One way of thinking about Méheust’s project is to read it as an elaborate delineation of these fundamental postmodern insights with respect to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural wars surrounding animal magnetism and psychical research, but toward a very specific, and deeply subversive, end. Basically, what Méheust demonstrates is how the present regime of power and knowledge—a regime defined by materialism, determinism, objectivism, and scientism—came about through the disciplining, suppression, and finally forgetting of the metaphysical shock of the psychical, which can indeed be read with the tools of postmodernism but finally overflows and overwhelms these. Méheust, in other words, employs the tools of poststructuralist thought in order to think beyond poststructuralism. He relativizes the relativizers, as the sociologist of religion Peter Berger might say.27
Thus, for example, when he discusses Pierre Bourdieu and the notions that all of our linguistic and geographic borders are the result of conflicts, compromises, and transactions, that the real is not given but constructed, that “society is the seat of a permanent battle around its definition,” he is careful to remind his readers of that which is common in all of this, which is precisely that which is often forgotten, namely, humanity itself (SM 2:121). Not that this human base is entirely stable. The limits of our human faculties, he suggests, were not in 1900 what they were in 1800. The very structure and capacities of our sensorium change with our social practices and intellectual categories, over which we ceaselessly fight. And not for nothing, it turns out: worlds of experience and possibility are indeed at stake.
Vigorous psychical phenomena are less common, or at least less reported, today than they were in the first half of the nineteenth century. Is this because we are not as credulous today, because our predecessors were being duped and we no longer can be? Or is it because the older epistemological limits were less stable, more fluid, and had not yet fully enforced the specificities of our present mental universe? It is not so absurd to ask, then, “if the culture in which we live has not finished completing the occultation of a psychism sui generis” (SM 2:122–23). It is not so absurd to ask, that is, if we have forgotten our own innate nature, whether we have, as it were, fallen into a certain cultural unconsciousness.
For the story Méheust tells, the nineteenth century was the turning point, the space and time in Western culture where and when consciousness defiantly suggested that it might be fantastically free of the spatial and temporal strictures that were then beginning to be seen as absolute. It all began on May 4, 1784, when a career military man and artillery colonel, an aristocrat by the name of Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), attempted to put a young peasant by the name of Victor Race into a Mesmeric “healing crisis.” That didn’t happen. Instead, Race woke up asleep. More specifically, he began to manifest a calm, lucid state of consciousness in which he ceased to speak in his village accent, took on a learned tone, and began to respond not to Puységur’s vocal commands, but to his unspoken thoughts. It was as if Race had some immediate access to his magnetizer’s innermost processes and desires.
Puységur was understandably stunned. He would write two years later of encountering in Victor “a being I do not know how to name” (un etre que je ne sais pas nommer).28 The two men (or the two men and the Being), ten years apart and from vastly different social backgrounds, became close collaborators in a shared exploration of this extraordinary state of mind. Victor, it turned out, could predict in these states the future course of his own treatment and healing with calenderical precision. More astonishingly still, he could also diagnose the conditions of other patients and prescribe effective treatments for their ills.
Puységur quickly discovered other somnambulistic subjects with similar abilities in the same district of France. The area was now a kind of psychic contagion zone. Puységur named this new technique somnamublisme provoqué or sommeil magnétique. It was the last expression that would finally stick and enter the English language as “magnetic sleep.” By “magnetic,” he referred to the strange metaphysical energies, at once physically palpable and mentally directed, that commonly manifested themselves in these altered states of consciousness. The eventual result of such seemingly humble beginnings was an extremely broad and diverse intellectual, therapeutic, and medical movement that spanned much of the Western world, but especially France, Germany, England, and the U.S. The efflorescence in France was the earliest, although it waned under the Napoleonic wars and, when it revived under the Restoration, so too did the rationalist forces poised against it, mostly from the academy (SM 1:384–93). An official commission was organized under a certain Doctor Husson, the chief medical officer at the Hotel-Dieu. It studied the matter for five years only to issue a report in 1831 that concluded that most of the magnetic phenomena were in fact quite real and effective.
A scandal erupted, and, as sometimes happens in the history of psychical research, if a skeptical body does not like the conclusions of one study, it simply organizes another, avoids research altogether, or just lies about the facts.29 Hence the next commission was directed by Dubois d’Amiens, who, not accidentally, also happened to be the major figure in the anti-magnetist crusade. A certain Doctor Burdin, who was a member of this second skeptical commission, offered three thousand francs to anyone who could perform a traditional magnetic feat, that is, read a text through some opaque obstacle (often a blindfold, but envelopes, buried pages further down in a book, and other strategies were also used). A young girl named Léonide Pigeaire stepped forward. She appeared to be able to do exactly this, that is, read with her eyes laboriously sealed by a veritable shroud (a photo of which appeared in the newspapers and is reproduced on the cover of the first volume of Somnambulisme). The intellectual and cultural environments would not be swayed, however. The two camps went to war over experimental protocol, the experiments were not able to take place, and, as Méheust puts it, “magnetism was vanquished by forfeit.”30
After the negative Dubois Commission report and the retraction of the Burdin prize in 1842, the magnetist movement essentially lost whatever status it had in the professional medical community. It hardly disappeared, however. Indeed, numerous major literary figures, philosophers, intellectuals, and anthropologists saw very clearly what was at stake, that is, what the magnetic phenomena suggested about human nature and its latent capacities, and pursued these with passion and dedication. This latter humanist defiance held for another century as the movement hopped the pond to the U.S. and the channel to England, where it merged with the later movements of Spiritualism and the psychical research tradition of the S.P.R.
Méheust’s Somnambulisme et médiumnité is the story of that initial efflorescence and subsequent disciplined suppression and forgetting. I have listed a few representative moments in the introduction, so I will not repeat them here. It is worth citing Méheust’s final thoughts on this long forgetting, however. Toward the very end of the two volumes, Méheust puts the matter as starkly as he can. If we were to reproduce in France in the second half of the twentieth century what was happening intellectually in the nineteenth century, or even in the first three decades of the twentieth, he points out, we would see names like Barthes, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Morin, Ricoeur, and Sartre debating the existence of psychical abilities in places like L’Homme, La Revue de métaphysique et de morale, Diogéne, and so on (SM 2:501). Such a thing, of course, can hardly be imagined. We have forgotten that much. We have rendered what was once possible completely impossible.
2. Guardians of the Threshold. Historians of psychology generally acknowledge Puységur’s role in “the discovery of the unconscious,” but they usually relegate this role to a subordinate one, to that of a catalyst, as Henri Ellenberger put it in his famous study.31 For Méheust, this is an inappropriate reading-backwards, an illegitimate adoption of a later ideology that is then anachronistically imposed on an earlier system that did not subscribe to the rules and limitations of t
he later ideology. And indeed, Puységur’s magnetic sleep, much like Myers’s subliminal Self, was no Freudian unconscious. This was a form of mind of immense metaphysical proportions and astonishing psychical abilities. Accordingly, authors like Méheust and Adam Crabtree reject the notion that Puységur’s magnetic sleep was somehow an ill-formed or incomplete version of a later Freudian psychoanalysis.32 Rather, Méheust argues, Freud’s psychoanalysis acted in effect as a “Guardian of the threshold” (SM 2:441), a compromise-formation that, by incorporating, refashioning, and domesticating select aspects of these new models of the psyche, rendered them relatively harmless to the reigning materialism and scientism of the day. In one of Méheust’s most striking images, psychoanalysis was a kind of “back fire” (contre-feu) set in the hills to stop the spread of an approaching metaphysical blaze (SM 2:213). The image is nearly perfect, as it suggests, correctly in my opinion, that psychoanalytic theory participated in the same fiery nature of that which it battled and finally stopped.
Méheust also points out, again correctly in my opinion, that an epistemological system like that of psychoanalysis grants very particular insights that the earlier mesmeric and magnetic models simply could not (e.g., oedipal and libidinal dynamics), even as the earlier models granted very particular insights that psychoanalysis could not (e.g., telepathy and the subliminal Self). Freud thus opened the Western world up to a “new continent” of the psyche with features ignored by the earlier models and now intricately described with what Méheust calls a kind of hallucinatory precision: enter the domains of the primary processes, the archaic, and the infantile. One of the results of Freud’s stunning success, however, was that the earlier discoveries of the magnetists and psychical researchers were effectively overshadowed. Eventually, they more or less disappeared (SM 2:415). There is no “free lunch” for Méheust, then, no perfect system. Every system, any system, conceals as it reveals and reveals as it conceals. As Fort once put it so precisely, to “save” one class of data is inevitably to “damn” another: “To have any opinion, one must overlook something.”
This, then, is a story of more than a forgetting, more than a simple suppression. For, as we see here with psychoanalysis, Méheust argues that major twentieth-century intellectual movements incorporated aspects of psychical research, but primarily as a strategy to resist them, to stop them in their tracks, as it were. In this way, these movements functioned like those immense padded stops at the end of a train line that are designed to stop the momentum of a moving locomotive in an emergency. Méheust defines these “stop concepts” (concepts butoirs) as “notions which, no doubt possessing an incontestable heuristic power, have at the same time a strategic function, that of limiting, by tacit convention, an obscure domain of experience, thus stopping the flight of thought into the unknown” (SM 2:208). In effect, such concepts function on a cultural level as means to stop a moving “train of thought.” They are defense mechanisms invoked by the internal logic of a social system in a cognitive or metaphysical emergency.
By far, Méheust’s most extensive and analyzed example here is again psychoanalysis, particularly in its notion of the unconscious and its methods of dream interpretation. Personally speaking now, I find this view of psychoanalysis as a kind of cultural shock zone before a psychical challenge especially convincing, as it helps me to relate what are essentially two opposite and seemingly exclusive views of psychoanalysis: one, about which I have written a great deal, as a kind of secular mysticism that is uniquely suited to the interpretation of mystical literature (especially erotic mystical literature); the other, by far the more orthodox reading, as a purely materialist and reductionistic method that has no place in its worldview for the mystical or the paranormal. What Méheust does, for me anyway, is show how both of these positions are true, how psychoanalysis, in effect, comes to be between the two competing worldviews, acting as a buffer or stop zone between them. This seems exactly right to me.
But it is not just psychoanalysis that protects Western culture from the moving train of the psychical. Méheust also treats, among many other figures: Arthur Schopenhauer, who, Méheust suggests, understood the super-conscious state of magnetic lucidity to correspond to a direct experience of the life-force in which the World is perceived, in his famous titled phrase, as Will and as Representation (SM 1:314); André Breton’s surrealism and its “occult background” (SM 2:322–32); Emile Durkheim’s sociology and its valorization of highly individualized forms of ecstatic consciousness made possible, paradoxically, by the fusion of collective enthusiasms (SM 2:260–61); psychofolkorist Andrew Lang’s anthropology of the soul and its constant evocation of “region X” (SM 2:276, 293); Mircea Eliade’s history of religions, with its constant references to mysticism, occultism, and the fantastic (SM 2:277–78, 294–95); and any number of literary oeuvres, including and especially those of Arthur Conan Doyle and Victor Hugo.
3. To Describe Is to Construct. Méheust’s grand historical thesis about “the forgetting of magnetism” carries with it a second major thesis about the inner workings of consciousness and culture, which is also a kind of insight into the metaphysical consequences of history. This is the striking notion that human intellectual and social practices, particularly in their naming and institution-creating functions, somehow circumscribe reality, somehow create the real for a particular place and time. In a single phrase, to describe is to construct. Méheust captures this idea in his French hyphenated expression, décrire-construire, which appears consistently throughout both volumes. We might gloss this Méheustian gnomon this way: “to acknowledge openly and to describe authoritatively some aspect of the real is to make possible a psychological experience of the same.” Méheust himself comes very close to this gloss when he broaches what he calls “an historical and epistemological enigma,” namely, the manner in which décrire-construire functions as “the actualization and/or the inhibition of potentialities.” To describe-construct, in other words, is also to describe-select (décrire-selectionner) and to describe-point (décrire-aiguiller) (SM 2:116). It is as if our intellectual and social practices “switch on” and “switch off” a set of latent universal human potentials.
In order to get a proper handle on what Méheust is arguing here, it is perhaps helpful to get a handle first on what he is not arguing. As a personalized, psychological truth, after all, Méheust’s sound bite seems to reflect rather closely one of the central ideas of the American metaphysical tradition, from the nineteenth-century Mind Cure and New Thought movements, through Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, to the human potential movement and the contemporary New Age. In its most exaggerated and radical forms, this idea boils down to the notion that a single individual can create his or her own reality through acts of intention and affirmation. This, essentially magical, idea is evident in a whole variety of modern mystical texts, from the channeled classic A Course in Miracles to the most recent breezy bestseller The Secret.
There are certainly links between the modern metaphysical literature and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century magnetic and psychical literature. But this is not exactly what Méheust is arguing in these two volumes. His thought is much more sociological, although it never ceases to be psychological as well. That is to say, he is much more interested in the broad social processes and institutional structures, not to mention the outright cultural wars, that produce a sense of the real in any given place and time. He is interested in things like government commissions, published essays and books, and medical and scholarly careers won and lost over ideas. More technically, he is interested in how our methods of inquiry end up constituting both the subject that seeks to know and the object that is finally known. Which is all to say that Bertrand Méheust is much closer to Michel Foucault than to A Course in Miracles.
Which is not to say that Méheust is arguing exactly what Foucault argued, or that he would disagree completely with the fundamental premises of a text like A Course in Miracles. Framed in my own terms now, Méh
eust’s thought appears rather as an elaborate attempt to relate consciousness to culture and culture to consciousness, and to demonstrate, in the process, how these two dimensions of human experience effectively constitute each other in a never-ending cycle of dialectic and debate. Méheust, then, would likely not accept that a single psyche can somehow create a new reality from whole cloth. But neither would he deny the possibility that an individual psyche, temporarily freed from its cultural constraints (which include the personal ego), might demonstrate “impossible” powers and capacities. That which is possible, after all, is relative. He would thus insist that a culture’s sense of reality—what is possible, what is impossible—is largely circumscribed or “set up” by social practices, historical institutions, and previous cultural battles by which the lines were drawn and the real circumscribed. Essentially, we write ourselves, but as social groups now, not generally as single lone individuals.33 Which implies, of course, that we can, singly or together, unwrite and author ourselves anew.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 31