and make it an autonomous discipline grounded in positive facts while avoiding reductionist outcomes. ¹²

Compared to Delacroix, who invited the new Swedenborgs to carefully read Kant before discussing and drawing risky scientific conclusions regarding those ‘fashionable mind-blowing facts’ (Delacroix, 1904: 578), Rosenbach was somewhat harsher and more radical. The progress of psychology, he declared in an 1892 article, had started the moment psychology had definitively purged itself of the metaphysical questions of philosophy, and this was the path the discipline had to pursue, limiting itself to those aspects of the mental that it was able to know through observation and experimentation. But in Richet’s view, science could go farther than Fechner, Wundt, or Donders. However much he claimed to be a ‘laboratory man’, he did not feel like qualifying this realm of ‘strange facts’ as mere metaphysics (Richet, 1892a: 420). Thirty years later, in 1922, Richet published a voluminous Traité de métapsychique, where he defined ‘metapsychics’ as precisely the science ‘whose objects are mechanical or psychological phenomena provoked by forces that appear to be intelligent or by unknown powers which are latent in the human mind’ (Richet, 1922: 5). Again, Richet’s conclusion was that, if we did not want to speak of spirits, we should at least admit that ‘the human personality has resources, both material and psychological, that we are unable to grasp’ (ibid.: 757). Hence, he adopted Boirac’s terminology and acknowledged as certain the existence of latent forms of consciousness that he termed ‘cryptoesthesias’. What really mattered, after all, as Boirac had said referring to the paradigmatic case of electricity, an authentic deus ex machina of his argumentation, was the actuality of cryptoidal phenomena; the fact that they occurred with less frequency and under more irregular conditions than phaneroidal phenomena did not detract from their scientific dignity (Boirac, 1917a: 291–2). Richet’s ‘great hope’, which provided the title to his last prophetic book (Richet, 1933), was precisely the discovery of the fundamental rational laws of this ‘unusual’, metapsychical world (‘cryptocosmos’) that surrounded us and that we still did not fathom fully.

In a similar vein, the psychologist Pierre Janet, Paul’s nephew, another fundamental reference for Boirac, did not shy away from associating himself with the parapsychological realm in his clinical practice. ¹³ In an extensive account of contemporary spiritism, published in 1892, he had shown how seriously he took the researches of that bizarre spiritist ‘cult’ or ‘church’, considering them as ‘extremely important documents for the understanding of the human mind’, documents whose scientific examination had ‘for ten years’ provided very useful material for the treatment of ‘mental illnesses’ (Janet, 1892: 413–14). Moreover, in his conclusion Janet claimed for experimental psychology, now a science distinct from philosophy, an autonomy in terms of methods and research that allowed it to observe with great serenity the overwhelming return of ‘metaphysics’ (testified by the fact that the International Spiritual Congress held in Paris in 1889 had attracted some 40,000 people). Indeed, psychology could help to deconstruct ‘infantile superstitions’ and contribute to ‘a general change of ideas’, towards a broader metaphysical picture of man and the world that was compatible with science (ibid.: 441–2). Of course, Janet’s stance was very prudent, as he was well aware of the follies and the fools circulating in that world. Nonetheless, he did not conceal his active participation in studies on mediumistic phenomena such as automatic writing (in consonance with Richet and the Society for Psychical Research), from which he had drawn some important conclusions, such as the following: ‘This curious fact [automatic writing] presented by the medium is indeed analogous in every detail to the phenomena found in nervous diseases, hysteria and induced somnambulism’. Mediumistic phenomena, he asserted, ‘have laws and they can all be explained on the basis of a serious disturbance in the mental operation of perception that we have described with the name of psychological disaggregation [désagrégation]’ (ibid.: 419).

The failure of synthesis

In the above quotation, Janet was referring to his studies conducted between 1882 and 1888 under the supervision of Joseph Gibert (1829–99) at the hospital of Le Havre, while he was teaching philosophy at the local high school, and then collected in his widely read dissertation L’automatisme psychologique, published in 1889. At Le Havre, Gibert and Janet had focused in particular on cases of somnambulism, with experiments that attracted the attention, among others, of Richet himself, of Léon Marillier (1862–1901), founder of the Société de psychologie physiologique, and of the circle of the Society for Psychical Research. ¹⁴ But the range of symptoms analysed and discussed by Janet in his thesis was far wider, also including hallucinations, anaesthesia, amnesia, catalepsy, dissociation, prophetic exaltation, demonic possession, and even mediumistic phenomena like table-turning or automatic writing – to the point that, as has been said, the category of ‘psychological automatism’ did not actually refer to ‘a specific mechanism’, but rather to ‘a set of convergent manifestations or symptoms’ systematized under one general theory (Fedi, 2007: 42).

According to Janet, automatisms were to be explained on the basis of a state of ‘psychological misery [misère psychologique]’, where the subject was unable, due to a ‘narrowing’ of his ‘field of consciousness’, to synthetize sensations into a unified and controlled personal representation. Consciousness in fact consisted ‘from the outset’ in a ‘synthetic activity combining a number of given phenomena in a new phenomenon differing from its elements’ (Janet, 1889: 483). In a sane subject whose field of consciousness extended normally, the capacity of synthesis worked in the most comprehensive manner, and ‘all phenomena, whatever their origin, are united in a single and always identical personal perception’ (ibid.: 336). In pathological cases, on the other hand, a failure of synthesis took the form of a disturbance of the will (‘moral force’), which let circulate freely in the psychic field of the subject facts of consciousness (images, sensations, and so on) that were associated in an independent, incoherent, and precarious fashion, giving birth to ‘secondary groups’ that, in the most serious cases, were the roots of hysterical neuroses, mnemonic alterations, personality changes, monoideisms – in short, of all the forms of partial or total automatism described in the thesis.

This model of the mind owed a great debt to the spiritualist philosophical psychology that had marked Janet’s formation. Following the wise advice of his mentor Ribot, Janet had decided to multiply his career options by studying both philosophy – in which he could find elements of psychology – and medicine, in particular neurology. In 1889, he earned his first PhD in philosophy, defending his thesis on automatism, while in 1893, when he was already the head of the psychology laboratory at the Salpêtrière, he completed his doctoral studies in medicine with a dissertation on hysteria. Over the following years, Janet would focus entirely on clinical research, also fulfilling his duties as editor of the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique (1904), president of the Société de psychologie (1901), and professor of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France (1902–34).

This notwithstanding, the philosophical roots of his psychological models, at least in L’automatisme, were patent. His status as Paul Janet’s nephew not only made available to him what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a huge cultural and social capital, which certainly facilitated his career, but also introduced him at an early stage to the main tenets of the philosophical psychology he was later taught at the ENS. To be sure, in accordance with François Broussais’s principle (later reprised by Claude Bernard) that the difference between the normal and the pathological was quantitative rather than ontological, Janet believed that the understanding of the subject must start from his more elementary, if not deviant, activities and states, for it was there that one could observe a primitive, albeit mechanical, form of spontaneity. Philosophers were therefore wrong in regarding the superior forms of consciousness as the point of departure of their analyses of mental life. On the contrary, far from being originary principles, unity and systematization were the outcomes of layered inferior processes (Janet, 1889: 3), rooted in physiological processes (ibid.: 480–1). Nonetheless, the model of the mind he adopted was coherent with the common hierarchy of the faculties that was widespread at the time, placing habits and passions at the lower level and the will and understanding (or the faculty of judgement) at the higher, in a progressive affirmation of autonomy and freedom (ibid.: 470–8).

This hierarchization was later contested, for example, by the Flemish philosopher-psychologist Georges Dwelshauvers (1866–1937), professor at the University of Brussels and author of La synthèse mentale (1908), a text strongly influenced by French spiritualism, in particular by the reflexive philosophy of Jules Lagneau (1851–94), professor at the lycée Michelet in Vanves. ¹⁵ In a 1916 book, Dwelshauvers reproached Janet for his overly narrow notion of the unconscious. Building on an original interpretation of Kantian apperception as a fundamentally preconscious process (Dwelshauvers, 1916: 87–8, 344), he submitted that the unconscious, instead of being the source of mental failure or disaggregation, played a ‘dynamic’ role, serving as the ‘arsenal of the creative synthesis’ (ibid.: 155–6).

This reference to Kantian apperception that we find in Dwelshauvers was no accident. The very notion of consciousness as a synthetic unity adopted by Janet was in fact the outcome of a complex process of reception and mediation, where Kant’s transcendental apperception merged or was conflated with the voluntarist motifs of post-Biranian French spiritualism. ¹⁶ The initiator of this conceptual assimilation was Jules Lachelier, a disciple of Félix Ravaisson and professor at the ENS from 1864 to 1875. ¹⁷ In his courses, but most notably in a short but popular text titled Du fondement de l’induction (1871), Lachelier had in fact proposed a different, reflexive reading of the Biranian subject, in the firm belief that Biran had failed at explaining in a compelling fashion the passage from psychical to natural causality. According to an anecdote related by his disciple Boutroux (1927: 11), Lachelier had meditated at length on the Kantian sentence, ‘The “I think” must be able to accompany all my representations’ (Kant, 1998[1781]: §15, B130: 246). From this, he had drawn the conclusion that the esprit was not defined by the apperception of an interior effort revealing the indissoluble link between volition and consciousness and, by transposition, the external causation of the world; on the contrary, not being a substance, the I was first and foremost thinking, reflection. There is little doubt that the translation of the German ‘Ich denke’ as ‘moi’ – that is, as the reflexive first person singular – by Tissot and Barni, the early translators of Kant, facilitated enormously the psychological reading of the formal Kantian I (see Balibar, 2004) – a reading that, despite a few variations on the theme, would remain predominant in the French spiritualist and idealistic tradition up to Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944). ¹⁸ Taking the lead from Lachelier, Boutroux inscribed himself within this tradition, defining consciousness not as a ‘phenomenon’, a ‘property’, or a ‘function’, but rather as ‘an act, a transformation of external data into internal data, a kind of living mould [moule] in which phenomena undergo a process of successive metamorphoses and the whole world may find exercise for activity’ (Boutroux, 1920[1874]: 115). This did not mean that consciousness was the cause of the world, only that the mind gave the world a sense or, more properly, a ‘form’. It is possible to appreciate in Boutroux the convergence of a Kantian notion, that of form, and a spiritualist one, that of act. Indeed, as has been noted, Boutroux took from Kant ‘only what could interest a spiritualist thinker, namely an original action of the esprit’ (Capeillères, 1998: 440). Such a peculiar interpretation of Kant’s transcendental apperception also explains Boutroux’s definition of the will as the ‘act of the person who, by virtue of his superiority, co-ordinates, organizes, and reduces to unity the multiplicity of both his modes of being and of objects’ (Boutroux, 1920[1874]: 163). We find an almost identical model in Janet’s dissertation, and this is not surprising if we consider that L’automatisme psychologique was defended in front of a commission that included, besides his uncle Paul, Boutroux himself. ¹⁹

However, in his explicative framework, Janet combined this notion of the creative power of the will with conceptual tools borrowed from other thinkers that we have already mentioned. For example, we can discern Fouillée’s idées-forces behind the theory that ideas were not mere mental conceptions, but rather and already tendencies, that is, movements and actions in potentia, to the extent that, in order to control and organize them in the unified representation of personality, consciousness had to exert a sort of counterforce, an act of will. Moreover, it is likely that Janet was also influenced by Renouvier’s notion of ‘mental vertigo’, seen as the immediate passage from imagination to act (see Renouvier, 1912: Vol. 1, 277–97). In such a mental state, Renouvier claimed,

the mere conception of movements as possible, as imminent, together with some fear or hope…is enough for the organs to start producing them, unless there are obstacles or unless the will manages to curb representation. This class includes in particular muscular acts or secretions, sympathetic imitation or contagion and, among the illusory phenomena, many of the facts of the so-called animal magnetism, the exploring pendulum, table-turning, etc. up to mental vertigo, which…highlights the common principles of all these phenomena. (ibid.: Vol. 2, 335)

Be that as it may, what ultimately mattered was that synthesis qua ‘act [Actus] of the spontaneity of the power of representation [Vortstellungskraft]’ (Kant, 1998: §15, B130: 245) was now converted from an intellectual operation to the structuring activity of subjectivity as a whole. As Janet noted in the conclusion of L’automatisme psychologique, in fact, ‘the work of the human mind’ consisted precisely in the act of synthesis, in the creation of wholes from diversity (Janet, 1889: 480). Against this backdrop, it is entirely correct (see Brower, 2010: 56; Carroy and Plas, 2000b; Brooks, 1998), to look at Janet’s theories as a sort of theoretical compromise between two disciplines – psychology and philosophy – whose frontiers were in the painstaking process of defining themselves.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Janet’s theses complicated the pacified framework of traditional philosophical psychology. According to him, in fact, the synthesis of consciousness was ‘both the obstacle [to] and the source of automatism’, and this was because, having the tendency to preserve themselves, synthesis could always produce those perceptions that would later form the basis of automatic associations (Janet, 1889: 365). In other words, synthesis was a power operating, with varying intensity, at every level and moment of psychic life, from the first sensations to the most complex ideational forms of science and art. When a narrowing of the field of consciousness occurred, synthesis could gather the sensations that had escaped the normal personal perception into a second unconscious perception, which provided a proper explanation for phenomena such as posthypnotic suggestion, somnambulism, or automatic writing. Episodes of somnambulism, Janet claimed, revealed another, temporary form of existence, separated from the normal one, most of the time defective and rudimentary; however, they could occasionally ‘originate a new existence that is more complete of the normal life of the individual’ (ibid.: 137). In the more severe cases of the ‘neuropaths’ or the ‘aliénés’, it was possible to observe the formation of actual personalities that were simultaneous to the normal personality of the subject. This posed for Janet a philosophical predicament: Whereas personality disorders did not raise problems, the presence of multiple personalities forced him to ‘revisit [reculer] even more the true nature of the metaphysical personhood and to consider the very notion of personal unity as an appearance that can undergo some modifications’ (ibid.: 323). Building on these findings – which met with resistance from his uncle Paul (see Janet, 1897: Vol. 2, 570–2; Carroy and Plas, 2000a; LeBlanc, 2001) – Janet claimed to have found the key to the treatment of mediumistic and spiritic phenomena, which are amply dealt with in the third chapter of the second part of the dissertation, dedicated to the ‘different kinds of psychological disaggregation’. Magnetism, psychographics, the summoning of spirits from Ouija boards, and table-turning – these were all cases of mental disaggregation that unleashed involuntary movements, autonomous visual and auditory sensations, suggestions, and hallucinations bearing witness to the existence of subconscious personalities not unlike those of somnambular patients. Of course, the mediumistic manifestations possessed a form of intelligence of their own, which did not belong to otherworldly spirits, however, but rather to the subconscious of the medium, who was unaware of his movements and thoughts: ‘The whole point of spiritism is…the disaggregation of the psychological phenomena and the formation, outside of the personal perception, of a second series of thoughts unrelated to the first one’ (Janet, 1889: 401). Janet then concluded that the phenomena observed by the spiritists were of the same kind as those that he himself observed in the somnambulists, and that the mediums were ultimately ‘neuropaths’, if not ‘hysterics’ (ibid.: 404), whose state of mental disaggregation allowed for the emergence of unconscious and ‘incomplete’ personalities, formed by ‘syntheses of images clustered around different centers’ (ibid.: 418).

Beyond synthesis: Neural force and cryptopsychic transmission

Boirac inscribed his notion of cryptopsychism within the conceptual space opened up by the Janetian subconscious. With explicit reference to Janet, he wrote, ‘Whatever the depth of the physical substratum of this mental misery, its most constant sign is, without question, cryptopsychism’, that is, ‘the tendency which certain psychological phenomena possess to decentralize themselves from the central consciousness, to constitute by its side certain focuses of consciousness of a secondary and less persistent order’ (Boirac, 1917a: 66). Although he adopted Janet’s explicative framework for ‘hypnoidal’ phenomena, Boirac wondered whether it was necessary to take a step further in order to reach an overall explanation of the totality of cryptoidal phenomena, including the two other families of phenomena that he labelled ‘magnetoidal’ (whose nature was mostly physical, such as animal magnetism) and ‘spiritoidal’ (that is, mediumistic, dwelling in a field of reality that, despite its psychological nature, was still unknown). Like Janet, he hoped one day to reduce parapsychical phenomena to those of normal and pathological psychology under more comprehensive and general laws. But in order to do so, it was necessary to enlarge our conception of mental life, deepening Janet’s insights into the existence of second-level personalities. The fact that it was possible to interact with a hypnotized subject, for example, pointed to the presence of a developed consciousness, endowed with an enhanced suggestibility, capable of recognizing the hypnotizer and of attaching importance to his words and gestures. Perhaps, then, Janet’s theory failed to give sufficient consideration to

the tendency of the cryptopsychic law of the conservation of energy, which in a great number of cases is responsible for the creation of a new personality and for the manifestation, under this form, of powers of perception, memory, imagination and reason equal, even superior, to those of the creative energy, normally identical with the central or habitual personality. (ibid.: 74)

It should be clarified that Boirac had no intention of following ‘certain authors’ who wanted to modify Janet’s theory to establish a sort of primacy of the unconscious self as the true site and agency of psychic over conscious life. This was the road taken, for example, by the physician Gustave Geley (1865–1924), a member of the Institut Psychologique and later director of the Institut Métapsychique International, who, in a section of his book L’être subconscient (published under the name of E. Gyel) devoted precisely to a revision of the ‘synthetic theory of psychology according to the new notions’, moved the power of synthesis from the conscious to the unconscious level. In his view, the conscious self depended on organic functions, whereas the unconscious self, endowed with ‘Force’ and ‘Intelligence’, was largely independent from ‘exteriorizable’ organic phenomena. By virtue of this autonomy, the unconscious self ‘stores the data of the senses, even the most irrelevant facts’, ‘synthesizes these data into new possibilities’, and ‘retains the complete memory of everything that happened within the field of consciousness’, directing consciousness in a disguised fashion and ensuring its permanence through time. In a certain sense, Geley argued, individuality was nothing but the ‘synthesis of various personalities preserved in their entirety’. When the conscious self died, its ‘full memory’ was retained on the unconscious level and ‘its psychic elements…are combined in subconscious synthesis with the psychic elements of the previous consciousnesses that have constituted it’ (Gyel, 1899: 128–31).

Boirac handled such conclusions with caution, adhering as usual to the authority of experimental evidence. However, the way was already mapped out, so to speak. In addition to an ‘elementary’ and ‘fragmentary’ cryptopsychism, it was necessary to include a ‘synthetic’ and ‘organized’ cryptopsychism whose phenomena arose in an increasingly structured way to form ‘the appearance of a secondary personality’ (Boirac, 1917a: 46). The key to the general understanding of the cryptopsychic level consisted for Boirac in an enlarged and upgraded model of mental life, well beyond the still psychological perspective of Janet. The latter in fact stopped at a conception of psychology that was still ‘phaneroidal’ – that is, based on a ‘purely psychological explanation’ (ibid.: 76; my emphasis), in the sense of classic psychology – which prevented him from taking seriously, for example, magnetoidal phenomena, dismissing them as instances of ‘hyperesthesia of touch’ (ibid.: 82). However, if Kant was right in his emphasis on the phenomenal relativity of our knowledge, nothing kept us from thinking that one day scientific progress would fill those explicative gaps that were currently badly supplemented with ‘superstitions’. It was therefore possible to propose the existence of a ‘transmission of the thought or the will’ between hidden consciousnesses, between ‘living bodies’, on a still unfathomable level of psychic life (ibid.: 98–9). As a matter of fact, findings so far suggested that cryptoidal phenomena were likely rooted in a ‘psychic force’ released by the nervous system and capable, like magnetism or electricity, ‘of radiating from a distance’ (ibid.: 249), with outcomes that varied by individual. As Boirac wrote:

In the normal individual and in the normal state, this force animating the system follows, as it were, certain constant and preordained channels. If some internal or external cause tends to upset its natural balance, it reacts immediately in a manner that will tend to reestablish it. Further, it receives, without a doubt, the radiations of other, foreign nervous systems, which it absorbs, neutralizes and transforms. This reception of extraneous forces is, however, unconscious and imperceptible. On the contrary, each time that the phenomena of suggestion or magnetism become possible, this force seems to acquire the property of rapid mobilization in all parts of the human organism; so much so that, under the action of the will or of the imagination, or under the action of certain physical agents and influences, it travels and accumulates itself instantaneously in certain parts while it abandons and evacuates certain others. Also, it would seem as if it had ceased to remain impenetrable, or indifferent, to the force of a similar nature which another nervous system sends. It will allow itself to be influenced by it, as if both belonged to one and the same individual, and as if regulated by the very same consciousness. (Boirac, 1917a: 165)

The superior faculties that, according to Janet, characterized the conscious life of normal individuals could in fact also express themselves on a cryptoidal level and somehow affect by transmission the mental life of other individuals. As Boirac made clear in his last book – L’avenir des sciences psychiques, published in 1917, the year of his death, and immediately released in England as The Psychology of the Future – the presence ‘beneath our conscious personality’ of ‘another personality that is still ourselves yet appears to be some one else: a personality that feels, thinks, and acts, entirely without our being conscious of it except for its exterior manifestations’ (Boirac, 1917b: 26) was undisputed. Far from being synonymous with disaggregation, mediumistic phenomena were instead the ultimate ‘synthetic’ and ‘spontaneous’ crystallization of a multiplicity of hypnoidal and magnetoidal phenomena, unified and induced on a cryptoidal level: ‘Spiritism appears, therefore, as a spontaneous synthesis of all, or almost all, the parapsychic facts, determined by a certain particular nervous and mental state, to which, perhaps, might be given the name “spiritogène”’ (ibid.: 273). And again: ‘It is not unusual, in a spiritistic séance that is even a little successful, to observe the facts of thought-reading, of clairvoyance, the exteriorization of the motricity, of materialization, etc., assembled all together in one spontaneous synthesis, the secret of which wholly escapes us’ (ibid.: 275). This was not, however, a purely immaterial activity; in this case, consciousness was not the abstract entity described in philosophy, but rather the consciousness of experimental psychology, grounded in physiology. It was thus necessary to presuppose ‘a kind of radiation or expansion of the nerve force, as the phenomena of heat, light, and electricity enable us easily to understand’ (Boirac, 1917a: 194). This was the only way to explain, for instance, cases of telepathy, where thought, with a nervous ‘discharge’, ‘travels through space’ in an action ‘similar to the Hertzian waves’ (ibid.: 185–6). Future studies, which Boirac always envisaged as strictly experimental, would need to take into account the hypothesis of this peculiar property of the psychic force, which he defined as ‘conductibility’. Perhaps it was not a single force; perhaps there existed an heterogeneous field of articulated and interacting forces, but the point was that this force or those forces obeyed ‘the great law of the “conservation of energy”’ (ibid.: 260). Only thus, going beyond the threshold of ‘ordinary’ psychology, would it have been possible to make ‘parapsychology’ a proper science, connected with physiology and those ‘regions of physics where the theory of the most subtle and imponderable forces of nature are elaborated’ (Boirac, 1917b: 11).

Conclusion

Our Hidden Forces was not only an attempt at phenomenological classification, so to speak, but also a search for those scientific conditions that would make it possible to isolate cryptoidal phenomena within experimental settings as verifiable and controllable as possible, excluding everything that could bias observation (simulations, individual variables like suggestibility and oversensitivity, and so on). Of course, this extreme application of the experimental method promised more than it could deliver, as acknowledged by the Académie des Sciences in its judgement on Boirac’s book for the Fanny Emden Prize. The problem was not the object per se (the prize was in fact awarded for field research into the effects of remote physiological or psychological action by one organism on another), but rather the intellectual formation of the author, which was deemed too philosophical (see Boirac, 1917a: xiv). The justifications of Boirac, who attacked the rigid and pernicious separation between ‘official science’ and independent research, were worthless in this respect: In the end, he was not a scientist, but rather a well-read dilettante that, while swearing by Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), was heading into shaky and uncertain territory. For Geley, for instance, he was a ‘nomenclator’ rather than a proper researcher (Geley, 1919: xii, 118–19, 121). Indeed, Boirac’s interest in Esperanto might be seen as a reflection of his will to establish clear and shared linguistic frameworks within the scientific community. Even the ‘epistemological’ pages of his book – omitted in the English edition but celebrated by Bergson (1972) – where Boirac ingenuously tried to point out the shortcomings of classical theories of causality when faced with cryptoidal phenomena, ultimately amounted to desperate and naïve efforts to classify the unclassifiable (see Boirac, 1908: Chapter 2). Besides, many of his argumentations were drawn from the Leçons de philosophie (1884–6) of the spiritualist philosopher Élie Rabier (1846–1932), that is, from the most popular philosophy manual of the time (it continued to be republished until 1912), which Boirac likely adopted when he was still a high school teacher. ²⁰ Despite its theoretical clarity and richness, Rabier’s manual could hardly be considered the most advanced point of reference on issues in the philosophy of science. After all, Boirac’s aim was simply to clarify the incompatibility of ‘our hidden forces’ with traditional models of causality and, therefore, with the canonic methods of observation.

Be that as it may, this bore witness to what the Académie and Geley had correctly grasped: Boirac’s inherently philosophical mindset. In the variety of his sources and references, he went beyond the standard synthetic model of consciousness to attain a form of panpsychism perhaps more unrefined than, but surely inspired by, that of his master Fouillée. This model of consciousness, which insisted on the connection and interdependence of all individuals – to the point that one might speculate on its affinities with the solidaristic conception of society advocated by Fouillée himself and, more famously, by Léon Bourgeois (1851–1925) – never managed to impose itself within the walls of the academia, where the eclectic spiritualist model continued to dominate, and this was perhaps because of Fouillée and Boirac’s marginal position within the philosophical field. ²¹

Apart from its quality and substance, Boirac’s intellectual endeavour should rather be seen as symptomatic of the complex relationships between science and philosophy in fin-de-siècle France (and Europe) – relationships that were far from linear, being marked instead by strategic forms of methodological and disciplinary negotiation, such that philosophers with a traditional education could engage in dialogue with experimental psychologists, or even become – or aspire to become, as Bergson did (see Bianco, 2020) – clinicians themselves, while scientists could be seduced by phenomena escaping the direct grasp of the senses. Parapsychological research – an interest that, as we have seen, was all but negligible, or at least private – represented in this respect a cross-cutting frontier zone or scientific no-man’s land where individual competences and professional affiliations tended to blur, prompting reactions that cannot be reduced to simplistic schemes distinguishing, as on a graduated scale from metaphysics to positivity, between spiritist charlatans, speculative philosophers, and rigorous scientists. Ultimately, Boirac longed for the opening of an ‘infinite’ field of scientific research, ‘a whole and still unknown region of nature’ (Boirac, 1908: 190) whose exploration would have required the ‘continuous cooperation of a large circle of physicians, physiologists, and philosophers’ (Boirac, 1917a: 103). The Institut psychique international, based in Paris (14 rue de Condé) and operational from 1900 to 1933 (although rebranded the Institut général psychologique in 1902), was founded with precisely this aim. ²²