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“... you are ‘Hélène Smith’ – the shop-girl in question and subject of the Swiss psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy’s sensational 1899 case-history From India to the Planet Mars – you solve the problem in classic 19th-century female-monomaniac fashion: by becoming a spirit medium. Initiated into table-rapping in the winter of 1891-2, Smith – whose ...”

“... people in the end is not a being but a theory’. The book has a cast of thousands: William James, Théodore Flournoy, Morton Prince (who failed to detect sexual wishes in his patients’ dreams and was given his marching orders), Eugen Bleuler, (Miss) Frank Miller (altruistically given to analysing her own poems), Otto Weininger (a suicide), Johann Jakob ...”

“... personae have often been used for such enterprises: think of the encounter between Theodore Flournoy, a professor of psychology in Geneva, and the Martian and Arabian personalities of the medium, Hélène Smith; think of George Hyde-Lees, Mrs Yeats, unlocking her husband’s poetic voice by summoning the improbable figure of Leo Africanus into their ...”