Unruly Spirits
The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France
A fascinating history of parapsychic phenomena in France during the age of Sigmund Freud
Cloth – $110
978-0-252-03564-7
Paper – $32
978-0-252-07751-7
eBook – $29.95
978-0-252-09005-9
Publication Date
Cloth: 10/07/2010
About the Book
In Unruly Spirits, M. Brady Brower connects the study of séances, telepathy, telekinesis, materializations, and other parapsychic phenomena in modern France to an epistemological crisis that would eventually yield the French adoption of psychoanalysis. Skillfully navigating experiments conducted by nineteenth-century French psychical researchers, Brower situates the institutional development of psychical research at the intersection of popular faith and the emergent discipline of psychology. He reveals that, by acknowledging persistent doubt about the intentions of its participants, psychical research would result in the realization of a subjectivity that was essentially indeterminate and would thus clear the way for the French reception of psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious and its more comprehensive account of subjective uncertainty.About the Author
M. Brady Brower is an assistant professor of history at Weber State University.Reviews
"Apart from offering a wealth of valuable original insights, Unruly Spirits transports findings of French historians of psychology and physical research ... revealing the close links and strong overlaps between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French psychology and physical research. . . . Fascinating and important."--Social History of Medicine"Essential reading for those interested in the history of either psychology or the border sciences."--Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
"Brower's book analyzes deftly the history of this troubled transition from a 'philosophy of the mind to a science of the mind in modern France.'"--Bulletin of the History of Medicine
"insightful study of the 'science' of the psychic--physical research (PR)-in modern France."--ISIS
Blurbs
"M. Brady Brower clearly demonstrates the importance of the French strain of psychical research and shows it to be a crucial and unjustly neglected episode in the story of modern psychology. What he has uncovered should provoke a searching revision of the standard account of the resistance psychoanalysis faced in fin-de-siècle and interwar France."--John Warne Monroe, author of Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France
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