From Electricity to Ectoplasm:

Hysteria and American Spiritualism

Just six years after the Fox sisters’ ‘mysterious rappings’ in Hydesville, New York, a group of

spirits calling themselves the ‘Association of Electricizers’ instructed the Universalist minister

John Murray Spear to build an engine that was to function like the human body. Spear, following

instructions from the Association, completed the ‘New Motive Power’ in High Rock,

Massachusetts in 1854. The machine was to be a gift to humanity from the spirit world for the

creation of a new but unspecified power on earth. The New Motive Power sat dormant on its

perch until the appearance of an unnamed woman who had previously been told by the spirit realm

that she would become the ‘Mary of a new dispensation.’ On June 29, the Boston New Era

published a lengthy description of the events of that day:

When there [High Rock], however... she began to experience the peculiar and agonizing sensations of parturition, differing somewhat from the ordinary experience, inasmuch as the throes were internal, and of the spirit, rather than the physical nature, but nevertheless quite uncontrollable, and not less severe than those pertaining to the latter. Its purpose and results were wholly incomprehensible to all but herself; but her own perceptions were clear and distinct that in these agonizing throes the most interior and refined elements of her spiritual being were imparted to, and absorbed by, the appropriate portions of the mechanism: its minerals having been made particularly receptive by previous chemical processes1.

The newspaper proceeded to recount that the machine ‘gave indications of life or pulsations,’

which continued and grew stronger as the weeks progressed through a series of ministrations by

the anonymous woman, ‘precisely analogous to that of nursing . . . until at times a very marked

and surprising motion resulted’2. The new “Electrical Motor,” as Spear coined it, was

unfortunately destined for infanticide by a posse of intolerant Spiritualists who destroyed it when

it failed to do anything.

1 Cited in Brandon, The Spiritualists, 9.2 Brandon, The Spiritualists, 9.

1

In psychoanalytic terms, this incident appears to be a textbook example of a hysterical

pregnancy, and it is by no means unique in the context of the Spiritualist movement. The history

of American Spiritualism is rife with anecdotes of what one may consider hysterical attacks, and

certainly contemporaneous critics of the movement were quick to label Spiritualists as

“hysterics”3. Despite the many striking resemblances between hysteria and Spiritualist trance

mediumship, contemporary scholarship on the latter has been loath to connect the two. However,

an examination of the shared characteristics of hysteria and Spiritualist mediumship, rather than

serving to pathologize believers, in fact reveals that Spiritualism saw itself as a competing

discourse to the emerging one of psychoanalysis, self-consciously and adamantly offering an

alternative view of similar phenomena. The hermetic impulse in Spiritualism provided a different

referent for the secrets of the cosmos than the young democracy and its medical teachings did.

The answers Spiritualists sought were external to the individual; believers tried to uncover the

secrets of the past, rather than the secrets of their selves. By explicitly attacking psychoanalytic

constructions of the unconscious as a locus of mental illness, Spiritualism offered not only a

theological understanding of alternative psychic states, but also a radically alternative

interpretation of the body--especially the woman’s body—as an instrument of intangible forces.

The Birth of Mediumship

Spiritualism was born in the mid-nineteenth century, the last great religious movement to come

out of the Second Great Awakening and arguably the clearest articulation of postmillennial

progressivism of the age. Positing an unprecedented continuity between this world and the

afterlife, Spiritualism proposed that the dead could be contacted to offer advice and solace to the

living. The inauguration of communicating with the dead caught the religious imagination of

antebellum Protestants, and by Ann Braude’s estimation, Spiritualism may have claimed as

adherents half the population of the country.

3 For a detailed account of various diagnoses of mental illness among Spiritualists, see Fornell, The Unhappy Medium, 70-83.

2

The atmosphere of America was ripe for this peculiar form of continuing revelation; the myriad

religious movements begun in this epoch bespeak the need for new religious answers tailored to

the ethos of the moment. In content, Spiritualism assuaged grieving and provided new and

heavenly knowledge. In structure, it was individualistic, populist, and antiestablishment in its

iconoclastic form of bestowing credentials on those with a gift for talking to the dead. Amid the

romantic mythos of the self-made man and the merit-based rewards of industrialization,

Spiritualism provided the possibility that anyone, and particularly women, might have the

necessary talent to be invested with quasi-religious authority.

Begun in 1848 with the Fox sisters’ “mysterious rappings,” Spiritualism offered what was

understood to be concrete and empirical proof of the continued existence of the dead. In response

to an apparent poltergeist in their Hydesville home, the Fox sisters innovated a system of raps to

spell answers to questions—one for a, two for b, and so forth—thereby turning a fairly banal

haunting into an ideological revolution in Protestant circles. Techniques for communicating with

the dead were soon honed, with the cumbersome system of “alphabet rapping” replaced by people

—most often women—who would enter trance states and serve as living conduits between this

world and the next.

As mediumship became an established and viable profession by mid-century, a veritable

cottage industry of speculation, apologia, and how-to manuals sprung up in its wake. Theories

and justifications generally focused on the advancing technologies of the time and serve as a

testimony to the middle class's fascination with pseudo-science. In the era of the telegraph, the

telephone, and photography, invisible communication was the cutting edge. By shifting the

emphasis of communication from reaching across space to that of reaching across time,

Spiritualism was for many not only believable but the logical extension of progress itself.

The appeal of Spiritualism was multifaceted; in Radical Spirits, Ann Braude argues that the

patina of empirical truth attributed to communicating with the dead had a direct impact on the

overthrow of Calvinism and specifically its policies of infant damnation4. In an epoch of a still-

high infant mortality rate, Spiritualism assured grieving mothers that their children were

4 Braude, Radical Spirits, Chapter two.

3

unassailably in heaven, flourishing in the company of deceased relatives and wise angels. The

spike in Spiritualist activity immediately following the Civil War attests to its ability to relieve

grief.

Others, however, had more pragmatic goals in mind when they attended large revival-type

trance shows or the smaller, domestically-centered séances. The benefits of being able to

communicate with the legendary dead were not lost on the literate and striving middle class, and

certain telling favorites were called upon to make sense of the current situation. Emanuel

Swedenborg, Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Franklin all loomed large in the

new pantheon of the spirit world, doling out advice, relating the conditions of the afterlife, and

continuing their earthly métiers posthumously.

Mediumship shared phenomenological characteristics with several similar movements of its

day, foremost Mesmerism. Ecstatic trance states and the presence of an alternative consciousness

call into question precisely what distinguishes Spiritualism proper from a host of similar

occurrences5. Spiritualism was both dependent on and an elaboration of early experiments with

hypnotism, which in Europe first blossomed as a branch of medical science. As the often

unwilling heirs to Mesmerism, Europeans had the first opportunity to interpret hypnotic states and

assign both value and meaning to them6. Mesmerism clearly included a mystical as well as

medical component, and in certain cases mesmerized patients reported a facility for the

paranormal and the ability to talk to the dead. However, European expressions of the phenomena

of Spiritualism lacked the systematic cosmology that Americans would assign it7.

5 See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, Chapter Five, and Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment, 151-162.6 The terminology for these states is slippery and changes several times over the century. For the sake of clarity, I will be using “hypnotism” as synonymous with “Mesmerism,” and reserving “hypnoid” to describe a state that one side sees as hysteria and another as mediumship. 7 Scholars have produced recent cross-cultural studies that call into question the authenticity of many forms of trance states and claims of spirit possession. Nicholas Spanos has noted that spirit possession frequently allows the socially disenfranchised to express discontent in such a manner that the subversive voice will not be censored. He argues that spirit possession is a vehicle for protest, but one in which the subject is largely coached by religious expectations and social cues. While I have tried to keep my descriptions of these events in line with Spiritualists’ own claims of authenticity, it should be noted that even if the trances were social performances, the nineteenth-century comparison still holds, since the same social performance claims could be made about hysterics as well. I would add that in the Spiritualists’ case, there was certainly not a unanimous encouragement of these states from the culture at large. There were real social repercussions for being a medium, including in Margaret Fox’s case, a loss of marriageability. For the social

4

With the belated entry of the Fox sisters, the material and cultural conditions coalesced to

produce the marriage of unconscious states and the religious imagination. Alternative states of

consciousness were certainly nothing new: nineteenth-century books proclaimed the Hydesville

events to be in line with all variety of religious expression from ‘primitive’ shamanistic trances to

the last gasp of the afflictions of Salem8. In the 1820’s the Shakers had experienced a similar

phenomenon when a series of adolescents were “possessed” by the spirits of Native Americans9.

With antecedents as varied as the witch trials and Shaker revivalism, Spiritualism was in one sense

merely a continuation of a tradition in which the marginalized—youth and women—expressed

religious discontent behind the cultural shield of an alternate consciousness. Spiritualism’s radical

departure from this legacy, however, was a matter of personal agency. The ability to invoke and

control alternate states was unique to both the historical era and the American articulation of

trances. Moreover, the first Spiritualists struck upon something that other dabblers in Mesmerism

failed to discover: one did not require a mesmerizer to produce a trance state. One could induce

it for one’s self.

The populist leanings of the young democracy were thus carved into the practices of popular

religion10. The decline of Calvinist election in the early nineteenth century left a cultural vacuum

that individualism would fill. No longer achieved by grace alone, salvation itself would be

dependent on the individual’s heartfelt efforts at religiosity. As the revivalism of the period

conclusively reassigned conversion and salvation as the individual’s responsibility, Spiritualism

took that ethos a step further. Echoing the religious individualism of its cultural parent, the

revivals of the Second Great Awakening, Spiritualism shifted the boundaries of the

contemporaneous discussion of trance states. Transformation for spiritual improvement was

indeed the individual’s responsibility, but one could transform one’s consciousness at will and

with no aid from God or man.

performance argument, see Spanos, Multiple Identities, 145-155.8 For one example of the former, see Hudson, The Law of Mental Medicine, Chapter one. For the latter, see Putnam, Witchcraft of New England.9 See Foster, Religion and Sexuality, 62-71. 10 For a discussion of the relation of republicanism to Spiritualism, see Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, Chapter three.

5

These coincidences of history conspired to create a distinctly American phenomenon; anyone

with ambition, patience, and a hint of talent could prove to be the next mediumship rage. This

democratic impulse cut across gender boundaries more easily than class or racial ones, but those

too were possible11. Women, however, were the primary beneficiaries of the cultural largess,

which, I will argue, was a contributing force to charges of mediumistic hysteria.

As Ann Braude has argued so persuasively, Spiritualism prior to the Civil War was largely an

affair of women. In Radical Spirits, Braude demonstrates that women were understood to be

more effective as mediums because the genders were thought to have opposite electrical “poles,”

or positive and negative charges. Women’s negative charge made them attractive to the positively

charged spirits. In the contemporaneous social construction, women’s nervousness and fragility

were paradoxically the best characteristics to encourage spirit manifestation12. Concomitantly,

precisely the same qualities that were understood to make women excellent mediums also opened

them to charges of mental instability.

As mediumship flourished, so too did its critics. Detractors denounced the movement as folly,

with many of them laughing too hard to say anything other than that it was preposterous;

predictably, others drew correlations between Spiritualism and demonic possession13. More sober

critics, however, saw Spiritualism as a form of individual and mass hysteria. Mediums were

institutionalized—some willingly and others not—and the “illness” was debated in the leading

psychotherapy journals of the day.

Hysteria, however, both in the nineteenth century and in this work, is an umbrella term for any

disease of the psyche predominantly affecting women. Following the Mesmerists’ discovery of

“magnetic sleep,” Europe and America were awash in artificial trance states. The use and value

of these states, however, were open to interpretation: animal magnetists claimed medical value,

Spiritualists theological value, and both enjoyed economic boons. However, the line between

11 As many have noticed but few have explored, traditional African religions share some family resemblances with Spiritualism inasmuch as both involve trance states and the consultation of ancestors. For an account of one African-American practitioner of Spiritualism, see Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph. For the adventures of a lower-class Catholic medium, see Carrington, The American Séances. 12 Braude, Radical Spirits, 23-24, 29, 39.13 See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 201-202.

6

illness and mysticism, hysteria and mediumship, was quite blurry, and the eye of the beholder was

of the utmost importance.

Spiritualists were quick to launch a counter-attack, and wrote books and editorials

distinguishing true mediumship from madness. Since most mediums were women, whose

“naturally nervous” constitutions made them better receptors for the spirit world, the conversation

implicitly and explicitly addressed ideas of the woman’s body. As fiercely as psychoanalysis

attempted to claim Spiritualist phenomena for its own domain, Spiritualists were forced to

articulate their opposing interpretation of mediumship as beneficial to the health of both body and

mind. I will argue that the debate as to whether trance states were pathology or theology took

place on the battleground of the woman’s body and that the debate itself articulates a contested

interpretation of the use and value of the woman’s body. Before discussing the particularities of

this argument, I will turn to its ideological forerunner, Mesmerism, in order to outline its

contributions to the ongoing debate about what mediumship meant.

Mesmerism

In the mid-eighteenth century, the colorful figure of Franz Anton Mesmer began his long and

finally fruitless attempt to gain legitimation for his claims about the effects of magnets for healing

the body. Mesmer’s initial theory posits that health is determined by a magnetic fluid in the body

which can become blocked or unevenly distributed in the system. The restoration of health was

thus tantamount to the restoration of a congenial flow of this fluid, which could be accomplished

through the use of magnets. Dubbed “animal magnetism,” Mesmer’s approach relied on not only

the instrument of magnets but the instrumentality of the magnetizer as well—the physician, being

magnetic himself, could beneficially influence the flow of the fluid in another’s body.

Mesmer was convinced that the “discovery” of magnetic fluid would revolutionize the field of

health and the cause of progress. Despite repeated attempts to garner the official recognition he

strongly felt was his due, Mesmer was marginalized by European authorities. However, this did

not deter many from employing his methods and Mesmer found himself in a flurry of competition

7

for patients. Embattled and bitter, Mesmer was denounced by two separate commissions

convened to examine animal magnetism after they concluded that his treatment boiled down to

‘touching, imagination, and imitation’14. In short, the French medical academy concluded that

animal magnetism’s beneficial effects were merely the products of what we would now call

hypnotic suggestion.

Animal magnetism thus introduced two key components on which Spiritualism would

elaborate: the instrumentality of the body and the idea that results could be measured and counted

as “empirical” truth even if the causes remained invisible. Spiritualism never strayed far from its

roots in alternative medical practices, and animal magnetism was roundly applauded in Spiritualist

publications straight through the Civil War. However, animal magnetism was but one theory in

Spiritualism’s arsenal, and while it set the atmosphere that would eventually induce trance states,

the advent of mediumship relied on animal magnetism’s outgrowth, Mesmerism.

The eponymous treatment of Mesmerism was in fact discovered by Mesmer’s former student

and new-found competitor. In 1784, the marquis de Puységur, protege and later apostate of Anton

Mesmer, happened upon a remarkable event in the course of treating a patient with magnetic

healing: his patient entered an alternative state of consciousness. While remaining “conscious”

inasmuch as he could speak and was fully aware of his surroundings, the subject was a

qualitatively different subject from his waking self, and Puységur was quick to link the

phenomenon with somnambulism, or sleep-walking.

In his landmark work, From Mesmer to Freud, Adam Crabtree delineates the marquis’s

speculations which would quietly shape a century of thinking about the health of the mind: first,

Puységur noted that the alternative consciousness was fully aware of the normal consciousness but

that this relation was not reciprocal. Second, the magnetizer held an enormous sway over the

patient in this state, both allowing for “hypnotic suggestion” and requiring of the doctor good will

and upstanding morals. Lastly, Puységur understood the alternate consciousness to be temporally

sequential with waking consciousness; that is, the alternate state did not always exist in some

mute, subterranean space of the mind but rather only existed under the conditions of “magnetic

14 Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 31.

8

sleep”15. Over time, a distinction was made between “sleepwalking,” in which the subject is not

conscious and remembers nothing of the event, and “sleep-waking,” in which the subject retains

consciousness and can recall the events and conversations that took place in the mesmerized state.

Mesmerism, or magnetic sleep, and animal magnetism came to be used in conjunction, with the

mesmerized patient aiding the doctor to guide the magnetic fluid. Puységur had already noted that

a patient in a state of magnetic sleep demonstrated certain abilities that smacked of the

paranormal: he asked the mesmerized patient about his or her own illness and proceeded,

apparently with some success, in following the patient’s advice on how best to treat it. Instances

of precognition were also noticed, although Puységur appeared to have very little interest in this

vein of his discovery. Certain other mesmerists, however, found this aspect more compelling, and

by the nineteenth century the alternate consciousness was explicitly associated with knowledge of

the divine. According to Crabtree,

[T]he striking similarity between the states attributed to religious ecstatics over the centuries and those of magnetic somnambulists was sufficient to place them in the same psychological category. Both involve impressions of separation from the body, and both entail some kind of communication with a higher spiritual world. While in the state of magnetic ecstasy, somnambulists might find themselves communicating with angels, demons, saints, or the souls of the departed. Experiences of magnetic ecstasy and combination with the discarnate world initiated animal magnetism into a new phase, which might be called magnetic spiritism.

The legacy of easily induced trance states and their association with the remarkable and the

divine would lay the groundwork for Spiritualism’s claims for the legitimacy of mediums. The

linchpin between Mesmer’s quasi-medical exploits and the birth of Spiritualism was the discovery

that trance states could be artificially induced. The groundwork was laid for the earnest alliance

of Mesmeric trances and the cultural interest in communicating with the dead. In the 1830’s,

Charles Poyen, a student of Puységur’s, brought the extraordinary new phenomenon to the United

States. With all the zeal of a convert, Poyen barraged Boston and the greater New England area

with demonstrations of the new healing technique. During numerous public shows in which

15 Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 38-105.

9

Poyen would ask audience members to participate, indications of the presence of the paranormal

and the spiritual realm continued16.

Nearly thirty years later, Spiritualism required only the theological backbone of Swedenborgian

mysticism to be added in order to achieve a fully articulated cosmology, replete with the means to

communicate with the dead and the theoretical backdrop to the cause and function of their

continued existence. Andrew Jackson Davis, primary theologian of the Spiritualist movement,

had been writing popular tracts that fused Swedenborg’s visions of heaven with an American

Transcendentalist view of the divine order being reflected in the natural one. Following the Fox

sisters’ instant fame, Davis irrevocably brought Swedenborgianism and communicating with the

dead together. In allying the two movements, Davis provided the philosophical underpinnings to

both trance states and their contents. Swedenborg’s many-tiered heavens were quickly sanitized

of any ominous components and peopled with not only Swedenborg’s angels but also the common

run of humankind. The concatenation of Mesmeric trances, the omnipresence of the dead, and the

weighty legacy of a Neoplatonic cosmos coalesced into the sweeping religious movement of

Spiritualism.

The Suggestion of Madness

From the outset, Spiritualists were destined to be plagued by charges of madness. Mesmerism

was already threatening the line between hypnotism and hysteria, and the Spiritualist declaration

that alternate states of consciousness in fact should be fostered made adherents a target for both

the scientific community and amateurs who saw a threat to Christianity in the movement. While

the definition of hysteria has changed radically over the last two hundred years, a common

consensus is that hysteria is essentially unwilling hypnotism: the hysteric is locked in a state of an

16 Fuller, ‘Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology,’ 209-210.

10

alternate consciousness17. Conversely, hypnotism has been seen as an artificially induced

hysteria18.

Moreover, Spiritualist trance states were constituted by the appearance of several voices or

personalities that were distinct from that of the medium. The change in personas, essential to

cultivating mediumship, bore an uncanny resemblance to a nineteenth-century subset of hysteria,

multiple personalities. “Schizophrenia,” as the phenomenon was frequently called, emerged as a

diagnosis in the second half of the nineteenth century. The parallel between Spiritualist

mediumship and schizophrenic behavior was so clearly delineated that Ian Hacking has argued

that Spiritualism was a primary cause for the continued diagnosis of schizophrenia in America

long after it had fallen out of use in France. He writes, ‘The disorder always needs a host, much in

the way that a parasite needs hosts. . . . In New England in particular, and in both America and

Britain more generally, an additional host [to hysteria and hypnotism] was psychic research linked

with spiritualism. One idea was that alters [alternative personalities] were departed spirits;

mediumship and multiple personality drew close’19. Hacking notes as well that the American

diagnosis of schizophrenia declined concomitantly with the popularity of the Spiritualist

movement.

The crux of the debate is relatively simple: Mesmerism had shown that an alternate

consciousness may appear under certain conditions. The interpretive battle raged over what that

consciousness referred to, however, and whether it was to be lauded or cured. For early

mesmerists, the alternative consciousness produced in magnetic sleep was akin to sleep-waking.

As Crabtree has shown, the apparent “second personality” of Mesmeric sleep-waking was firmly

grounded in the subject. Whereas a similar phenomenon a hundred years earlier would have been

culturally ‘read’ as demonic forces inhabiting a person against her will, in Puységur’s hands the

17 For an excellent treatment of the changing definitions of hysteria, see Bronfen, The Knotted Subject, 105-118. Bronfen agrees with Edward Shorter’s assessment that ‘the unconscious, ‘not wishing to make itself ridiculous, brings itself medically up to date’’ (115). The implication here is that hysteria itself is a floating signifier of interest predominantly for what cultural mores it is reflecting at any historical moment. 18 The association of hysteria and what we now call hypnotism was made as early as 1787, nearly a century before its more famous articulations by Jean Charcot and later Sigmund Freud. See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 127.19 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 135-136.

11

second consciousness was an artifact belonging solely to the subject. Moreover, the second

consciousness was understood to be wiser and more morally apt than the waking consciousness20.

Spiritualism shifted the referent of the alternate consciousness outside of the self. The

seemingly endless number of personalities that could temporarily inhabit a body referred not back

to the subject but to external sources. Like Puységur, Spiritualists saw the alternate personalities

generally as wiser, more benevolent, and more ethically advanced than the medium’s waking

state. However, the spirits of the dead were called upon predominantly to dole out advice or

comfort the grieving—the move from a medical model to a religious one largely depleted the

hypnotized state of its relationship to curing. And the trance state itself most certainly did not

require curing in the eyes of the Spiritualists, as many of its detractors argued.

Proponents of Spiritualism readily admitted that hysteria and mediumship had a single source.

For American Spiritualists, the cause and effect of hysteria and mediumship were reversed. If the

psychoanalytic community deemed mediums hysterical, the Spiritualist community often deemed

hysterics mediums under the influence of negative suggestion. In his 1871 Mental Disorders

Andrew Jackson Davis writes:

The truth which lies at the foundation of such insanity is the truth of psychology—the power of one mentality to affect the other—by which the positive will controls the passive mind, causing it to reason erroneously from correct impressions, and compelling the weaker will to assume another character, to the temporary exclusion and forgetfulness of its own, and thus personify that which is pro tempore paramount in the imagination. To separate the chaff from the wheat, in the sphere of such mysterious mental manifestations, is a part of the work of Spiritualism21.

The language of the will is rife in Spiritualist discussions of mediumship and insanity, and

frequently functions as an intermediary between the body and the soul. Both insanity and trance

states occupy the nebulous ground of alternative consciousness, but the will must always govern

the intent and discretion of the entranced. Davis continues, ‘In short, no mind must permit itself to

be overrun and controlled by another’s will. Passivity or negativeness to the will and wishes of

superior intelligence is permitted by the Divine Code only when the highest ends are believed to

be only thus attainable’22. Thus, suggestibility distinguishes the mad from the medium, and since

20 Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 83.21 Davis, Mental Disorders, 224.22 Davis, Mental Disorders, 262-263.

12

the American medium has no need of a mesmerizer, only the hysteric was left to the negative

influences of control.

One sees this form of direct confrontation between psychology and Spiritualism immediately

after a series of young women were institutionalized for lapsing into trance states which blurred

the line between madness and mediumship. Proponents quickly developed a vocabulary for

distinguishing Spiritualism from psychology, and admitted that some people who understood

themselves to be mediums were merely mad. Others who received antisocial or violent

instructions from the spirit world might not yet have reached the proper degree of mediumistic

proficiency.

The Spiritualist cosmos allowed for such distinctions by its inherent flexibility. New mediums

were prone to receiving messages from spirits on the lowest of the (usually) seven-tiered heavens.

Since death did not instantly result in heavenly perfection but rather inaugurated a long process of

improvement, spirits themselves frequently made errors in judgment. Not only, then, were

contradictory messages from the spirit world resolved—the spirits were mistaken—but also ethical

issues were solved: one might have come into contact with an unprogressed and evilly inclined

spirit23. The razor’s edge between madness and mediumship centered on control, particularly a

woman’s control, of her voice and body to which I will now turn respectively.

The Disease of Language

In 1860, an anonymous American doctor published a case study of C., a twenty-five year old

seamstress, in the Journal of Insanity. C. had been admitted to the asylum with her own consent,

proclaiming, however, that she was not insane but that she was unable to control the spirits who

took hold of her. Furthermore, many of the controlling spirits were themselves mad. We are not

given many details of C.’s treatment and recovery, other than the beneficial use of physical

23 A student of mine has written compellingly on this issue, arguing that the sorts of spirits one encountered were predicated on the moral fortitude of the medium. See Christa Shusko, ‘Active Mediums in American Spiritualism,’ unpublished paper.

13

restraints and the recommendation against the use of padded rooms in such cases; the thesis of the

article is a refutation of the new term ‘monomania,’ and the young medium is the exemplar.

C. had begun to cultivate mediumship and to experiment with trance states. She was overly

successful, and quickly fell to the beck and call of numerous spirits whose demands were many

and frequently violent:

In an effort to obey those commands, many of which were trivial, contradictory, and impossible, she would be greatly perplexed and at times seem in utter despair. Generally, however, her state was one of exaltation. Her voice was loud, her manner imperious, and she resisted with much strength, though not passionately, when interrupted in carrying into effect the directions of the spirits, and would appear to her friends perfectly natural in manner and speech. Her fellow Spiritualists assured her that nothing was wrong with her, and that she was only passing through a special and extraordinary experience, in her development as a medium24.

Unable to resist the stronger will of the spirits, C. eventually allowed her mother to admit her to

the asylum.

The resemblance to multiple personalities is here overt. C. is controlled, against her will, by

the voices that speak through her. The author states, ‘She is now almost constantly the mouth-

piece of numerous spirits good and evil, who rapidly interrupt and succeed each other. At one

moment the spirit is through her talking loudly to her, commanding, and then rebuking her for the

non-performance of its behests’25. C. is occasionally instructed by the spirits to do violence to

herself and others, and her dementia lasts nearly a year.

Through the regulation of diet, rest, and undoubtedly what Elaine Showalter has termed “moral

management,” C. is eventually cured enough to be released. However, she still insisted on the

reality of the spirits and her sanity. The doctor himself, while never succumbing to the

Spiritualist interpretation, admits that this type of mental illness is a hermeneutic problem:

If a dozen years ago, and previously to the first development of the Spiritual phenomena, an hypothesis of the relations of disembodied spirits to men, like that which has since come to distinguish a numerous sect, had belonged to a single individual, that man would have been, without doubt, mad. . . . The simple belief, then, in spiritual phenomena, as actual or possible facts in her experience, was not previously to her attack of mania, and is not since her convalescence, an insane delusion. It became an insane delusion only when it was associated with a condition of insanity; which is, therefore, something still beyond26.

24 Anonymous, ‘Case of Mania,’ 324. 25 Anonymous, ‘Case of Mania,’ 326.26 Anonymous, ‘Case of Mania,’ 337.

14

C.’s problem, then, is not the existence of alternate consciousnesses or even their temporary

inhabiting of her body; her problem is the inability to control them and to judge adequately which

spirits are to be trusted.

I would argue that the association between multiple personalities and hysteria is a temporally

bound problem of language. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, states of alternate consciousness

were understood to be sequential with the waking state27. An ‘unconscious’ state, as we now think

of it as omnipresent but out of reach in all but cases of hypnotism or insanity, simply did not exist

before the second half of the century. Later designations of hysteria as a repressed trauma assume

an almost spatial relation of the conscious state to the unconscious one—traumas require a place in

which to be repressed and proceed to thwart the well-being of the conscious state from its locus of

inaccessibility.

As with the case of C., insanity is determined not by unconscious workings but by the display

of the lack of control, specifically the lack of control in language. As the century progressed, the

catch-all term “hysteria” would be sliced into finer and finer symptomological distinctions ranging

from schizophrenia to neurasthenia. The overriding theme that hysteria would maintain, however,

was the loss of language. The distinction between psychological and Spiritualist interpretations

of the lack of linguistic control turned upon whether the resulting speech was productive. The

diagnosis of hysteria presupposes that productive paths of language have been blocked off for the

victim and replaced by more cryptic and unproductive forms of communication. Elisabeth

Bronfen neatly summarizes this in her discussion of hysteria as a malady of representation: ‘In

other words, to produce hysterical symptoms—be this the loss of consciousness, control over body

functions, or control over the vagaries of the mind—is for those afflicted the only possible way to

articulate a psychic disturbance, but the improper recourse to language of the body signals that the

patient cannot effectively use symbolic language’28.

In certain cases, as with C., the lack of control determines the presence or absence of a

psychological problem. The referent of alternative language became paramount. Spiritualist

27 See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 39-41 and 57.28 Bronfen, The Knotted Subject, 117.

15

trance speech repeatedly refers to subjects outside of the self; indeed, the farther from the waking

self and its perceived abilities, the more likely trance speech was to be regarded as authentic. One

of the hallmarks of true mediumship was the ability to pass certain tests wherein the testers did not

believe that the medium could discuss such topics due to a lack of education or intelligence. This

was seen particularly in the case of women who were generally thought to be incapable of waxing

eloquent about philosophy or politics29. The referent of trance speech thus pointed as far away

from the subject as possible.

The ability to speak in other languages was a sure sign of mediumship. New York State

Supreme Court Judge John Edmonds, the most influential Spiritualist in the years preceding the

Civil War, recounts the development of a young medium whom he had shepherded through her

career. According to Edmonds’s developmental model, speaking in tongues is a distinct stage on

the path of spiritual acquisition, coming after the ability to see events from a distance and before

the ability to see spirits and heavenly dramas. He writes, ‘She next became developed to speak in

different languages. She knows no language but her own, and a little smattering of boarding-

school French. Yet she has spoken in nine or ten different tongues, sometimes for an hour at a

time, with the ease and fluency of a native. It is not infrequent that foreigners converse with their

spirit-friends through her in their own language’30. The young lady proceeded to move from

recognizable foreign languages to the development of a strictly spiritual language,

incomprehensible to all but herself and the dead31. Heteroglossia is not perceived as an

impediment to her development; rather, it is the sign of the refinement of her skills.

Ann Braude has argued that Spiritualism’s appeal to women was that trance states gave

legitimacy to women’s speech in a sort of paradox of protofeminism—by acting as the passive

vehicles for famous dead males, women could expound upon philosophy and politics and be

listened to32. Women comprised the vast majority of the movement and did indeed attract

29 For the account of a famous example of this, see Fornell, The Unhappy Medium, 81. Cora Hatch, the most exalted medium of her generation, was given a series of questions in her trance state that she was specifically not expected to be able to answer in her waking one. The judging committee included professors of science and government officials, and Mrs. Hatch was expected to respond to queries such as how gyroscopes worked. 30 Edmonds and Dexter, Spiritualism, 45.31 Edmonds and Dexter, Spiritualism, 45. 32 Braude, Radical Spirits, Chapter four.

16

audiences in the thousands to their trance-induced lectures, giving women’s speech pride of place

in Spiritualism. However, women were lauded not only for disquisitions on venerable topics but

also when their speech was technically nonsense. The disease of language becomes the gift of

language, and the woman’s voice is productive of new knowledge even at its most

incomprehensible. The line between madness and mediumship would also be decided by the

instrumentality of the body and what it did or did not produce.

The Hysterically Pregnant Body

The New York Times made a several decades-long career of mercilessly lampooning

Spiritualism, pausing in its mocking tone only when famous men were ‘converted’33. In 1868, the

paper joyously and smugly recounts an astonishing event in Newark, New Jersey, where a group

of Spiritualists with unusually strong millennialist tendencies decided that the millennium had

indeed arrived, and ergo the conditions of Edenic perfection could be reinstated. Much to the

paper's delight, this included public nudity.

It appears from the account that a small group of Spiritualists were led by a team who had

appointed themselves to inaugurate the millennium by assuming the roles of Adam and Eve. The

paper reports, ‘About 9 o’clock on New-Year’s evening, the street pedestrians who had occasion

to pass Mrs. Reeves’ house, were rather more astonished than delighted to behold McEwan

standing in front of the open window clad in the habiliments of Adam before the fall, while the

fair Miss Reeves, impersonating Eve, was seen to flit to and fro under the gas-light like a fawn

gamboling in the Garden of Eden’34.

The couple proceeded to invite passersby inside, and McEwan delivered a lecture on the new

dispensation. The Times reports, ‘They ignore human institutions, laws, and customs, and act

solely from the promptings of ‘spirits of just men made perfect’’35. The group created quite a

stir, and the police were eventually involved. The couple were deemed insane by local doctors

33 Robert Hare’s embracing of Spiritualism warranted a lengthy front-page treatment. See the New York Times, Nov. 24 1855. 34 New York Times, Jan. 5, 1886.35 New York Times, Jan. 5, 1886.

17

and sentenced to the Insane Asylum in Trenton. While this account is highly unusual for

Spiritualist behavior, it was also precisely the sort of episode that got the most publicity. In fact,

the Times’s correspondents occasionally lamented how tame and reasonable the majority of

Spiritualists were36.

While such displays were an anomaly in Spiritualist circles, the theme of creation, and indeed

the creation of life, were not. Birthing imagery accompanied women’s ascent into the public eye,

and it too was accused of being lascivious or at least sacrilegious. Margaret Fox, one of the

original sisters who founded American Spiritualism, was appalled by the association of spirits and

giving birth that she had witnessed in London. The New York Herald reports, ‘They even go so

far as to have what they call ‘spiritual children’! They pretend something like the immaculate

conception! . . .there are other séances, where none but the most tried and trusted are admitted, and

where there are shameless goings on that vie with the secret Saturnalia of the Romans’37.

While such negative accounts make it impossible to ascertain what the Spiritualists thought

they were doing, there was certainly a symbolic association between mediums and pregnancy. In

certain cases, this symbolism goes so far as to be indistinguishable from what psychoanalytic

discourse has termed “hysterical pregnancies,” a subset of hysteria which may be part of a larger

constellation of symptoms or may manifest itself as the sole symptom. As with heteroglossia, the

crux of the argument is the interpretation, rather than the existence, of the phenomenon of

alternative consciousness.

Incidents of hysterical pregnancies and birthing symbolism writ large are numerous in the

history of American Spiritualism. As the domestic sphere tightened and familial bonds became

increasingly emotional rather than economic, the still-high infant mortality rate became an

unbearable psychological burden on mothers. Braude writes, ‘The focus on human agency and

moral accountability suggested that individuals were responsible for their own failure to receive

the spirit. Because of the new possibility that human beings might cause a conversion, ‘the death

of an unregenerate individual engendered more anxiety than in the Puritan era when people left

36 See the New York Times, Jan. 4 and Jan. 8, 1853.37 Cited in Fornell, The Unhappy Medium, 176.

18

election to God’s hands alone.’ This was especially true in the case of infants and children, who

died before they had an opportunity to exercise their own agency toward

conversions . . . . By seeking, and sometimes finding, intimate contact with the dead, Spiritualists

found evidence for the rejection of death as a final separation’38.

In tandem with the psychological aspects of infant mortality, the material conditions of the

middle decades of the nineteenth century also indicate a women’s appropriation, or in this case,

reappropriation, of prevailing mores about death. In ‘A History of Death in Antebellum, Anglo-

Protestant Communities,’ Gary Laderman argues that the rise of capitalism with rapid

industrialization radically altered the gendered roles surrounding death. Whereas in the first half

of the century the corpse and its attendant duties fell firmly in the woman’s orbit of care, by the

1850’s death had become a commodity-driven industry run almost solely by men. Laderman

states, ‘Despite their intimacy with the corpse in the early part of the century, in the public sphere

women were often segregated from the dead . . . . [T]he services of the undertaker and the

attendant emerging funeral industries located the corpse in a network of commercial activity that

was just beginning to operate in a heretofore untapped market. The dead were inserted into an

arena where consumerism, class differentiation, and mass-produced goods and services ensured

that their treatment depended on a slowly developing economic regime’39.

Thus, the historical location of Spiritualism would support an argument that women were

contesting theological ideas about infant damnation as well as reappropriating their roles as

caretakers of the deceased, albeit after the fact. However, these factors are inadequate to locate

the events of hysterical pregnancies in Spiritualist mediumship. The incidents of hysterical

pregnancies do not reflect the birth of children, and most frequently not even spirit children.

Rather, I will argue, hysterical pregnancies were the vehicle for women’s appropriation of an

alternative discourse.

If one grants that hysteric or alternate states manifest something symbolically through the use

of the body, the metaphoric occurrence of hysterical pregnancies in Spiritualism may shed light

not only on the situation of American women in the Gilded Age but also on hypnoid states which

38 Braude, Radical Spirits, 50-51.39 Laderman, ‘A History of Death,’ 36-37.

19

have heretofore been largely pathologized in the discourse of psychoanalysis. As with the case of

the unnamed woman who gave birth, or life, to a machine, in an era when electricity was the

cutting edge of technology, the birth imagery of mediumship repeatedly refers to scientific, or

pseudo-scientific, progress.

By the fin de siècle, the marriage of Spiritualism and science appeared in the form of

ectoplasm. The Spiritualist phenomenon of ectoplasm made its debut in the first decades of the

twentieth century, when it was both pedigreed and popularized by the noted scientist Lombroso,

the inventor of modern criminology40. The term “ectoplasm” was in fact coined by the physicist

Sir Oliver Lodge when it appeared at a séance comprised entirely of academics. Lodge writes,

‘As far as the physics of the movements were concerned, they were all produced, I believe, in

accordance with the ordinary laws of matter. The ectoplasmic formation which operated was not

normal; but its abnormality belongs to physiology or anatomy--it is something which biologists

ought to study. It was something which Richet, as a physiologist, found repugnant and was very

loth [sic] to admit, but the facts were too much for him’41.

Manifestations of ectoplasm were soon seen on this side of the Atlantic, and Margery Crandon

was at the apex of this historical moment, not only for her ectoplasmic productions but also

because her mediumship provoked the life-long and venomous dispute between Houdini and Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle. Performing a séance for the members of the Scientific American Journal

(of which her husband was president), Margery produced pseudopods from her navel. One

observer testifies, ‘It was the most beautiful case of teleplasm and telekinesis with which I am

acquainted. One is able to handle the teleplasm freely. The materialized hands are connected by

an umbilical cord to the medium; they seize upon objects and displace them . . . . The control is

irreproachable’42.

While I have no intention of arguing that the production of ectoplasm was solely the result of

an involuntary hypnoid state, the choice of symbolism remains fecund ground for an exploration

into the role of trance-induced pregnancies in Spiritualism. In both Spiritualism and

40 Brandon, The Spiritualists, 130-132.41 Cited in Brandon, The Spiritualists, 134.42 Cited in Brandon, The Spiritualists, 186-187.

20

psychoanalysis, the body is the conduit of an alternative discourse to speech. Various feminist

theorists have analyzed the semiotic code of the body as a language of protest against masculine-

controlled speech. Dianne Hunter, in ‘Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism,’ argues

persuasively, ‘Hysteria can be considered as a self-repudiating form of feminine discourse in

which the body signifies what social conditions make it impossible to state linguistically . . . .

Hysteria expresses in the language of the body what psychoanalysis says in words. Both

psychoanalysis and hysteria subvert the reigning cultural order by exploding its linguistic

conventions and decomposing its facade of orderly conduct’43.

In rebutting Hunter’s thesis, Elaine Showalter cautions against the feminist appropriation of

what is in fact a psychologically excruciating illness. Furthermore, she argues that hysteria has

hampered the causes of feminism precisely because it is not productive. Showalter writes,

‘[H]owever, the hysteric’s deviance and rebellion are carefully programmed and delimited by the

social order. Hysteria is tolerated because in fact it has no power to effect cultural change; it is

much safer for the patriarchal order to encourage and allow discontented women to express their

wrongs through psychosomatic illness than to have them agitating for economic and legal rights’44.

Although compelling on their own terms, neither Hunter’s nor Showalter’s theses withstand the

scrutiny of hysterical symptoms in Spiritualism. While some mediums’ dissociative states may

easily be seen as a non-linguistically articulated form of protest (the lower-class medium who

produced rats from the spirit world for her wealthy clients, for example),45 hypnoid states in

Spiritualism uphold the scientific and progressivist mores of the epoch. Furthermore, those

women who were periodically overtaken bodily by spirits were also the same ones who ran

practically all of the reform movements of the nineteenth century, including the platform for

women’s rights. Indeed, hysterical mediumship routinely advocated equality between the sexes

and brought to the movement the theological buttress that all people were equal in the afterlife.

From electricity to ectoplasm, hysterical pregnancies in American Spiritualism produced the

discourse of science. As numerous scholars have noted in connection with rituals of passage,

43 Hunter, ‘Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism,’113-114. 44 Showalter, The Female Malady, 161.45 See Carrington, The American Séances.

21

women may give birth to babies but men give birth symbolically to culture46. Through the vehicle

of hysterical pregnancies, women in Spiritualism claimed birthing symbolism in service of the

production of culture, the pseudo-scientific progressivism of the day. By posing an alternative

discourse to that of psychoanalysis, Spiritualists proposed that the hypnoid state was continuous

with consciousness and that it should be intermittently culled for its knowledge. In so doing,

Spiritualists articulated the hypnoid body, the woman’s body, as a site of epistemic possibility; far

from requiring a cure, the hypnoid body was generative and productive, fertile with the latest in

technology.

The Master Mesmerists: Freud and Breuer

Freud and Breuer’s landmark work of 1895, Studies in Hysteria, was widely recognized as

providing the Rosetta stone for the workings of the unconscious. While Freudian methods of

analysis have largely dropped out of vogue in favor of treating neurotic symptoms with

medication, Freud’s legacy remains an intellectual behemoth of the twentieth century. As

Edward Shorter has documented, Freud’s work caught fire in America even before the first

translation of Studies in Hysteria and remained the most influential theory for treating mental

illness through the 1970’s.47 While Freud was by no means the only, or even the first, person to

propose the presence of an unconscious, his particular articulation of the theory held the most

sway and is emblematic of his generation of thought.48 By the turn of the twentieth century,

Spiritualism was contending with the existence of an unconscious, and the proponents of the

unconscious were being contentious about Spiritualists’ hysterical symptoms.

46 For an excellent treatment of this phenomenon in rabbinic Judaism, see Boyarin, ‘The Great Fat Massacre.’47 See Shorter, A History of Psychiatry, 160-189. 48 The terminology for similar theoretical constructs changes rapidly in the course of the nineteenth century, from the “double consciousness” of early Mesmerists, to the use of “subconscious” in a way that is analogous to Freud’s term “unconscious,” (and distinct from what Freud means when he uses the term “subconscious,”) and finally to a Freudian “unconscious.” For the sake of clarity, I have used “unconscious” in the Freudian sense to denote an ever-present part of the psyche where traumata are repressed and attempt to make themselves known to consciousness. However, the term is not without its precedents, and many Spiritualists writings use older terms.

22

Hysteria was America’s introduction to the new school of psychoanalysis spearheaded by

Freud and Breuer. Hysteria was also the backdrop for the invention of the “talking cure,”

provided to Breuer by his patient Bertha Pappenheim, pseudonymously recorded as Anna O. The

introduction to the case studies details the theoretical contributions of the work, in which Freud

and Breuer assert that the manifestation of hysteria is the result of a repressed memory of a

traumatic psychological event and that language is the therapeutic key to dislodge it.

The relationship between the repressed memory and the hysterical symptoms is metaphoric:

the body concretizes the trauma by symbolic associations. Freud and Breuer argue, ‘In other

cases the connection is not so simple, there being only, as it were, a symbolic relation between the

cause and the pathological phenomenon, just as in the normal dream . . . . We have studied

patients, who were wont to make the most prolific use of such symbolization . . . . [W]e must

maintain that the psychic trauma or the memory of the same acts like a foreign body which even

long after its penetration must be considered as an agent of the present, the proof of which we see

in the most remarkable phenomenon’49. The past traumatic event embedded in the unconscious

asserts itself symbolically through the body, and hysterical symptoms disappear in their entirety

when the memory is brought to consciousness and thoroughly “talked out.”

The hypnoid state is the pharmakon for Freud and Breuer: hysteria is a state of hypnosis which

is most effectively cured by therapeutic hypnosis, under which the patient is induced to remember

the repressed event which caused the hysteria in the first place. The centerpiece of their

argument, the implementation of the talking cure, is the primary form of instrumentality--the

repressed memory is quite literally lodged into the woman’s body and uses the body as an

instrument to proclaim its existence. The talking cure unseats the memory from the unconscious

and moves it into conscious reflection, along with the repressed affect and its concomitant

associations, thereby dispelling its hold on the hysteric. The result is catharsis; the instrument of

the voice conquers and supercedes the instrumentality of the body50.

Language is not only the cure for hysteria, it was symptomatic of being hysterical. The loss of

language, and sometimes the loss of the right language, were indications that hysterical symptoms

49 Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 2-3.50 Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 12.

23

had progressed. Anna O. lost her ability to control words, syntax, grammar, and eventually lost

her ability to speak her native German, although under hypnosis she was able to speak three other

languages fluently51. The restoration of language is tantamount to the restoration of sanity, since

the vehicle of words is necessary to conquer the symbolic manifestations in the body.

The relationship of psychoanalysis’s disease of language to classical religious heteroglossia

begs the question of whether psychoanalysis has served to recast historically religious questions in

scientific discourse, and effectively, in the twentieth century, to replace religiosity with secular

individualism. While it is outside the scope of this work to tackle psychoanalysis for its

usurpation of traditional religious forms, I would posit that the Spiritualists intuited precisely such

a movement and aggressively sought to counter it. By the Freudian era, the alternate

consciousness posited by Spiritualists from the outset was thoroughly medicalized and stuffed into

the basement: the higher trance state which made spirits accessible became the lower constant

state which made pathology possible. In short, Freud successfully inverted a model of

consciousness which the Mesmerists and Spiritualists had handed him—the alternate

consciousness was now omnipresent and a danger to consciousness.

The writings of fin de siècle Spiritualists engage the psychoanalytic construction of the

unconscious, and take issue with its characterization of the unconscious as a subterranean breeding

ground for pathology. While agreeing that alternate states of consciousness existed, those states

were not naturally occurring but rather required cultivation and talent. Indeed, the argument went

further into the nature of the psyche itself. Some Spiritualists altogether denied the existence of

an unconscious, and argued that alternate states of consciousness sprang from a different source.

The 1912 how-to manual, Spirit Mediumship--How to Develop It, published by the Reverend E.

W. Sprague, specifically refutes the psychoanalytic constructions of the unconscious:

J. S. Loveland says: ‘A dual body implies dual consciousness.’ We prefer to believe that there is but one consciousness belonging to each of us, and when it enters the vibration of the spiritual, or etheric body, which is enveloped within the physical body, it discerns spiritual things. It is then that mediumship becomes operative.... Therefore the theory of the ‘Sub-conscious Mind’ of Thomson J. Hudson, and other theoretical dreamers, is not an independent entity endowed with all knowledge not possessed by the

51 For an excellent treatment of this, see Showalter, The Female Malady, 155-156.

24

conscious mind, nor with so-called occult powers not possessed by the normal man. The discovery (?) of a scientist, like many others coming from similar sources, passes away under the light of true science, as the dews and fogs of the morning disappear before the penetrating light of the rising sun52.

Like the Freudian understanding of hysteria, alternate states of consciousness do not

necessarily imply individual agency--while the cultivation of such states was imperative in order

to develop mediumship, spirits also foisted these states on the unsuspecting. Sprague continues,

‘Somnambulism borders closely upon clairvoyance and sleep-walkers are sometimes controlled by

spirits while in this strange condition. Persons while in this unconscious somnambulistic state

have written wonderful essays and sermons . . . and written poetry and other things that were

beyond their ability when in their normal state. This may be mental mediumship.

Somnambulism is also closely related to the trance condition. The medium acts and does things

which exceed his powers when awake’53. Thus, in the post-Freudian epoch, the language of the

will begins to pale in Spiritualism. The new discursive enemy, the unconscious, had to be

contested on its own grounds—spirits could account for an apparent lack of agency as well as the

clear demonstration of it.

Taking the Mesmeric legacy one step further, Spiritualism disputed the construction of the

unconscious as disjunct from consciousness: alternative psychic states certainly existed, but for

the theological (and economic) betterment of humanity. Sprague argues,

Every mental medium when placing himself in a condition to be hypnotized by his spirit helpers, becomes subject to suggestion; therefore it is detrimental to the medium’s development and to the results of the séances to suggest that there are, or may be, ‘evil spirits’ present . . . . When a medium gets his mind full of Hudson’s theory of the ‘Subconscious Mind’ and is filled with fear of ‘Evil Spirits,’ he had better cease trying to develop his mediumship. A belief in either of these theories is almost sure destruction to his development54.

Spiritualists took aim at not only the proximate causes of hypnoid states in psychology but also

their results. In 1900, Hudson Tuttle, arch-defender of the faith, laid bare the distinction of

referents between the movements. He writes, ‘Theorists attempt to account for the mental

manifestations, as trance, writing, etc. [sic], by mesmerism or psychology. . . . But mesmeric

52 Sprague, Spirit Mediumship 102. 53 Sprague, Spirit Mediumship, 80.54 Sprague, Spirit Mediumship, 33.

25

impressions do not go outside of the person or objects en rapport with the subject. They never

reveal what is unknown to those in connection. Spiritual impressibility reaches outside of

surroundings, and reveals the thoughts of the spirit who is en rapport’55. Thus the limited range

of psychology is questioned; the self-referentiality of the unconscious gives way to the self-

referentiality of the tool to measure it.

While the spirits play an analogous role to the repressed memory in hysterical attacks, the

memory is by definition traumatic in both its inception and its role in governing the character of

the hysterical symptoms. The distinctions between the causal forces are three-fold: first, time is

essential in the Freudian understanding of hysteria. Hysteria is a psychological condition

referring backward to some prior traumatic event. Mediumship refers backward in time only

inasmuch as the spirit controlling the body is no longer of this world; in all other senses the spirit

is fully present. Secondly, the interpretations of the phenomena differ radically: Freud

pathologizes the hypnoid state and grants it the status of a psychological disease, whereas

Spiritualists interpret the same condition theologically. Finally, the instrumentality of the body is

at stake. Hysterics are victims of their unconscious which symbolically manifests the repressed

memory in the body. The constellation of symptoms refers to one event, the repression of which

blocks associative affect. For Spiritualists, the body is an instrument of the spirit world, but, as I

have argued, that instrumentality is overdetermined and highly associative.

Many contemporary scholars have taken Freud to task on his insistence that hysterical

symptoms mean only one thing. In The Forms of Violence Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit

forcefully argue that Freud himself first claimed that the unconscious was riddled with

overdetermined symbols and then proceeded to argue that these overdetermined elements pointed

to a single referent56. While understandably the Spiritualists were lacking a vocabulary of

narrative theory, I would argue that this is precisely the first leg of their argument against

psychoanalysis—alternate states, trance speech, and even the woman’s body are overdetermined.

Much academic work has been done on the gendered effects of the talking cure. In The Female

Malady, Elaine Showalter argues that the remarkable contribution of Freud and Breuer was their

55 Tuttle, Arcana, 10-11.56 Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence, 104-125.

26

willingness to listen to women’s stories. Departing from the objectifying photographic

construction of hysterics by their predecessor Charcot, Freud and Breuer undertook the project of

curing hysteria not only by seriously listening to women but also by asserting that hysteria is the

by-product of bright and talented women whose potential is being socially stifled. Showalter

writes,

The feminist critique of Freud should not obscure the fact that the early years of psychoanalysis offered a considerable advance over the biological determinism and moralism of Darwinian psychiatry . . . . In principle, although not always in practice, psychoanalysis was not moralistic; it did not judge the hysteric as weak or bad, but saw the hysterical symptoms as the product of unconscious conflicts beyond the person’s control. Finally, psychoanalysis was attentive to the process of therapy . . . . The patient became an active, although not an equal, partner in the cure57.

For psychoanalysis, the body represents the problem that only the voice can correct. The process

is inherently self-reflexive; the hysteric is a partner in curing herself.

By setting hypnoid states in the context of the doctor/patient relationship, Freud and Breuer

essentially re-introduce the element that American Spiritualists had dispensed with—the need for

a mesmerizer. As it were, the hysteric has inadvertently hypnotized herself to avoid confronting

a trauma; she requires a doctor to hypnotize her to force her to recall the trauma. By reinfusing

the hypnoid state with the power dynamic of medical practice, the woman’s body is subject to the

definitive interpretation by someone other than herself.

As the initial headiness of the young republic died down, Spiritualism itself sought legitimacy

in the scientific discourses of its day. However, it never relinquished the individualism of self-

induced trance states and the hermeneutic privileges associated with them. As a feminine

discourse, Spiritualism introduced some provocative ideas; however, it was by no means the

utopia that was ousted. The mere fact that a medium’s speech referred to anything but herself

begs the question of how protofeminist the interpretive stance was. Freud and Breuer at least

encouraged women to worry about their own health. Nonetheless, the mere choice of

interpretation has interesting consequences, and raises more questions. The medical model

dictates that diseases of the psyche have single causes; Spiritualism was under no such constraints.

57 Showalter, The Female Malady, 161-162.

27

In contrast to Freudian constructions of the hysteric in which the metaphoricity of the body

refers to a single traumatic event, the hysterical body in Spiritualism promotes multiple layers of

meaning. Hypnoid language produced ‘scientific’ discourse by merely existing; hysterical

pregnancies allowed mediums corporeally to give birth to the discourse of science. Words and

bodies were productive and multivalent; by undermining the hegemony of psychoanalytic

discourse, Spiritualism offered not only a different interpretation but also a different interpreter of

the body’s language.

Born in 1967, Cathy Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. She is currently working on a book about the influence of Neoplatonism on American Spiritualism.

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28

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