The third and final video in our series on poltergeist phenomena and hauntings in the history of science (and this time also medicine) has just gone live. This episode is on the longer side, as we will dwell quite a bit on twentieth-century continental Europe. Once again, you are going to encounter several figures not … Read more
The philosopher and occult writer Carl du Prel was the most prominent German-language theorist of the unconscious self immediately before Sigmund Freud, who once called du Prel “that brilliant mystic.” Revered by artists like R. M. Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, du Prel’s writings informed the work of renowned psychologists other than Freud, … Read more
The investigation of ‘occult’ phenomena associated with spiritualism and mesmerism occupied the minds of representatives of modern psychology much more than this has been reflected in standard histories of modern psychology. From Gustav Theodor Fechner and William James to Théodore Flournoy and Hans Eysenck, many prominent psychologists were not only interested in the psychodynamics of … Read more
The following excerpts are from a report originally contributed by Carl Gustav Jung to Spuk. Irrglaube oder Wahrglaube? (chapter 5, Baden: Gyr, 1950), a study of hauntings and poltergeist cases by the zoologist Fanny Moser (1872-1953). The below is extracted from C. G. Jung, Psychology and the Occult (London: Routledge, 1982, pp. 174-183; I’m grateful … Read more
Ostensible ‘poltergeist phenomena’ are the very epitome of ‘things that go bump in the night’, and most modern scientists would probably relegate them to the realm of fairy tales without thinking twice. And yet, for historians studying the historical continuity of scientific interest in the supposed ‘supernatural’, they offer surprising insights. Probably coined by Martin … Read more