Policing dreams: History and the moral uses of the unconscious

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 49, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 142-160

  Hayward, Rhodri ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 52849125838     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/2000.49.142     Document Type: Review

References (208)

1. On Hilprecht (1859-1925), see American Dictionary of Biography 9, pp. 58-9.
2. Hilprecht's dream has near-canonical status within the literature on psychical research: W. Romaine Newbold, 'Subconscious Reasoning', Proceedings Society for Psychic Research (SPR) 12, 1896, pp. 11-20;
3. Theodore Flournoy, Spiritualism and Psychology, New York, 1911, p. 131;
4. Andrew Lang, The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, London, 1897, pp. 19-23;
5. Frank Podmore, Studies in Psychical Research, London, 1897, pp. 382-4;
6. Frederic Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, vol. 1, London, 1903, pp.375-9.
7. It has recently reappeared in a popular work by Brian Inglis, The Power of Dreams, London, 1988, pp. 36-7, 60-1.
8. Newbold, 'Subconscious Reasoning', pp. 14-15.
9. Newbold, 'Subconscious Reasoning', p. 15.
10. The dream-inspired realization of the fragments' common origin occurred too late for any revision of the plates prepared for the expedition catalogue. However Hilprecht added brief notes to each engraving and also to the table of contents, see H. V. Hilprecht (ed.), The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadephia, 1893, pp. 50, 52.
11. Newbold, 'Subconscious Reasoning', p. 17.
12. For Newbold (1865-1926), see American DNB 7, pp. 448-9.
13. On the association of ideas, see Kurt Danziger, 'Generative Metaphor and the History of Psychological Discourse', in David E. Leary (ed.), Metaphors in the History of Psychology, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 331-56, esp. 339-48.
14. For Peters (1852-1921), clergyman archaeologist, see American DNB 14, pp. 506-7.
15. Hayden White 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', Critical Inquiry 7, 1980, p. 26.
16. For the separation of the 'worldly self and the 'divine soul' in Protestant Christianity, see L. Dumont, 'A Modified View of our Origins: the Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism', in M. Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of Person, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 93-123.
17. Romans 5:12-14, 7:7ff; 1 Corinthians 15:21-3, 15:45-9. For nineteenth-century commentaries on this division, see David Somerville, St Paul's Conception of Christ, Edinburgh, 1897;
18. R.L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation (1896), London, 1902, pp. 113-7;
19. William Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam, The Epistle to the Romans (1895), Edinburgh, 1911, pp. 131-47;
20. George Baker Stevens, The Theology of the New Testament (1901), Edinburgh, 1911, pp. 349-62;
21. H. R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (1912), Edinburgh, 1914, chap. 3.
22. Psalms 76:5; Jeremiah 51:39; Daniel 12:2; John 11:13; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14. For commentaries on the Biblical equation of sleep and death, see John Bigelow, The Mystery of Sleep (1897), London, 1904, pp. 155f;
23. Carleton Greene, Death and Sleep, the idea of their analogy, London, 1904.
24. See also Isaiah 26:9; Psalms 139:18. Many unorthodox Christians, particularly Swedenborgians and spiritualists, argued that the Spirit permanently coexisted alongside the soul and the self in man. For spiritualist statements of the tripartite model, see A.J. Davis, 'The Poughkeepsie Seer', 'Death and the After Life' (1868), section 1 in The Harmonial Philosophy, a compendium and digest of the work of Andrew Jackson Davis, London, 1917, pp. 130-1;
25. T. Grant, A Scientific View of Modern Spiritualism, read before the Mid Kent Natural History and Philosophic Society (1872), London, 1873, pp. 3f.
26. For less partisan accounts, Catherine Crowe, The Night-side of Nature (1848), reprint intro. Colin Wilson, Wellingborough, 1986, pp. 131f;
27. C.C. Massey, 'Concerning Geists', The Spiritualist, 20 Aug. 1880, pp. 85-7;
28. Thomas Jay Hudson, The Law of Psychic Phenomena, London, 1893, pp. 27-8.
29. Franz Delitzsch (Professor of Theology at Leipzig) whose System der Biblischen Psychologie (1855) appeared in translation by R.E. Wallis as A System of Biblical Psychology, Edinburgh, 1867, pp. 332-3;
30. Henry Christmas, On the Cradle of Twin Giants: Science and History, London, 1849, p. 190;
31. [Anon], 'Dreams, dreamers and dreamland'. Borderland 3, 1896, p. 471.
32. On the generality of the view, see Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3rd edn London, 1885, pp. 136f.
33. For nineteenth-century models, see Arthur Chambers, Our Life after Death, or the teaching of the Bible concerning the Unseen World, London, 1894;
34. Joseph William Reynolds, The Natural History of Immortality, London, 1891.
35. For an overview: Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature, Cambridge, 1992.
36. Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, London, 1860, pp. 79-80;
37. Frederick Greenwood, Imagination in Dreams and their Study, London, 1894, pp. 52-3.
38. Catherine Crowe, The Night-side of Nature, p. 49.
39. See also Joseph Ennermoser, The History of Magic, transl. William Howitt, London, 1854, vol. 1, p.49;
40. Truthseeker, 'On the Origin of Dreams', Light, 22 Dec. 1885, pp. 621-2.
41. On Crowe (1800-1876), see DNB 13, p. 237.
42. Frank Seafield, The Literature and Curiosities of Dreams, 2nd edn London, 1869, p. 49.
43. Seafield was the pseudonym of Alexander Henley Grant, see British Biographical Archives fiche #1229, no. 446. On the relativity of time and space perception in dreams, see E. Cox, 'On Some Phenomena of Sleep and Dreams' (1875), in Proceedings of the Psychological Society of Great Britain, London, 1880, pp. 54-5.
44. For Victorian reports of travelling clairvoyance: Joseph Darby, Day Visions and Clairvoyant Night Dreams with facts on Somnambulism and Prevision, London, 1892;
45. Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 234-9;
46. Eric Dingwall, Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena, London, 1967.
47. For the dream mechanisms involved in Highland second sight, see James Gregorson Campbell, Witchcraft and Second Sight in Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Glasgow, 1902, pp. 124f, 179-80.
48. On the idea of death as a rhetorical device for defining a life narrative, see Walter Benjamin, 'The Storyteller' in Illuminations (1955), London, 1992, p. 93;
49. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, Oxford, 1984, pp. 22ff.
50. On angelic supervision and intervention: John Blackburn Leslie, The Angels of God, London, T. Woolmer, 1885, pp. 23f;
51. for general spirit invasion of dreams, see Roden Noel, 'Hallucination, Memory and the Unconscious Self, Journal Society for Psychic Research (SPR), Jan. 1886, pp. 158-70.
52. For a massive collection of testimonies on visions of dying friends, see Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, 2 vols, London, 1886.
53. For late theories of succubi and incubi attacks, see Evan Roberts and Jessie Penn Lewis, War on the Saints, Leicester, 1912;
54. M. Conway, Demonology and Devil-lore, London, 1879, p. 236.
55. On demonic intervention in dreams, see J.L. Nevius, Demon Possession and Allied Themes, Chicago, 1894, pp. 85-8, 282;
56. G. H. Pember, The Earth's Earliest Ages, London, 1883, p. 251;
57. Benjamin Warfield, 'Dreams and the Moral Life', Homiletic Review new series 20, Sept. 1890, p. 216.
58. For the appearance of fairies in dreams: W. Y. Evans Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, London, 1911, pp. 41, 51, 55, 58.
59. Spencer, Sociology, pp. 132-142;
60. E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, (1871), London, 1903, pp. 121, 439-45.
61. Spencer, Sociology, p. 140.
62. Tylor, Primitive Culture, p. 445.
63. See also Edward Clodd, Myths and Dreams, London, 1885, pp. 242-3.
64. The history of these religions has been repeated many times. For a comprehensive analysis, see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 101-3
65. and the slightly less detailed work of Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research, London, 1968.
66. For the relationship of spiritualism to plebeian culture, see Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850-1910, London, 1986.
67. For the feminist implications of the spiritualist project: Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, London, 1990.
68. On the growth of Swedenborgianism, see Erland J. Brock (ed.), Swedenborg and his Influence, Bryn Aethyn, 1988.
69. Emmanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia: The Heavenly Mysteries etc. (1749-56), London, 1878, vol. 2, paras 1, 975 ff. esp. 1, 983.
70. For an exposition of Swedenborg's philosophy, see Theophilus Parsons, Outlines of the Religion and Philosophy of Swedenborg, London, 1876.
71. Victorian psychiatric assessments of Swedenborg were remarkably sympathetic, see William Wotherspoon Ireland, Through the Ivory Gate: Studies in History and Psychology, Edinburgh, 1888, pp. 1-113;
72. Henry Maudsley, 'Emmanuel Swedenborg', Journal of Mental Science 15, 1869, pp. 170-96.
73. Arcana Coelestia vol. 2, para 1, 977.
74. For further information on Swedenborg and dreams, see William Van Dusen's introduction to Swedenborg's Journal of Dreams 2nd edn, London, 1989.
75. For the influence of Swedenborgianism on spiritualism, see Barrow, Independent Spirits, chap. 1;
76. Maurice Davies, Heterodox London, London, 1874, pp. 90-115.
77. For the professional medium's reluctance to endorse dream inspiration, see James Morse, 'Significant Dreams', Light 15 Dec. 1894, p. 604.
78. For reports of prophetic dreams in the spiritualist press, see 'Dreams', Spiritual Magazine, 4 April 1879;
79. 'Dream Warnings', Spiritualist 13, 1878, pp. 172, 194;
80. 'Symbolic Dreams', Spiritualist 14, 1878, pp. 140, 239;
81. 'Dreams', Spiritualist 16, 1880, p. 257;
82. 'Dreamy Shades', Spiritualist 17, 1880, p. 97;
83. 'Fulfilled Dream', Spiritualist 18, 1881, p. 237;
84. 'A Remarkable Dream', Light, 28 Aug. 1894;
85. 'A Dream which came true', Light, 1 Dec. 1894;
86. 'A Useful Dream', Light, 2 Jan. 1895;
87. 'Dreams, Dreamers and Dreaming', Borderland 3, 1896, pp. 470-5;
88. 'Dreams and Dreaming', Borderland 4, 1897, pp. 301-2.
89. On Davis, see Podmore, Modern Spiritualism, London, 1902, vol. 1, pp. 158-76.
90. Davis was a fundamental influence on British spiritualism, with his doctrines taught throughout the movement's Lyceum schools, see Oppenheim, Other World, pp. 101-3.
91. A. J. Davis, The Great Harmonia, vol. 3, Boston, 1858, pp. 316f.
92. Greenwood, Imagination in Dreams, pp. 70-1.
93. On Greenwood (1830-1909), DNB 2nd Supp., vol. 2, pp. 157-9.
94. Roden Noel (1834-94) had served as Groom of the Privy Chamber but resigned his commission because of his growing republican sympathies, see A. W. Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, New York, 1947, pp. 154-5;
95. DNB vol. 41, p. 92.
96. Roden Noel, The Philosophy of Immortality, London, 1882, pp. 63, 123.
97. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, London, 1852
98. estimated that each dream-book title still sold around 11, 000 copies a year (pp. 294-5). The most popular titles included: The Dreamers Sure Guide, London, 1876;
99. The Universal Dreambook or Ladies Interpreter, London, 1876.
100. On the persistence of popular dream interpretation: John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, London, 1900, p. 657;
101. Tylor, Primitive Culture, pp. 439-0.
102. And see Maureen Perkins, 'The Meaning of Dream Books', History Workshop Journal 48, autumn 1999.
103. For dream interpretation as a family or household activity, see Richard Bland, 'Dreams and their Interpretation', Borderland 3, 1896, pp. 474-5;
104. J. M. Dixon, 'Dreams', Spiritualist, 19 Sept. 1879, pp. 141-2.
105. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971, pp. 595-601.
106. On dream evidence in Scottish trials, see John Hill Burton, Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland, London, 1852;
107. for corpse-location evidence at Littleport coroners court, see C.H. Cooper, 'Dream Testimony', Notes and Queries 8, 24 Sept. 1853, p. 287;
108. in the Rose Foster inquest, Spring Hill, Birmingham, see 'Dream Verified', Light, 4 May 1895.
109. For dream revelations of an Ashford suicide and a Glasgow murder, see Kentish Express, 2 June 1894;
110. Glasgow Herald, 3 Jan. 1895
111. abstracted in Borderland 2, 1895, p. 2.
112. This play had appeared in various forms from 1828 onwards with the first script being published in 1877, see M. Kilgarrif, Golden Age of English Melodrama, London, 1974, pp. 204-35.
113. See also, F. C. H., 'Dream Testimony', Notes and Queries 2nd series, 2, 27 Dec. 1856, p. 515;
114. and F. C. H., Notes and Queries 3, 24 May 1857, p. 333.
115. Darby, Day Visions, p. 115.
116. For a good overview, see the introduction and bibliographic essay by Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton in Taithe and Thornton (eds.), Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History, 1300-2000, Stroud, 1997.
117. For Brothers (1757-1824), see John Barrell, 'Imagining the King's Death: the arrest of Richard Brothers', History Workshop Journal 37, 1994, pp. 1-32.
118. For Joanna Southcott (1750-1814), see J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, London, 1979, chap. 5;
119. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, London, 1983, pp. 163-71.
120. For Francis Starr, see Mid-summer's Morning Dream, London, 1852;
121. Twenty Years of a Traveller's Life, Norwich, n.d.
122. For J. G. H. Brown's prophecies, see Revelations for the Late War, London, 1846;
123. Message from the Spirits, London, 1857.
124. For their context, see Barrow, Independent Spirits, London, 1986, chap. 2.
125. On the radical implications of inspired authority, see I.M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, Harmondsworth, 1970;
126. Erika Bourguignon (ed.), Religion, Altered States of Consciousness and Social Change, Columbus, 1973.
127. On typology see, George Landow, Victorian Lights, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought, London, 1980.
128. Frank Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, Cambridge, Mass., 1979, p. 106.
129. See also Roger Caillois, Logical and Philosophical Problems of the Dream, Berkeley, 1966, p. 31.
130. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, London, 1987, p. 16, also chap. 1 throughout;
131. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Inferiority, 1780-1930, London, 1995.
132. On the mystical failure of language and representation, see Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, transl. Michael B. Smith, Chicago, 1992, pp. 108-26.
133. For the challenge inherent in the mobile identity of the possessed, see his essay: 'Discourse Disturbed: The Sorcerer's Speech', in The Writing of History (1975) transl. Tom Conley, New York, 1988, p. 258.
134. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Demonology', North American Review 74 March, 1877, p. 179;
135. Benjamin Warfield, 'Dreams and the Moral Life', Homiletic Review 20, 1890, p. 216.
136. The best accounts of the society's formation, can be found in Gauld, Founders;
137. and Oppenheim, Other World.
138. John Cerullo, The Secularization of the Soul, Philadephia, 1982, chap. 3.
139. On Henry Sidgwick, Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, see D.G. James, Henry Sidgwick, Science and Faith in Victorian England, Oxford, 1970.
140. On Gurney, see Trevor Hall, The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, London: Duckworth, 1964.
141. On Myers, see Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion, New Haven, 1974, chap.5.
142. On carnival and transgression, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London, 1986.
143. 'Further Notes on the Unconscious Self, part 2', Journal SPR, March 1886, p. 225;
144. 'Automatic Writing or the Rationale of Planchette', Contemporary Review 47, 1885, pp. 235, 248
145. see also E. Gurney 'Problems of Hypnotism', Proceedings SPR 2, 1883-4, pp. 270-7.
146. For a discussion of this critique, see James Glass, Delusions: Internal Dimensions of Political Life, Chicago, 1985, chap. 6 esp. pp. 133-8.
147. Alongside the examples cited below, see 'Automatic Writing II', Proceedings SPR 3, 1885, pp. 1-64, esp. 3, 33, 62;
148. 'Automatic Writing III - Physiological and Pathological Analogies', Proceedings SPR 4, 1885-7, p. 212;
149. 'Automatic Writing IV - The Daemon of Socrates', Proceedings SPR 5, 1888-9, p. 525.
150. Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Phantasms, p. Iviii.
151. On the writing of Phantasms, see Gauld, Founders, pp. 160ff;
152. Cerullo, Secularisation, pp. 92-3.
153. Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, London, 1894, chap. 6.
154. Frank Podmore, Apparitions and Thought-Transference, London, chap. 8.
155. 'Stages of Hypnotic Memory', Proceedings SPR 4, 1886-7, p. 531.
156. See also Carl du Prel, The Philosophy of Mysticism (1885), London, 1889, vol. 1, p. 201.
157. On the graphic automatisms: F. W. H. Myers 'On a Telepathic Explanation of Some So-Called Spiritualistic Phenomena', Proceedings SPR 2, 1884, pp. 226-37;
158. the same material was covered in Myers, 'Automatic Writing II', Proceedings SPR 3, 1885, pp. 24f;
159. 'Automatic Writing or the Rationale of Planchette', Contemporary Review 47, 1885, pp. 240-3.
160. On the visions of blood, Miss X [Ada Goodrich Freer], 'On the Apparent Sources of Subliminal Messages', Proceedings SPR 5, 1888-9, pp. 486-501;
161. 'Experiments in Crystal Vision', Proceedings SPR 11, 1895, pp. 114-44.
162. The most famous example of this process appears in Theodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages (1901), transl. Daniel B. Dermilye and ed. Sonu Shamdasani, Princeton, 1994.
163. Albert Moll, Hypnotism (1889), 3rd edn, London, 1899, pp. 291-2;
164. Joseph Lapponi, Hypnotism and Spiritualism, London, 1906, chap.1;
165. Henry Ellenbergery, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), London, 1994, pp. 53-7;
166. Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, 'Demon Possession, Mesmerism and Hysteria', Journal of Abnormal Psychology 88, 1979, pp. 538-9.
167. 'Human Personality in the Light of Hypnotic Suggestion', Proceedings SPR 4, 1886-7, pp. 1-24
168. repr. Nineteenth Century 20, 1886;
169. Phantasms, pp. xlii-iii;
170. 'On Telepathic Hypnotism and its Relation to Other Forms of Hypnotic Suggestion', Proceedings SPR 4, 1886-7, p. 185;
171. 'Multiplex Personality', Proceedings SPR 4, 1886-7, pp. 496-514
172. repr. Nineteenth Century 20, 1886.
173. Myers's view was shared by continental researchers such as Beaunis, Forel and Krafft-Ebing: Moll, Hypnotism, p. 333.
174. 'Peculiarities of Certain Post-Hypnotic States', Proceedings SPR 4, 1886-7, pp. 268-323;
175. 'Recent Experiments in Hypnotism', Proceedings SPR 5, 1888-9, pp. 3-17.
176. For discussions of Gurney's experiments in hypnosis, see Gauld, Hypnotism, pp. 389-93;
177. T. W. Mitchell, 'The Contribution of Psychical Research to Psychotherapeutics', Proceedings SPR 45, 1938-9, pp. 175-86;
178. Frederic Myers, 'The Work of Edmund Gurney in Experimental Psychology', Proceedings SPR 5, 1888-9, pp. 359-73;
179. Williams, Victorian Psychical Research chap. 7, section 2. Hall (Edmund Gurney) has suggested that Gurney's experimental results were produced through his subject's deliberate deceit.
180. I have omitted from this brief discussion Gurney's attempt to demonstrate the operation of a mesmeric influence in the trance state: see Gurney and Myers, 'Some Higher Aspects of Mesmerism', National Review 5, 1885, pp. 581-703;
181. Gauld, Founders, Appendix A.
182. Max Dessoir, 'The Magic Mirror', Monist 1, 1890-1, pp. 116-7.
183. 'Further Notes on the Unconscious Self, part 2', Journal SPR, March 1886, p. 225;
184. see also E. Gurney, 'Problems of Hypnotism', Proceedings SPR 2, 1883-1, pp. 270-7.
185. 'Further Notes on the Unconscious Self, part 3', Journal SPR, April 1886, p. 241.
186. On Podmore, post-office clerk and Fabian socialist, see Hall, Edmund Gurney, Appendix A.
187. Podmore, Modern Spiritualism, vol. 2, p. 328.
188. For the classic statement on automatism, see Pierre Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals (1894), transl. C. R. Corson (1901), Washington, 1977, p. 243.
189. 'The Subliminal Consciousness: Chap. 2, The Mechanism of Suggestion', Proceedings SPR 7, 1892, p. 355.
190. For example, Sarah Underwood channelled the spirit of Robert Chambers who denounced the subliminal, Borderland 3, 1896, p. 84;
191. 'The Psychical Research Society and its Negative Record', Borderland 2, 1895, pp. 346-8;
192. J. Farmer, 'Spiritualism, Spiritualists and the SPR', Light, 19 Sept. 1885), pp. 447-9.
193. As Raphael Samuel wrote of contemporary psychohistorical investigations: the 'logic' which they discover in fantasy, the 'hidden order' which they explicate in a text, the parallelisms which they point out in developments between the moral and psychic economy, so far from being indwelling properties of the documents or symptomatic absences, are ones which they have put there themselves. 'Reading the Signs II: Fact Grubbers and Mind Readers', History Workshop Journal 33, spring 1992, p. 242.
194. Stephen Bann, 'Analysing the Discourse of History', in The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past, Manchester, pp. 33-63;
195. Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', Critical Inquiry 17, 1980, pp. 5-27.
196. For an overview of White's argument, see Wulf Kansteiner 'Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History', History and Theory, 1992, pp. 272-95.
197. Hayden White, 'The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and Desublimination', in The Content of the Form, Baltimore, 1987, p. 66.
198. For contemporary accounts of prophetic dreams, see Danah Zohar, Through the Time Barrier, London 1982;
199. Inglis, Power of Dreams.
200. Sally Alexander, 'Women, Class and Sexual Difference in the 1830's and 40's: Some Reflections on the writing of a feminist history', History Workshop Journal 17, spring 1984, pp. 134f.
201. On the possibility that psychoanalysis could uncover a missing dimension of fantastic experience in history: Lyndal Roper, 'Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany', History Workshop Journal 32, autumn 1991, pp. 37-8.
202. Phantasms, p. xlvi;
203. Podmore, Apparitions, p. 373;
204. Andrew Lang, 'Comparative Psychical Research', Contemporary Review, Sept. 1893, pp. 372-87.
205. Spiritualists could also field similar arguments - C. C. Massey argued that mediumistic ability was an inherited trait which had been largely wiped out in the witch hunts: 'The Influence of Psychical Research on the Dominant Culture', Light, Supp. 24 Oct. 1885, pp. 519-22.
206. For a Lacanian model of spirit possession, see Owen, The Darkened Room, chap. 8.
207. On the tensions between historical narrative and revivalist rhetoric, see Rhodri Hayward, 'From the Millennial Future to the Unconscious Past', in Taithe and Thornton, Prophecy, pp. 161-80.
208. This argument has been made by the Jesuit historiographer, Michel de Certeau. In his essay 'Psychoanalysis and its History', 1978 (Heterologies: Discourses on the Other, transl. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, 1986, p. 10), De Certeau criticizes the modern hypostatization of the practice: When psychoanalysis forgets its own historicity, that is its internal relation to conflicts of power and position, it becomes either a mechanism of drives, a dogmatism of discourse or a gnosis of symbols.