Flournoy’s Complaint

Letters

Vol. 18 No. 12 · 20 June 1996

From Sonu Shamdasani

In her review of my edition of Théodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages (LRB, 23 May), Terry Castle presents a phantasmagoric rendition of my Introduction, ‘Encountering Hélène: Théodore Flournoy and the Genesis of Subliminal Psychology’ (while making liberal use of material contained therein). ‘Encountering Hélène’ gave an account of the psychological interest in mediums at the turn of the century, how and why they became the principal subjects of subliminal psychology, which in turn was situated within the wider problematic of how psychology found or created its subjects. This was followed by a discussion of the initial reception of From India to the Planet Mars, its subsequent reading by linguists and Surrealists, a critical discussion of the recent feminist historiography of spiritualism and, finally, an indication of its relevance to contemporary issues in psychology.

Far from depicting an ‘essentially malign encounter between mental science and spiritualism’, I set out to show how such an encounter gave rise to subliminal psychology. Nowhere was it suggested that in séances, ‘male scientists like Flournoy discovered both a sexual and an epistemological threat’, or that the spirit medium ‘had to be “contained” within the evolving masculinist discourse of psychiatry’. I did not characterise Flournoy’s relation with Hélène Smith as an ‘emotional transference’, or suggest that he was ‘unmanned’ by their encounter. Indeed, Flournoy was not a psychiatrist, as Castle mistakenly believes. According to Castle, my reading could be framed by Brouillet’s 1887 etching of Charcot lecturing on hysteria and a cartoon of Freud tormenting Dora. However, I showed in considerable detail how for Flournoy, mediums presented the best opportunity for studying the subliminal creative imagination, and how his valorisation of the trance differentiated his position from the pathologisation of the trance in French neurology and abnormal psychology as represented by Charcot and Janet, and subsequently by psychoanalysis. Castle’s judgment of Hélène Smiths spiritualistic activities as arising from ‘a narcissistic craving for attention’, in contrast to Flournoy’s valuation of their compensatory and teleological function and their telepathic and telekinetic elements, is a curious coda to such pathologisation. The gendered reading is not mine but Castle’s, who in her essay ‘Marie Antoinette Obsessions’ interpreted Hélène Smith’s ‘royal romance’ in terms of latent homosexuality. In that essay, Castle had also erroneously claimed that Flournoy was ‘one of the earliest disciples of Freud’. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What Castle reports as my conclusion, that mediums like Hélène Smith were the victims of the masculine gaze of science, is also nowhere to be found in my Introduction, the actual conclusion being: ‘the study of the history of psychology, the questioning of the standards of legitimation by which particular psychologies became regnant, rescripting history in the process, while others are relegated to psychology’s “unconscious” – the depiction of how psychology constructs its fabulous genesis, its subliminal romances – is of critical importance to today’s psychological agenda.’ The attribution of meaningless monikers, ‘Post-Modern’, ‘post-feminist’, and ‘post-Foucauldian’ does not help much in this regard.

In addition, Castle characterises Mireille Cifali as ‘a feminist writer’ and her essay ‘The Making of Martian: The Creation of an Imaginary Language’ as ‘fiercely hostile’ to Flournoy. Cifali is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychology, whose sympathetic reappraisals of Flournoy did much to instigate the new Flournoy scholarship. Her essay was a detailed comparison of Flournoy’s account of a Martian séance with the séance transcripts, and a significant contribution to the contemporary understanding of glossolalia as a conjoint, staged production.

Castle makes much of Hélène Smith’s refusal to allow a photograph of herself to appear in the book. For those interested, a photograph of her with Flournoy was reproduced in Olivier Flournoy’s Théodore et Léopold: de Théodore Flournoy à la psychanalyse. Correspondance et documents de Hélène Smith, Ferdinand de Saussure, Auguste Barth et Charles Michel, which forms an ideal accompaniment to From India to the Planet Mars. For the record, the picture of Hélène Smith is far from the squalor that Castle claims characterised séance photography.

Finally, I am the editor of Jung’s seminar The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga and not of ‘several works by Jung’.

Sonu Shamdasani
London NW1