Cesare Lombroso on mediumship and pathology

Mediumship and pathology

American Spiritualism developed rapidly in the middle of the nineteenth century during a period of fast religious, scientific, technological and social changes (Taves, 1999; Timmons, 2005). ¹ The activities of mediums were one of the factors that affected the development and dissemination of Spiritualism. Working in or out of a presumed altered state of consciousness generally called a trance, some mediums specialized in messages or intellectual performances that purportedly came from the deceased. Mediums expressed information about deceased individuals via feelings, thoughts, visions and voices. Once received, the mediums could pass on the information verbally or through writing, or through other means such as poetry, paintings and the playing of music. In addition, there were mediums who produced physical effects including, but not limited to, raps, movement of objects, the appearance of writing on paper or on slates, luminous effects, and materializations of figures or parts of figures associated with the deceased by the sitters in the séance room. Some mediums did not specialize in this way but rather produced both mental and physical effects. ²

Mediumship represented different things to different people. Most Spiritualists saw mediums as a conduit to a spirit world or as the harbingers of a new era (e.g. Edmonds and Dexter, 1853), while others saw them as in thrall to evil spirits or demons (e.g. M’Donald, 1866) or, more simply, as swindlers (e.g. Jewett, 1873) or frauds. Another group of individuals, among them psychologists and psychiatrists, saw mediums as individuals capable of producing ‘real’ manifestations that were not produced by spirit agency. That is, they believed that the mediumistic communications contained actual information about deceased individuals and that the physical effects occurred without the use of conventional means. They posited that the phenomena of the séance were the result of real psychic abilities of the medium without discarnate intervention. ³

Another tradition at the time held that mediumship was a purely pathological phenomenon, in which the reported events were either the product of fraud, or of such processes as suggestion, dissociation, automatisms, or hallucinations that clouded the judgement of both mediums and sitters. ⁴ Among the individuals who comprised this tradition were Frederic Marvin (1847–1918) and William Hammond (1828–1900) in the USA, and Pierre Janet (1859–1947) and Joseph Lévy-Valensi (1879–1943) in France (Hammond, 1876; Janet, 1889; Lévy-Valensi, 1910; Marvin, 1874). Alfred Binet (1857–1911) wrote in his book Les Altérations de la Personnalité: ‘From time to time the most discrete authors cannot avoid saying that such [an] excellent medium had a nervous crisis …’ (Binet, 1892: 299). ⁵ Jean Martin Charcot (1825–93), among others, believed some mediumistic phenomena showed hysterical contagion (Charcot, 1888), a topic that was developed by others in later years (e.g. Viollet, 1910).

In his book Folie et Spiritisme (1999), Pascal Le Maléfan traced the existence of different causal models of the pathology-mediumship relationship in the French medical literature on the subject. He argued that the figure of the medium in French Spiritism affected French psychiatric nosology. Mediumistic trances, visions and automatic writing provided an analogy ‘by which spiritist phenomena … served to refine mechanisms, classifications, etiologies and interpretation systems in psychopathology’ (Le Maléfan, 1999: 47).

However, Lombroso defended ideas that were held by a small number of individuals at the time. He postulated a different relationship between mediumship and pathology, one that admitted the coexistence of both pathology and the supernormal. This point of view was also present in some publications about cases in which the person under study was considered to have experienced both telepathy and hysterical symptoms (e.g. J.H.P.H., 1894). Along these same lines, others argued that ‘distant intention’ only worked with those whose nervous system was out of balance (Bourru and Burot, 1887: 128), or who were in rare states of ‘extreme sensibility, abnormal, pathological …’ (Despine, 1880: 226).

An American journalist and writer, Francis G. Fairfield (1844–87), now mainly forgotten, believed that lesions in the nervous system accounted for genuine psychic phenomena (Fairfield, 1875). He wrote:

[T]his lesion develops as one of its exponents a peculiar sensory and motor aura (or atmosphere), which, entering into intimate molecular relations and contact with surrounding objects within a circle of greater or less periphery, eventuates in the phenomenon of clairvoyance in cephalic, and of table-tipping, rappings, and the like, in vital temperaments. (p. 29)

This aura, he said, came from the nervous system and was a function of nervous disorder. ⁶

In Italy, psychiatrist Enrico Morselli (1852–1929), who believed in real mediumistic phenomena, also discussed mediumship as a morbid phenomenon during the early part of the twentieth century. In his view, mediums showed a variety of disturbances of the nervous system, among them paralyses and limb infirmities (Morselli, 1908, Vol. 1: 103–11). Furthermore, he saw conditions such as diabetes, obesity, renal disorders and neuralgia as part of a hysteria-related diathesis related to mediumship (Vol. 2: 302, 482). In his opinion: ‘Mediumship is a metahysterical condition’ (Vol. 2: 310). ⁷

The investigation of mediumship, and particularly its veridical aspects, was the subject of psychical research, a movement that developed in the late nineteenth century, and attempted to explore psychic phenomena scientifically. ⁸ A particularly important development was the founding of the Society for Psychical Research and the early investigations and theorizing done by its members. Founded in London in 1882 by a group of scholars and scientists, the membership also included some Spiritualists. ⁹ Under its aegis, researchers carried out studies on a variety of phenomena such as thought-transference, apparitions of the living and of the dead, and mediumship (e.g. Gurney, Myers and Podmore, 1886; Guthrie and Birchall, 1883; Lodge, 1894; Myers, 1892). The last included unprecedented detailed investigations of mental mediums, particularly the Boston medium Leonora E. Piper (1857–1950; e.g. Lodge, 1890), who became known initially through the investigations of American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910; see James, 1886, 1890). Using the results of these and other investigations, classical scholar Frederic W.H. Myers (1843–1901) – also known as the Society’s main theoretician – developed his model of the subliminal mind. In his model, Myers redefined previous ideas of the unconscious to include psychic phenomena, the concept of a nonphysical mind, and contact with the spiritual world. ¹⁰

Cesare Lombroso

Lombroso, who lived between 1835 and 1909, was a well-known Italian psychiatrist and criminologist. ¹¹ He studied medicine at the University of Pavia between 1852 and 1858. On 13 March 1858 he graduated as a physician, and on 14 May 1859 he qualified as a surgeon. A week later he joined the Army of Piedmont (northern region of Italy, from which the process of unification of the Italian States began) as a military doctor. This provided him with firsthand knowledge about the poor hygienic conditions in which large segments of the population lived.

In those years Lombroso began his studies on pellagra and on the human and Italian ‘races’. During his university years he had been in an asylum in Vienna, where he began to develop his ideas on the congenital organic abnormalities of madness.

In 1865 Lombroso obtained a post as a university teacher of psychiatry. Later he had a temporary position teaching forensics (1873), and even later (1876) a formal one. In 1890 he took a position in psychiatry, and in 1905 in criminal anthropology. While Lombroso had many admirers and followers (Villa, 2013), as seen when several of his followers got together in a celebration of his work (Anon., 1908), there is no question that he had many critics as well (e.g. Bougault, 1895). Writing about the 1876 appointment, which was a dual chair covering both forensic medicine and public hygiene at the University of Turin, Villa (2013) noted that others at the University questioned the originality of his chosen topics. Furthermore, even at the height of his fame and influence, some considered him a pseudoscientist (e.g. Anon., 1910b). In 1882, for example, he was expelled by the Società Italiana di Antropologia ed Etnografia for his deviant ideas. New scholarship has documented these perceptions of Lombroso and his work (e.g. Baima Bollone, 1992, 2002; Iannantuoni, Lodesani and Schiraldi, 2015; Knepper and Ystehede, 2013; Montaldo, 2011).

Lombroso proposed that there were born criminals and that they presented particular inherited physical and mental signs of degeneration and atavism, some of which included common facial bone structure, as well as abnormal tactile sensibility and arterial pressure. Furthermore, they showed abnormalities in their bones, especially the skull, and left-handedness, all of which he considered to be clear marks of atavism and degeneration. Lombroso started discussing this in L’Uomo Delinquente (1876) – which went through several revised editions during the rest of the century – as well as in other publications (e.g. Lombroso, 1887a, 1891a). His work was considered to be a representative of late nineteenth-century degeneration theory (Pick, 1989).

Women and geniuses did not escape Lombroso’s schema. In fact, he associated genius with pathology, pointing out that there had been frequent examples of geniuses going insane. He wrote:

The frequency of delusions in their multiform characters of degenerative characteristics, of the loss of affectivity, of heredity, more particularly in the children of inebriate, imbecile, idiotic, or epileptic parents, and, above all, the peculiar character of inspiration, show that genius is a degenerative psychosis of the epileptoid group. (Lombroso, 1896b: 359)

Lombroso, hypnosis and telepathy

Lombroso became interested in psychic phenomena during the last decades of the nineteenth century. ¹² By this time psychical research had become known in Europe through the work of the SPR and through other developments (e.g. Aksakof, 1895; James, 1886; Ochorowicz, 1887; Richet, 1884). In Italy, as shown by Biondi (1988), there was a great deal of interest in Spiritualism and mediumship.

During the late nineteenth century, followers of the doctrine of Allan Kardec (pseudonym of Hippolyte-Léon Denizard Rivail, 1804–69; Kardec, 1857) began to establish Spiritist groups. The monthly Annali dello Spiritismo in Italia was circulated widely in Italy, and a few mediums began to appear, producing various phenomena, such as automatic writing and table turning. The adherents of Spiritism were mostly educated people from artistic and literary circles (musicians, music critics, authors, playwrights, etc.) and physicians. There were a very few scientists, and some ordinary and illiterate people. The condemnation of the Catholic Church was strong. Spiritism was denounced in the Church’s journals, magazines and newspapers, as well as in powerful sermons heard every Sunday in the churches (Biondi, 1988, 2013).

Although not well known, Lombroso’s involvement with ‘occult’ and unconventional themes came from his youth. When he was a university student, one of his teachers, Bartolomeo Panizza, had experimentally studied ‘thought transmission’ under hypnosis while he was a member of a medical commission in Milan in September of 1850; he was also one of the main Italian physicians (and a head of the University of Pavia), and Lombroso developed a friendship with him. When the official report of the medical commission concluded that thought transference did not exist, Panizza remained convinced of the contrary (Biondi, in press). Interestingly Lombroso (1932) wrote that Panizza was a superstitious man who had many irrational beliefs.

There are other examples of Lombroso’s early interest in unconventional topics. While in Genoa for some months – during his years as a military physician – he studied homeopathy under the guidance of Dr Giulio Gaiter (1819–1901), well known in Italy for his belief in homeopathy. Lombroso maintained his interest in homeopathy until the end of the century. In 1896, he started to publish on the subject, as well as on mediumship, in his Archivio di Psichiatria, Scienze Penali, ed Antropologia Criminale (Lombroso, 1896a).

Towards the end of the 1870s, Lombroso showed interest in hypnosis, including its physiology and trance states. In 1882 he published a paper about the action of magnets and the transposition of the senses (Lombroso, 1882) and continued for years to study and publish on the topic. In those years, Lombroso paid attention to the phenomenon of ‘psychological polarization’, the supposed induction of opposite feelings and states of the mind of hypnotized people when a magnet was brought close to them. The phenomena had been discussed by French researchers (Binet and Féré, 1885), and, finding it interesting, Lombroso conducted some investigations of his own. In 1887 he participated in a medical committee whose remit was to analyse the phenomenon and which concluded, after new experiments, that it did not exist (Biondi, 2004). However, Lombroso himself continued to be convinced of its existence, as seen in his book Ricerche sui Fenomeni Ipnotici e Spiritici (1909a).

He also participated in a government commission to evaluate the theatrical shows of public magnetizer Donato, whose real name was Alfred D’Hont. Afterwards Lombroso was firmly convinced that public exhibitions of hypnosis had to be forbidden because of the potential risks that it had for the mental hygiene of the general public. Donato was also known for performing demonstrations of ‘telepathy’, and Lombroso may have also been exposed to these (e.g. Gallini, 1983).

In 1886 he wrote in ‘Studi sull’ipnotismo’ that some hysterical women have the skill to know in advance on what day and in what hour they will have a new crisis, which Lombroso interpreted as evidence that the brain had a nervous centre for this in ‘civilized’ people (Lombroso, 1886b; see also Lombroso, 1887c). Furthermore, he stated that if ‘thought and will are phenomena of movement … what difficulty would there be to think that motion is transmitted at a distance?’ (Lombroso, 1887c: 25). He also collaborated with colleagues in works on hypnosis (e.g. Ottolenghi and Lombroso, 1889).

Lombroso (1887b) repeated his firm belief that thought was a vibration capable of exteriorization. It seems that he believed he had a rational theory to explain thought-transference based on cerebral emanations, a model discussed by many others during the nineteenth century (Alvarado, 2015).

Originally, Lombroso was not a friend of Spiritism, having gone on record against the Spiritistic theory (Lombroso, 1886a). But by mid-1888 he seemed somewhat open-minded as can be seen in the article that he published (Lombroso, 1888) in the Roman literary weekly Fanfulla della Domenica. Lombroso wrote that, although no particular era was ready for new facts, it could get used to them through their repetition. He also thought the following about reactions to his supposed discovery of a toxin in corn as the cause of pellagra:

Sixteen or twenty years ago, Italy judged the man who had discovered the pellagrozeina to be a fool, and even now the academic world laughs at criminal anthropology, hypnotism, and homeopathy. I wonder if I and my friends, who laugh at spiritism, are wrong, because we are unable to realize an error, and just like fools, being in the dark of the truth, we laugh at those who are not in that dark. (Lombroso, 1888: 2)

In January 1890 Lombroso met professional mind-reader Pickman (who was in Turin for some theatrical shows) and was able to study him. Lombroso (1890a, 1890b) presented a medical and psychological history of this individual, and performed some tests of thought transmission with him. In these papers, Lombroso showed that he was aware of the work of Pierre Janet and others on telepathy, as well as of the publications of the SPR in general. In fact, by the end of 1890 Lombroso was listed as a Corresponding Member of the SPR (Anon., 1890: 680), so by that time he had access to their Proceedings and Journal and we may speculate that he was reading them. Interestingly, and relevant to the excerpt below which links genuine psychic phenomena to pathology, Lombroso (1890b: 217) wrote: ‘Pickman is lucid because he is neuropathic with incipient ataxia …’.

Lombroso, with colleagues Archelao Grimaldi and Efisio Ardu, also conducted an inquiry about thought transference (Lombroso, 1891b). By this time Lombroso had accepted telepathy as a reality and believed it was related to abnormal states of extreme sensitivity in persons showing a ‘nervous excitability to an extreme degree’ (p. 68), a condition he associated with a lack of attention to external stimuli. These disturbances, Lombroso believed, were typical of hysterics, but they also explained the high frequency of thoughts from dying persons, who he presumed had nervous energy disturbances in their cortexes due to the emotions of dying (see also a review in a later article: Lombroso, 1904).

He also published accounts of cases of premonition (Lombroso, 1896a), luminous phenomena (Lombroso, 1897), and poltergeist and haunting phenomena (Lombroso, 1901, 1906b). In addition, he also discussed the publications of others about psychic phenomena (e.g. Lombroso, 1908b).

At the end of his life, in 1909, Lombroso published a book entitled Ricerche sui Fenomeni Ipnotici e Spiritici (Lombroso, 1909a), which was translated into English and changed in various ways. The English title of the book was After Death – What? Spiritistic Phenomena and their Interpretation (Lombroso, 1909b). The Italian edition has two parts with several chapters in each. The first part is about hypnotism, and discusses the transposition of the senses, thought-transference, and hysteric and epileptic premonitions, among other topics. The second part is about Spiritism, and includes a chapter on the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918), one on apparitions, hauntings, psychic photography, and one on the belief about spirits of the dead among ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’ people. In this book Lombroso stated that living agency was not enough to account for some phenomena.

In one of his articles, Lombroso (1906a) referred to the transitory appearance of the dead, which suggests his acceptance of discarnate spirits, and he returned briefly to the topic of spirit agency in his book: ‘During trance … mediums acquire muscular and intellectual energy which they have not before had, and which can only rarely be explained by the transfer of thought from the minds of spectators (i.e. by telepathy), and which therefore demand a special explanation, – that of aid from the spirits of the departed’ (Lombroso, 1909b: 123). In the same book, however, Lombroso also expressed doubts about the explanatory power of exteriorized body energy to explain phenomena at a distance because he saw some physical phenomena as seemingly beyond the forces of the body (pp. 157–8).

Lombroso and the medium Eusapia Palladino

Lombroso had been sceptical about physical mediumship, but he eventually became convinced when he had séances with Palladino, who later became very influential in Italy and elsewhere. In fact, her mediumship, in spite of the occasional detection of fraud (e.g. Courtier, 1908: 521–40; Flammarion, 1907: 520–1), convinced many of the reality of her phenomena, among which were the movement of objects and materializations. Besides Morselli and Myers mentioned above, Palladino was studied by many important men in psychical research and science, including Filippo Bottazzi (1867–1941), Pierre Curie (1859–1906), Albert de Rochas (1837–1914), Carl du Prel (1839–99), Giovanni Battista Ermacora (1869–98), Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), Oliver J. Lodge (1851–1940), Charles Richet (1850–1935) and Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929). In addition to providing evidence for the existence of physical phenomena such as telekinesis and materializations, Palladino was influential in spreading images of fraud and in providing the context for the development of methodologies and theoretical explanations for physical phenomena (Alvarado, 1993, 2013). ¹³

In 1891 Lombroso had sittings with Palladino, which convinced him that her telekinetic and materialization phenomena were genuine (Ciolfi, 1891; Lombroso, 1892a). Because of Lombroso’s international fame, his conversion received a great deal of publicity, thereby attracting the interest of others to this medium. Soon afterwards, she was studied by a group of scholars and scientists in Milan, the first important investigation of her phenomena involving various conditions and scientific instruments (Aksakof et al., 1893). This was followed by several other investigations published in the 1890s (e.g. de Rochas, 1897; Lodge, 1894; Sidgwick, 1895) and the following decade (e.g. Bottazzi, 1909; Feilding, Baggally and Carrington, 1909; Morselli, 1908).

Lombroso continued having séances with Palladino in later years (e.g. Lombroso, 1909b). In his attempts to make sense of Palladino’s phenomena, he presented two main lines of speculations, both of which are included in the Classic Text below. He argued for an exteriorization of nervous force from the medium caused by her unusual pathological state, similar to that of hysterics and the hypnotized. To some extent, but in a highly unorthodox way, the ideas of pathology presented in the excerpt were an extension of Lombroso’s ideas about criminals, the mentally ill and women.

In fact, soon after he was convinced of Palladino’s phenomena in 1891, Lombroso (1892b) had characterized the medium as a neuropath who suffered from epileptic and hysterical attacks. Nonetheless, Lombroso believed that the physical phenomena were real. Palladino, he wrote, ‘presents very serious cerebral anomalies from which come without doubt the interruption of the functions of some cerebral centres, while the activity of other centres is increased, notably the motor centres’ (p. 150). He assumed that the increased activity of the motor centres spilled over the medium’s body to cause her physical phenomena, a notion that was not new to him, however, but basically a reformulation of older ideas that had been put forward by others to explain physical mediumship (Alvarado, 2006).

Lombroso’s opinion about the origin of the forces manifested in the séances was criticized by a few scholars, such as the physicist and psychical researcher Giovanni Battista Ermacora (1858–98, Ermacora, 1892). Nonetheless, the idea influenced a number of subsequent authors who discussed Palladino such as Arullani (1907) and Bottazzi (1909). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Spiritists reacted negatively and argued, in essence, that Lombroso’s ideas did not explain the phenomena (e.g. Anon., 1893; Dias da Cruz, 1893). ¹⁴

A number of writers noted that Palladino became personally close to Lombroso. One of these was Paola Lombroso, (1871–1954), Lombroso’s daughter, who published an article about the medium in a popular monthly (P. Lombroso, 1907). A biographer of the medium, Tito Alippi (1870–1959), remembered that she called Lombroso ‘Papà Lombroso’, while the alienist called her ‘my daughter’ (Alippi, 1962: 148).

There is no question that Lombroso publicized Palladino’s mediumship greatly through his writings and testimony (Lombroso, 1892a, 1892b, 1906a, 1908a, 1908b, 1909a). But it may be speculated that he also owed much to the medium, namely that she showed him the existence of ‘a world different from the one admitted by neuro-pathologists’ (Lombroso, 1892b: 146). According to Biondi (1988: 136–7), Lombroso changed from ‘materialistic positivism, to a spiritistic positivism’. Furthermore, he expressed gratitude to the medium for the opportunity to see his mother materialized in séances. ¹⁵

Our introduction, and Lombroso’s excerpt, is but a reminder of the complexity of ideas about pathology and psychic phenomena. While most of those who pathologized mediumship in the past reduced mediumistic phenomena to abnormal functioning as well as to conventional explanations of different sorts, Lombroso exhibited a variant position defending the existence of the supernormal nature of the phenomena (the actual occurrence of telekinesis and materializations) while accepting that the medium presented psychopathological symptoms. To make the topic even more complex, Lombroso eventually accepted the action of discarnate spirits as an explanation of mediumship. This reminds us that in the historical study of ideas about mediumship we need to consider such complex interactions between pathology, and human and spirit agency.

Lombroso’s speculations included ideas, based on his own and others’ concepts, about the nature of women, a topic discussed by Zingrone (1994). In summary, Lombroso’s discussion of Palladino contains much from his previous ideas. In his writings, the medium took the role of the criminal, the mentally ill and women in general. That is, the medium provided him with a further opportunity to defend some of his ideas, while at the same time he was extending the materialistic paradigm that inspired them. Lombroso’s work represents a particularly rich example of the blending of ideas from psychiatry, criminal anthropology and psychical research, and about the materialistic and the spiritual. As such, his work deserves to be studied in more detail.

The Classic Text

The excerpt presented here comes from Lombroso’s After Death – What? (1909b: 102–19), ¹⁶ published in the year of his death. It is taken from the fourth chapter, ‘The Power and Action of Mediums’.