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 altered states of consciousness (such as hypnotism and mediumistic trance), but also in the reality of supposedly transcendental capacities of the mind, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis.
Carl Gustav Jung’s fascination with the occult is of course well known. In fact, his M.D. thesis, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena, is a study along the lines of the work of Frederic Myers and Théodore Flournoy, though it is purely concerned with psychodynamic rather than parapsychological aspects of mediumship. Jung never published any systematic studies to scientifically evaluate the occurrence of occult phenomena, but he was well informed about contemporary parapsychological studies, attended many experimental séances (sometimes accompanied by his mentor, Eugen Bleuler) and performed many informal parapsychological tests himself. (And regular visitors of Forbidden Histories will probably remember Jung’s account of a spine-chilling night in a haunted house.)
Leafing through the second edition of a German-language classic of spiritualism, Georg Sulzer’s Light and Shadow in the Practice of Spiritism, I found an interesting reference to parapsychological tests performed by Jung. Sulzer, a Zürich lawyer and one-time President of the Swiss Court of Cassation, became a convert to spiritualism in 1898 and proselytized his new heretical faith in several books and pamphlets. In Light and Shadow (first published in 1913 by Oswald Mutze, a leading spiritualist press which also issued Jung’s M.D. thesis and published the journal Psychische Studien), Sulzer described an episode concerning Jung’s tests of the alleged clairvoyance of one Mrs. Fäßler, a somnambule who had the reputation of being able to successfully diagnose medical ailments in strangers. Sulzer fails to date the episode, which took place in Jung’s flat, but circumstances mentioned in the book suggest that it must have occurred some time between 1902 and 1912. Sulzer writes (my translation):
“During the trial, which we now performed, Dr. Jung pulled me into the room next door, and there he told me very quietly that I should put the letter, which he had written to me and through which he had invited me to this test sitting, upon Mrs. Fäßler’s head. So I did, and she now described a woman, naming a number of physical and mental characteristics and eventually diseases as well, which that person was supposed to suffer from.
Of course I thought she was thoroughly mistaken to begin with. However, I noticed that Dr. Jung looked very thoughtful sitting in his chair, and after Mrs. Fäßler concluded her description I was illuminated about the reason for this demeanour, which struck me as conspicuous; for he now exclaimed: ‘Wonderful, she has quite precisely described my mother, everything correct, characteristics as well as her medical conditions, and she doesn’t know my mother at all, who lives in Basel and whom she only saw once, when she visited me in Zürich, walking through the room’. Dr. Jung confessed to me that he was unable to explain this strange case, and I, too, wish not to bother suggesting any hypotheses.”
Recommended Literature
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Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychology and the Occult. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978 [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].
Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology. The Dream of a Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].
Postscript, 11 April 2015: Sonu Shamdasani, the editor of Jung’s Red Book, informs me that there exist detailed minutes of Jung’s sittings with Mrs. Fäßler in the Jung papers at ETH Zürich.
© Andreas Sommer
Reblogged this on In A Human Moment.