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This book retraces the story of spiritual medium Hélène Smith, a woman who came to inspire some of the greatest scientists and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing to light archival documents, correspondences, and publications on the medium, author Claudie Massicotte illuminates Smith's important contributions to evolving definitions of the subject during a period viewed by many as one of disenchantment. In retracing the medium's story, she explores the role of gender and occultism in modern understandings of the embodied self and its relation to the spiritual.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Hélène, or the Ghosts of Depth Psychology
- Chapter 1. Bodies
- Ventriloquizing Agency: Magic Dolls and Spiritualist Authorship
- Chapter 2. Desire
- Bearing, Authoring, and the Symbolizations of Excess in Psychoanalysis
- Chapter 3. Languages
- Extra-Planetary Signs and the Haunted Origins of Modern Linguistics
- Chapter 4. Creativity
- The Muse of Surrealism: Automatism and the Creative Unconscious
- Conclusion: The Enchanted Unconscious
- Bibliography
- Index
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Claudie Massicotte is a learning designer in San Diego, California. She previously worked as Assistant Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism at Young Harris College and as a Postdoctoral fellow in French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Seances, 1850-1930.
Zusammenfassung
In 1896, a young Genevan medium named Hélène Smith perceived in trance the following words from a Martian inhabitant: "michma michtmon mimini thouainenm mimatchineg." Those attending her séance dutifully transcribed these words and the event marked the beginning of a series of occult experiences that transported her to the red planet. In her state of trance, Smith came to produce foreign conversations, a new alphabet, and paintings of the Martian surroundings that captured the popular and scientific imagination of Geneva. Alongside her Martian travels, she also retrieved memories of her past lives as a fifteenth-century "Hindoo" princess and as Queen Marie Antoinette.
Today, Smith's séances may appear to be nothing more than eccentric practices at the margins of modernity. As author Claudie Massicotte argues, however, the medium came to embody the extreme possibilities of a new form of subjectivity, with her séances becoming important loci for pioneering authors' discoveries in psychology, linguistics, and the arts. Through analyses of archival documents, correspondences, and publications on the medium, Massicotte sheds light on the role of women in the construction of turn-of-the-century psychological discourses, showing how Smith challenged traditional representations of female patients as powerless victims and passive objects of powerful doctors. She shows how the medium became the site of conflicting theories about subjectivity--specifically one's relationship to embodiment, desire, language, art, and madness--while unleashing a radical form of creativity that troubled existing paradigms of modern sciences. Massicotte skillfully retraces the story of this prolific figure and the authors, scientists, and artists she inspired in order to bring to light a forgotten chapter in modern intellectual history.
Zusatztext
This book will be of importance to anyone interested in the history of psychology and the way psychological theories both reflect and impact the way we view the universe and the creatures in it--especially women.
