Why Was the First Compilation of James’ Essays on Unorthodox Science Published in French?

Given my own specialization in the occult underbelly of the history of modern human sciences, the heretical preoccupations of William James as the ‘founding father’ of modern American psychology are a naturally recurring theme of Forbidden Histories. Some of you might be aware of a recent book by Krister D. Knapp, William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity, which I reviewed for Isis (click here for the published review on the journal website, and if you don’t have access to the journal you can read the unpaginated manuscript version here). I’m sorry to say that I think the book’s problems far outweigh its merits, though within the 800 words limits of an Isis review I was only able to address few of the book’s shortcomings (of which I will however have more to say in a couple of essays I’m currently working on).

Sadly, errors are not limited to rather minor and relatively insignificant ones like Knapp’s claim that the volume William James on Psychical Research (edited and published in 1960 by Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou) “was the first of its kind to bring together some of James’s key essays on psychical research” (p. 307). While the claim is true for the first edition of a selection of James’ psychical research writings in his native language, the first compilation of 12 of his texts on psychical research in fact appeared in a French translation in 1924.

Rendered into French by a certain E. Durandeaud, James’ essays were published as part of a book series on ‘psychical sciences’ under the title Etudes et réflexions d’un psychiste (Studies and Reflections of a Psychical Researcher) by Payot in Paris, a press with a focus on works in history, philosophy and science. The editor of this book series, science journalist René Sudre, contributed a useful introduction, which summarizes the main text and provides a rough context for James’ unorthodox activities.

Though it could have begun with James’ first known text on occult matters (a review of a book on spiritualism in 1869), the collection of the 12 translated essays kicks off with his “Report of the Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena” (1886), and includes, for example, his presidential address to the Society of Psychical Research (1896); his obituary of Frederic W. H. Myers and appraisal of Myers’ work as a psychologist (1901); James’ report on a late phase in the automatic productions of the Boston trance medium Leonora Piper (1909, his most comprehensive text in psychical research); and it concludes with the popular article “The Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’”, which was also published in 1909, the year before James’ death.

So why was the first collection of some of James’ writings on psychical research published in a French translation? After all, a reprint of his original English texts would have been way less cumbersome than their translation into a foreign language. And this of course raises a related question: Why had a compilation of some of his unorthodox writings in English to wait until half a century after his death?

While I don’t think there is a straightforward answer to either question and will postpone a reply to the second one, it’s worthwhile to roughly compare the Anglo-American context with France.

The Anglo-American Context

When James was alive, psychical research was hotly contested particularly among fellow psychologists in Germany, whose overall hostility was mirrored by attitudes of many colleagues of James in America. Contrary to standard notions that continue to be popular despite being hopelessly outdated, however, few if any critics publicly battled the unorthodox researches of James and other elite scientists by offering dispassionate methodological critiques. Weapons of choice by opponents in America such as G. Stanley Hall, Joseph Jastrow and Hugo Münsterberg were polemical misrepresentations of what James and colleagues actually did, along with sweeping pathologizations of the belief in the very possibility of ‘psychic’ phenomena (which were then readily scooped up and promulgated as the official verdict of science by newspapers and popular magazines).

Soon after James’ death in 1910, American psychology began to be dominated by Behaviorism, whose proponents virtually banished terms like ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ from psychological nomenclature. Neither had they any use for things like telepathy and other weird phenomena which James thought squarely fell within the scientific jurisdiction of experimental psychology. (And hardly surprisingly, James’ phrase of the ‘will to believe’, which was promptly turned into a dirty word by opponents of his psychical research and pragmatic philosophy when he was still alive, continued to function in a misappropriated meaning as a sufficient general explanation of continuing scientific interest in alleged occult phenomena.)

James shared his opinion of the psychological pertinence of alleged psychic phenomena with his closest collaborators in England, Edmund Gurney and (following Gurney’s death in 1888) Frederic Myers at the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). As I have argued at length in my doctoral thesis, for a short but historically significant time their work on telepathy and its alleged manifestations in trance states, hallucinations and automatisms became a discrete British brand of psychological experimentation, which amalgamated with French experimental hypnotism and eventually competed with German-style physiological psychology.

Yet, after Myers’ death in 1901, neither within the SPR itself nor in fact anywhere in Britain was there anybody left to continue the practice of psychical research as a branch of experimental psychology. Myers was the last SPR leader in 1900 to represent British psychologists at the International Congresses of Psychology, and his and James’ heretodox approach to functionings of the mind, which was more concerned with its subliminal regions than the everyday waking self as the classical object of psychology, was actively discouraged by SPR council member, William McDougall (who happened to be a founder of the British Psychological Society, and later a successor of James at Harvard, before supporting the establishment of the parapsychology laboratory at Duke University. We will come back to the apparent contradiction of McDougall’s support of psychical research and simultaneous rejection of Myers’ and James’ psychology in the second part).

Not much later, the SPR became a major British conduit of Freudian psychoanalysis, which soon eclipsed what may have been left of the subliminal psychology of Myers and James within the SPR itself (Freud himself became a member and in 1912 published an essay in the SPR Proceedings to demarcate his programmatically anti-occult psychoanalysis from Myers’ subliminal psychology).

It seems, then, that Britain was not exactly the most conducive place for a collation of James’ essays in psychical research at the time of their French translation either.

Metapsychique and Science Journalism in France: René Sudre

Elite scientists in German- and English-language countries by no means ceased to be actively involved in studies of alleged occult phenomena altogether, but heterodox continuities seemed much more visible in France. And the cause of French psychical research (or métapsychique) was no doubt considerably bolstered after its doyen, the physiologist Charles Richet, scored a Nobel Prize in 1913.

Before Richet, other elite intellectuals in France including fellow Nobel Laureates Marie and Pierre Curie, and James’ philosophical hero Henri Bergson, had come out in favour of occult goings-on they believed to have observed in experiments with the medium Eusapia Palladino (of which I hope to write a separate post soon). But public opinion concerning the official stance of science regarding occult phenomena was not determined by first-hand experiments of elite representatives of the sciences, but by the mighty feather of science popularizers and journalists. And while Richet, the Curies and others tried to disentangle the question of the reality of the controversial phenomena from premature metaphysical interpretations, most journalists working in the anticlerical aftermath of the Third Republic in fact refused to follow them and usually decried any investigations of the claimed anomalies as nothing but gullible spiritualism.

Opponents of Jamesian unorthodox science in America likewise consciously chose popular magazines and newspapers as prime platforms to get their programmatic pronouncements of the inherent scientific, philosophical and religious illegitimacy of empirical approaches to occult phenomena across (one of James’ critics, fellow psychologist James McKeen Cattell, was the editor of Science magazine and later the Popular Science Monthly). Here they had followed the example of previous popularizers of Victorian scientific naturalism (which, it needs to be remembered, was not the same as ontological materialism, of which major science ‘naturalizers’ such as Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall in Britain, and Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hermann Helmholtz in Germany, were just as critical as subsequent psychological opponents of James’ psychical research).

A decisive reason for the first appearance of some of James’ psychical research writings in French may lie in the fact that their editor, René Sudre, was a prominent science journalist. Before Sudre – a co-founder of the French National Union of Journalists, director of information for the newspaper L’Avenir, writer for various French-language papers and pioneer of radio journalism – would focus his activities overwhelmingly on empirical approaches to the occult, he had already established himself as an influential figure in Francophone journalism. This put him in a favourable strategic position to counterbalance the popularization of hostile attitudes to unrestrictedly empirical approaches to the hotly debated psychic phenomena, and no doubt helped his negotiations with renowned publishers and editors to realize comparatively ambitious projects like James’ Etudes et réflexions d’un psychiste.

I will try to conclude my attempt to roughly understand the timing and place of publications of James’ unorthodox works in a separate post. There I will return to the later American context (including McDougall and the beginning professionalization of experimental parapsychology), and consider possible reasons which appeared conducive to the appearance of the first English compilation of some of James’ psychical research essays in 1961.

© Andreas Sommer

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Bibliography

Evrard, Renaud. “René Sudre.” In Psi Encyclopedia, ed. Robert McLuhan. London: Society for Psychical Research [open accesss online resource].

Freud, Sigmund. “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 26 (1912): 312-18.

James, William. Essays in Psychical Research (The Works of William James). Ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].

James, William. Etudes et réflexions d’un psychiste. Ed. René Sudre, transl. E. Durandeaud. Paris: Payot, 1924 [Search on Abebooks].

Knapp, Krister Dylan. William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017 [Not recommended before you read James’ original writings].

McDougall, William. “Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. By Frederic W. H. Myers.” Mind 12 (1903): 513-26.

Murphy, Gardner, and R. O. Ballou, eds. William James on Psychical Research. New York: Viking Press. London: Chatto and Windus, 1960 [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].

Sommer, Andreas. “Psychical Research and the Origins of American Psychology: Hugo Münsterberg, William James and Eusapia Palladino.” History of the Human Sciences 25 (2012): 23-44 [open access PDF].

Sommer, Andreas. “Crossing the Boundaries of Mind and Body. Psychical Research and the Origins of Modern Psychology.” PhD thesis, University College London, 2013.

Sommer, Andreas. “Krister Dylan Knapp. William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity.” Isis 109 (2018): 410-11 [unpaginated manuscript].

Taylor, Eugene. William James: On Consciousness Beyond the Margin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996 [Buy on Amazon] [Search on Abebooks].