FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM:

HYSTERIA AND AMERICAN SPIRITUALISM

CATHY GUTIERREZ

Just six years after the Fox sisters mysterious rappings in Hydesville, New
York, a group of spirits calling themselves the Association of Electricizers
instructed the Universalist minister John Murray Spear to build an engine that
was to function like the human body. Spear, following instructions from the
Association, completed the New Motive Power in High Rock, Massachu-
setts in 1854. The machine was to be a gift to humanity from the spirit world
for the creation of a new but unspecified power on earth. The New Motive
Power sat dormant on its perch until the appearance of an unnamed woman
who had previously been told by the spirit realm that she would become the
Mary of a new dispensation. On June 29, the Boston New Era published a
lengthy description of the events of that day:
When there [High Rock], however... she began to experience the peculiar and
agonizing sensations of parturition, differing somewhat from the ordinary experi-
ence, inasmuch as the throes were internal, and of the spirit, rather than the physi-
cal nature, but nevertheless quite uncontrollable, and not less severe than those
pertaining to the latter. Its purpose and results were wholly incomprehensible to
all but herself; but her own perceptions were clear and distinct that in these ago-
nizing throes the most interior and refined elements of her spiritual being were
imparted to, and absorbed by, the appropriate portions of the mechanism: its min-
erals having been made particularly receptive by previous chemical processes1.

The newspaper proceeded to recount that the machine gave indications of

life or pulsations, which continued and grew stronger as the weeks progressed
through a series of ministrations by the anonymous woman, precisely analo-
gous to that of nursing . . . until at times a very marked and surprising motion
resulted2. The new Electrical Motor, as Spear coined it, was unfortunately
destined for infanticide by a posse of intolerant Spiritualists who destroyed it
when it failed to do anything.
In psychoanalytic terms, this incident appears to be a textbook example of a
hysterical pregnancy, and it is by no means unique in the context of the Spiritu-
alist movement. The history of American Spiritualism is rife with anecdotes of
what one may consider hysterical attacks, and certainly contemporaneous crit-
1
Cited in Brandon, The Spiritualists, 9.
2
Brandon, The Spiritualists, 9.

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Aries Vol. 3, no. 1

56 CATHY GUTIERREZ

ics of the movement were quick to label Spiritualists as hysterics 3. Despite

the many striking resemblances between hysteria and Spiritualist trance
mediumship, contemporary scholarship on the latter has been loath to connect
the two. However, an examination of the shared characteristics of hysteria and
Spiritualist mediumship, rather than serving to pathologize believers, in fact
reveals that Spiritualism saw itself as a competing discourse to the emerging
one of psychoanalysis, self-consciously and adamantly offering an alternative
view of similar phenomena. The hermetic impulse in Spiritualism provided a
different referent for the secrets of the cosmos than the young democracy and
its medical teachings did. The answers Spiritualists sought were external to the
individual; believers tried to uncover the secrets of the past, rather than the
secrets of their selves. By explicitly attacking psychoanalytic constructions of
the unconscious as a locus of mental illness, Spiritualism offered not only a
theological understanding of alternative psychic states, but also a radically
alternative interpretation of the body especially the womans body as an
instrument of intangible forces.

1. The Birth of Mediumship

Spiritualism was born in the mid-nineteenth century, the last great religious
movement to come out of the Second Great Awakening and arguably the clear-
est articulation of postmillennial progressivism of the age. Positing an unprec-
edented continuity between this world and the afterlife, Spiritualism proposed
that the dead could be contacted to offer advice and solace to the living. The
inauguration of communicating with the dead caught the religious imagination
of antebellum Protestants, and by Ann Braudes estimation, Spiritualism may
have claimed as adherents half the population of the country.
The atmosphere of America was ripe for this peculiar form of continuing
revelation; the myriad religious movements begun in this epoch bespeak the
need for new religious answers tailored to the ethos of the moment. In content,
Spiritualism assuaged grieving and provided new and heavenly knowledge. In
structure, it was individualistic, populist, and antiestablishment in its icono-
clastic form of bestowing credentials on those with a gift for talking to the
dead. Amid the romantic mythos of the self-made man and the merit-based
rewards of industrialization, Spiritualism provided the possibility that anyone,
and particularly women, might have the necessary talent to be invested with
quasi-religious authority.

3
For a detailed account of various diagnoses of mental illness among Spiritualists, see
Fornell, The Unhappy Medium, 70-83.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 57

Begun in 1848 with the Fox sisters mysterious rappings, Spiritualism

offered what was understood to be concrete and empirical proof of the contin-
ued existence of the dead. In response to an apparent poltergeist in their
Hydesville home, the Fox sisters innovated a system of raps to spell answers to
questions one for a, two for b, and so forth thereby turning a fairly banal
haunting into an ideological revolution in Protestant circles. Techniques for
communicating with the dead were soon honed, with the cumbersome system
of alphabet rapping replaced by people most often women who would
enter trance states and serve as living conduits between this world and the
next.
As mediumship became an established and viable profession by mid-cen-
tury, a veritable cottage industry of speculation, apologia, and how-to manuals
sprung up in its wake. Theories and justifications generally focused on the
advancing technologies of the time and serve as a testimony to the middle
classs fascination with pseudo-science. In the era of the telegraph, the tel-
ephone, and photography, invisible communication was the cutting edge. By
shifting the emphasis of communication from reaching across space to that of
reaching across time, Spiritualism was for many not only believable but the
logical extension of progress itself.
The appeal of Spiritualism was multifaceted; in Radical Spirits, Ann
Braude argues that the patina of empirical truth attributed to communicating
with the dead had a direct impact on the overthrow of Calvinism and specifi-
cally its policies of infant damnation4. In an epoch of a still-high infant mortal-
ity rate, Spiritualism assured grieving mothers that their children were
unassailably in heaven, flourishing in the company of deceased relatives and
wise angels. The spike in Spiritualist activity immediately following the Civil
War attests to its ability to relieve grief.
Others, however, had more pragmatic goals in mind when they attended
large revival-type trance shows or the smaller, domestically-centered sances.
The benefits of being able to communicate with the legendary dead were not
lost on the literate and striving middle class, and certain telling favorites were
called upon to make sense of the current situation. Emanuel Swedenborg,
Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Franklin all loomed large
in the new pantheon of the spirit world, doling out advice, relating the condi-
tions of the afterlife, and continuing their earthly mtiers posthumously.
Mediumship shared phenomenological characteristics with several similar
movements of its day, foremost Mesmerism. Ecstatic trance states and the
presence of an alternative consciousness call into question precisely what dis-

4
Braude, Radical Spirits, Chapter two.
58 CATHY GUTIERREZ

tinguishes Spiritualism proper from a host of similar occurrences5. Spiritual-

ism was both dependent on and an elaboration of early experiments with hyp-
notism, which in Europe first blossomed as a branch of medical science. As the
often unwilling heirs to Mesmerism, Europeans had the first opportunity to
interpret hypnotic states and assign both value and meaning to them6. Mesmer-
ism clearly included a mystical as well as medical component, and in certain
cases mesmerized patients reported a facility for the paranormal and the abil-
ity to talk to the dead. However, European expressions of the phenomena of
Spiritualism lacked the systematic cosmology that Americans would assign it7.
With the belated entry of the Fox sisters, the material and cultural condi-
tions coalesced to produce the marriage of unconscious states and the religious
imagination. Alternative states of consciousness were certainly nothing new:
nineteenth-century books proclaimed the Hydesville events to be in line with
all variety of religious expression from primitive shamanistic trances to the
last gasp of the afflictions of Salem8. In the 1820s the Shakers had experi-
enced a similar phenomenon when a series of adolescents were possessed by
the spirits of Native Americans 9. With antecedents as varied as the witch trials
and Shaker revivalism, Spiritualism was in one sense merely a continuation of
a tradition in which the marginalized youth and women expressed religious
discontent behind the cultural shield of an alternate consciousness. Spiritual-
isms radical departure from this legacy, however, was a matter of personal
agency. The ability to invoke and control alternate states was unique to both
the historical era and the American articulation of trances. Moreover, the first

5
See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, Chapter Five, and Godwin, The Theosophical En-
lightenment, 151-162.
6
The terminology for these states is slippery and changes several times over the century. For
the sake of clarity, I will be using hypnotism as synonymous with Mesmerism, and reserving
hypnoid to describe a state that one side sees as hysteria and another as mediumship.
7
Scholars have produced recent cross-cultural studies that call into question the authenticity
of many forms of trance states and claims of spirit possession. Nicholas Spanos has noted that
spirit possession frequently allows the socially disenfranchised to express discontent in such a
manner that the subversive voice will not be censored. He argues that spirit possession is a
vehicle for protest, but one in which the subject is largely coached by religious expectations and
social cues. While I have tried to keep my descriptions of these events in line with Spiritualists
own claims of authenticity, it should be noted that even if the trances were social performances,
the nineteenth-century comparison still holds, since the same social performance claims could be
made about hysterics as well. I would add that in the Spiritualists case, there was certainly not a
unanimous encouragement of these states from the culture at large. There were real social reper-
cussions for being a medium, including in Margaret Foxs case, a loss of marriageability. For the
social performance argument, see Spanos, Multiple Identities, 145-155.
8
For one example of the former, see Hudson, The Law of Mental Medicine, Chapter one. For
the latter, see Putnam, Witchcraft of New England.
9
See Foster, Religion and Sexuality, 62-71.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 59

Spiritualists struck upon something that other dabblers in Mesmerism failed to

discover: one did not require a mesmerizer to produce a trance state. One
could induce it for ones self.
The populist leanings of the young democracy were thus carved into the
practices of popular religion10 . The decline of Calvinist election in the early
nineteenth century left a cultural vacuum that individualism would fill. No
longer achieved by grace alone, salvation itself would be dependent on the
individuals heartfelt efforts at religiosity. As the revivalism of the period con-
clusively reassigned conversion and salvation as the individuals responsibil-
ity, Spiritualism took that ethos a step further. Echoing the religious individu-
alism of its cultural parent, the revivals of the Second Great Awakening,
Spiritualism shifted the boundaries of the contemporaneous discussion of
trance states. Transformation for spiritual improvement was indeed the indi-
viduals responsibility, but one could transform ones consciousness at will
and with no aid from God or man.
These coincidences of history conspired to create a distinctly American
phenomenon; anyone with ambition, patience, and a hint of talent could prove
to be the next mediumship rage. This democratic impulse cut across gender
boundaries more easily than class or racial ones, but those too were possible11.
Women, however, were the primary beneficiaries of the cultural largess,
which, I will argue, was a contributing force to charges of mediumistic hyste-
ria.
As Ann Braude has argued so persuasively, Spiritualism prior to the Civil
War was largely an affair of women. In Radical Spirits, Braude demonstrates
that women were understood to be more effective as mediums because the
genders were thought to have opposite electrical poles, or positive and nega-
tive charges. Womens negative charge made them attractive to the positively
charged spirits. In the contemporaneous social construction, womens nerv-
ousness and fragility were paradoxically the best characteristics to encourage
spirit manifestation 12. Concomitantly, precisely the same qualities that were
understood to make women excellent mediums also opened them to charges of
mental instability.

10
For a discussion of the relation of republicanism to Spiritualism, see Carroll, Spiritualism
in Antebellum America, Chapter three.
11
As many have noticed but few have explored, traditional African religions share some fam-
ily resemblances with Spiritualism inasmuch as both involve trance states and the consultation
of ancestors. For an account of one African-American practitioner of Spiritualism, see Deveney,
Paschal Beverly Randolph. For the adventures of a lower-class Catholic medium, see
Carrington, The American Sances.
12
Braude, Radical Spirits, 23-24, 29, 39.
60 CATHY GUTIERREZ

As mediumship flourished, so too did its critics. Detractors denounced the

movement as folly, with many of them laughing too hard to say anything other
than that it was preposterous; predictably, others drew correlations between
Spiritualism and demonic possession 13 . More sober critics, however, saw Spir-
itualism as a form of individual and mass hysteria. Mediums were institution-
alized some willingly and others not and the illness was debated in the
leading psychotherapy journals of the day.
Hysteria, however, both in the nineteenth century and in this work, is an
umbrella term for any disease of the psyche predominantly affecting women.
Following the Mesmerists discovery of magnetic sleep, Europe and
America were awash in artificial trance states. The use and value of these
states, however, were open to interpretation: animal magnetists claimed medi-
cal value, Spiritualists theological value, and both enjoyed economic boons.
However, the line between illness and mysticism, hysteria and mediumship,
was quite blurry, and the eye of the beholder was of the utmost importance.
Spiritualists were quick to launch a counter-attack, and wrote books and
editorials distinguishing true mediumship from madness. Since most mediums
were women, whose naturally nervous constitutions made them better
receptors for the spirit world, the conversation implicitly and explicitly ad-
dressed ideas of the womans body. As fiercely as psychoanalysis attempted to
claim Spiritualist phenomena for its own domain, Spiritualists were forced to
articulate their opposing interpretation of mediumship as beneficial to the
health of both body and mind. I will argue that the debate as to whether trance
states were pathology or theology took place on the battleground of the wom-
ans body and that the debate itself articulates a contested interpretation of the
use and value of the womans body. Before discussing the particularities of this
argument, I will turn to its ideological forerunner, Mesmerism, in order to out-
line its contributions to the ongoing debate about what mediumship meant.

2. Mesmerism

In the mid-eighteenth century, the colorful figure of Franz Anton Mesmer be-
gan his long and finally fruitless attempt to gain legitimation for his claims
about the effects of magnets for healing the body. Mesmers initial theory pos-
its that health is determined by a magnetic fluid in the body which can become
blocked or unevenly distributed in the system. The restoration of health was
thus tantamount to the restoration of a congenial flow of this fluid, which could
be accomplished through the use of magnets. Dubbed animal magnetism,

13
See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 201-202.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 61

Mesmers approach relied on not only the instrument of magnets but the in-
strumentality of the magnetizer as well the physician, being magnetic him-
self, could beneficially influence the flow of the fluid in anothers body.
Mesmer was convinced that the discovery of magnetic fluid would revo-
lutionize the field of health and the cause of progress. Despite repeated at-
tempts to garner the official recognition he strongly felt was his due, Mesmer
was marginalized by European authorities. However, this did not deter many
from employing his methods and Mesmer found himself in a flurry of compe-
tition for patients. Embattled and bitter, Mesmer was denounced by two sepa-
rate commissions convened to examine animal magnetism after they con-
cluded that his treatment boiled down to touching, imagination, and
imitation14. In short, the French medical academy concluded that animal mag-
netisms beneficial effects were merely the products of what we would now
call hypnotic suggestion.
Animal magnetism thus introduced two key components on which Spiritu-
alism would elaborate: the instrumentality of the body and the idea that results
could be measured and counted as empirical truth even if the causes re-
mained invisible. Spiritualism never strayed far from its roots in alternative
medical practices, and animal magnetism was roundly applauded in Spiritual-
ist publications straight through the Civil War. However, animal magnetism
was but one theory in Spiritualisms arsenal, and while it set the atmosphere
that would eventually induce trance states, the advent of mediumship relied on
animal magnetisms outgrowth, Mesmerism.
The eponymous treatment of Mesmerism was in fact discovered by
Mesmers former student and new-found competitor. In 1784, the marquis de
Puysgur, protege and later apostate of Anton Mesmer, happened upon a re-
markable event in the course of treating a patient with magnetic healing: his
patient entered an alternative state of consciousness. While remaining con-
scious inasmuch as he could speak and was fully aware of his surroundings,
the subject was a qualitatively different subject from his waking self, and
Puysgur was quick to link the phenomenon with somnambulism, or sleep-
walking.
In his landmark work, From Mesmer to Freud, Adam Crabtree delineates
the marquiss speculations which would quietly shape a century of thinking
about the health of the mind: first, Puysgur noted that the alternative con-
sciousness was fully aware of the normal consciousness but that this relation
was not reciprocal. Second, the magnetizer held an enormous sway over the
patient in this state, both allowing for hypnotic suggestion and requiring of

14
Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 31.
62 CATHY GUTIERREZ

the doctor good will and upstanding morals. Lastly, Puysgur understood the
alternate consciousness to be temporally sequential with waking conscious-
ness; that is, the alternate state did not always exist in some mute, subterranean
space of the mind but rather only existed under the conditions of magnetic
sleep 15. Over time, a distinction was made between sleepwalking, in which
the subject is not conscious and remembers nothing of the event, and sleep-
waking, in which the subject retains consciousness and can recall the events
and conversations that took place in the mesmerized state.
Mesmerism, or magnetic sleep, and animal magnetism came to be used in
conjunction, with the mesmerized patient aiding the doctor to guide the mag-
netic fluid. Puysgur had already noted that a patient in a state of magnetic
sleep demonstrated certain abilities that smacked of the paranormal: he asked
the mesmerized patient about his or her own illness and proceeded, apparently
with some success, in following the patients advice on how best to treat it.
Instances of precognition were also noticed, although Puysgur appeared to
have very little interest in this vein of his discovery. Certain other mesmerists,
however, found this aspect more compelling, and by the nineteenth century the
alternate consciousness was explicitly associated with knowledge of the di-
vine. According to Crabtree,
[T]he striking similarity between the states attributed to religious ecstatics over
the centuries and those of magnetic somnambulists was sufficient to place them
in the same psychological category. Both involve impressions of separation from
the body, and both entail some kind of communication with a higher spiritual
world. While in the state of magnetic ecstasy, somnambulists might find them-
selves communicating with angels, demons, saints, or the souls of the departed.
Experiences of magnetic ecstasy and combination with the discarnate world initi-
ated animal magnetism into a new phase, which might be called magnetic
spiritism 16.

The legacy of easily induced trance states and their association with the re-
markable and the divine would lay the groundwork for Spiritualisms claims
for the legitimacy of mediums. The linchpin between Mesmers quasi-medical
exploits and the birth of Spiritualism was the discovery that trance states could
be artificially induced. The groundwork was laid for the earnest alliance of
Mesmeric trances and the cultural interest in communicating with the dead. In
the 1830s, Charles Poyen, a student of Puysgurs, brought the extraordinary
new phenomenon to the United States. With all the zeal of a convert, Poyen
barraged Boston and the greater New England area with demonstrations of the

15
Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 38-105.
16
Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 178.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 63

new healing technique. During numerous public shows in which Poyen would
ask audience members to participate, indications of the presence of the par-
anormal and the spiritual realm continued 17 .
Nearly thirty years later, Spiritualism required only the theological back-
bone of Swedenborgian mysticism to be added in order to achieve a fully ar-
ticulated cosmology, replete with the means to communicate with the dead and
the theoretical backdrop to the cause and function of their continued existence.
Andrew Jackson Davis, primary theologian of the Spiritualist movement, had
been writing popular tracts that fused Swedenborgs visions of heaven with an
American Transcendentalist view of the divine order being reflected in the
natural one. Following the Fox sisters instant fame, Davis irrevocably brought
Swedenborgianism and communicating with the dead together. In allying the
two movements, Davis provided the philosophical underpinnings to both
trance states and their contents. Swedenborgs many-tiered heavens were
quickly sanitized of any ominous components and peopled with not only
Swedenborgs angels but also the common run of humankind. The concatena-
tion of Mesmeric trances, the omnipresence of the dead, and the weighty
legacy of a Neoplatonic cosmos coalesced into the sweeping religious move-
ment of Spiritualism.

3. The Suggestion of Madness

From the outset, Spiritualists were destined to be plagued by charges of mad-

ness. Mesmerism was already threatening the line between hypnotism and hys-
teria, and the Spiritualist declaration that alternate states of consciousness in
fact should be fostered made adherents a target for both the scientific commu-
nity and amateurs who saw a threat to Christianity in the movement. While the
definition of hysteria has changed radically over the last two hundred years, a
common consensus is that hysteria is essentially unwilling hypnotism: the hys-
teric is locked in a state of an alternate consciousness 18. Conversely, hypnotism
has been seen as an artificially induced hysteria 19.

17
Fuller, Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology, 209-210.
18
For an excellent treatment of the changing definitions of hysteria, see Bronfen, The Knotted
Subject, 105-118. Bronfen agrees with Edward Shorters assessment that the unconscious, not
wishing to make itself ridiculous, brings itself medically up to date (115). The implication here
is that hysteria itself is a floating signifier of interest predominantly for what cultural mores it is
reflecting at any historical moment.
19
The association of hysteria and what we now call hypnotism was made as early as 1787,
nearly a century before its more famous articulations by Jean Charcot and later Sigmund Freud.
See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 127.
64 CATHY GUTIERREZ

Moreover, Spiritualist trance states were constituted by the appearance of

several voices or personalities that were distinct from that of the medium. The
change in personas, essential to cultivating mediumship, bore an uncanny re-
semblance to a nineteenth-century subset of hysteria, multiple personalities.
Schizophrenia, as the phenomenon was frequently called, emerged as a di-
agnosis in the second half of the nineteenth century. The parallel between Spir-
itualist mediumship and schizophrenic behavior was so clearly delineated that
Ian Hacking has argued that Spiritualism was a primary cause for the contin-
ued diagnosis of schizophrenia in America long after it had fallen out of use in
France. He writes,
The disorder always needs a host, much in the way that a parasite needs hosts.
In New England in particular, and in both America and Britain more generally, an
additional host [to hysteria and hypnotism] was psychic research linked with
spiritualism. One idea was that alters [alternative personalities] were departed
spirits; mediumship and multiple personality drew close20.

Hacking notes as well that the American diagnosis of schizophrenia declined

concomitantly with the popularity of the Spiritualist movement.
The crux of the debate is relatively simple: Mesmerism had shown that an
alternate consciousness may appear under certain conditions. The interpretive
battle raged over what that consciousness referred to, however, and whether it
was to be lauded or cured. For early mesmerists, the alternative consciousness
produced in magnetic sleep was akin to sleep-waking. As Crabtree has shown,
the apparent second personality of Mesmeric sleep-waking was firmly
grounded in the subject. Whereas a similar phenomenon a hundred years ear-
lier would have been culturally read as demonic forces inhabiting a person
against her will, in Puysgurs hands the second consciousness was an artifact
belonging solely to the subject. Moreover, the second consciousness was un-
derstood to be wiser and more morally apt than the waking consciousness 21.
Spiritualism shifted the referent of the alternate consciousness outside of
the self. The seemingly endless number of personalities that could temporarily
inhabit a body referred not back to the subject but to external sources. Like
Puysgur, Spiritualists saw the alternate personalities generally as wiser, more
benevolent, and more ethically advanced than the mediums waking state.
However, the spirits of the dead were called upon predominantly to dole out
advice or to comfort the grieving the move from a medical model to a reli-
gious one largely depleted the hypnotized state of its relationship to curing.

20
Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 135-136.
21
Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 83.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 65

And the trance state itself most certainly did not require curing in the eyes of
the Spiritualists, as many of its detractors argued.
Proponents of Spiritualism readily admitted that hysteria and mediumship
had a single source. For American Spiritualists, the cause and effect of hysteria
and mediumship were reversed. If the psychoanalytic community deemed
mediums hysterical, the Spiritualist community often deemed hysterics medi-
ums under the influence of negative suggestion. In his 1871 Mental Disorders
Andrew Jackson Davis writes:
The truth which lies at the foundation of such insanity is the truth of psychology
the power of one mentality to affect the other by which the positive will
controls the passive mind, causing it to reason erroneously from correct impres-
sions, and compelling the weaker will to assume another character, to the tempo-
rary exclusion and forgetfulness of its own, and thus personify that which is pro
tempore paramount in the imagination. To separate the chaff from the wheat, in
the sphere of such mysterious mental manifestations, is a part of the work of
Spiritualism 22.

The language of the will is rife in Spiritualist discussions of mediumship and

insanity, and frequently functions as an intermediary between the body and the
soul. Both insanity and trance states occupy the nebulous ground of alternative
consciousness, but the will must always govern the intent and discretion of the
entranced. Davis continues, In short, no mind must permit itself to be overrun
and controlled by anothers will. Passivity or negativeness to the will and
wishes of superior intelligence is permitted by the Divine Code only when the
highest ends are believed to be only thus attainable23 . Thus, suggestibility
distinguishes the mad from the medium, and since the American medium has
no need of a mesmerizer, only the hysteric was left to the negative influences
of control.
One sees this form of direct confrontation between psychology and Spiritu-
alism immediately after a series of young women were institutionalized for
lapsing into trance states which blurred the line between madness and
mediumship. Proponents quickly developed a vocabulary for distinguishing
Spiritualism from psychology, and admitted that some people who understood
themselves to be mediums were merely mad. Others who received antisocial
or violent instructions from the spirit world might not yet have reached the
proper degree of mediumistic proficiency.
The Spiritualist cosmos allowed for such distinctions by its inherent flex-
ibility. New mediums were prone to receiving messages from spirits on the

22
Davis, Mental Disorders, 224.
23
Davis, Mental Disorders, 262-263.
66 CATHY GUTIERREZ

lowest of the (usually) seven-tiered heavens. Since death did not instantly re-
sult in heavenly perfection but rather inaugurated a long process of improve-
ment, spirits themselves frequently made errors in judgment. Not only, then,
were contradictory messages from the spirit world resolved the spirits were
mistaken but also ethical issues were solved: one might have come into con-
tact with an unprogressed and evilly inclined spirit24. The razors edge be-
tween madness and mediumship centered on control, particularly a womans
control, of her voice and body to which I will now turn respectively.

4. The Disease of Language

In 1860, an anonymous American doctor published a case study of C., a

twenty-five year old seamstress, in the Journal of Insanity. C. had been admit-
ted to the asylum with her own consent, proclaiming, however, that she was not
insane but that she was unable to control the spirits who took hold of her.
Furthermore, many of the controlling spirits were themselves mad. We are not
given many details of C.s treatment and recovery, other than the beneficial use
of physical restraints and the recommendation against the use of padded rooms
in such cases; the thesis of the article is a refutation of the new term monoma-
nia, and the young medium is the exemplar.
C. had begun to cultivate mediumship and to experiment with trance states.
She was overly successful, and quickly fell to the beck and call of numerous
spirits whose demands were many and frequently violent:
In an effort to obey those commands, many of which were trivial, contradictory,
and impossible, she would be greatly perplexed and at times seem in utter despair.
Generally, however, her state was one of exaltation. Her voice was loud, her man-
ner imperious, and she resisted with much strength, though not passionately, when
interrupted in carrying into effect the directions of the spirits, and would appear to
her friends perfectly natural in manner and speech. Her fellow Spiritualists as-
sured her that nothing was wrong with her, and that she was only passing through a
special and extraordinary experience, in her development as a medium 25.

Unable to resist the stronger will of the spirits, C. eventually allowed her
mother to admit her to the asylum.
The resemblance to multiple personalities is here overt. C. is controlled,
against her will, by the voices that speak through her. The author states,

24
A student of mine has written compellingly on this issue, arguing that the sorts of spirits one
encountered were predicated on the moral fortitude of the medium. See Christa Shusko, Active
Mediums in American Spiritualism, unpublished paper.
25
Anonymous, Case of Mania, 324.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 67

She is now almost constantly the mouth-piece of numerous spirits good and evil,
who rapidly interrupt and succeed each other. At one moment the spirit is through
her talking loudly to her, commanding, and then rebuking her for the non-per-
formance of its behests 26.

C. is occasionally instructed by the spirits to do violence to herself and others,

and her dementia lasts nearly a year.
Through the regulation of diet, rest, and undoubtedly what Elaine Show-
alter has termed moral management, C. is eventually cured enough to be
released. However, she still insisted on the reality of the spirits and her sanity.
The doctor himself, while never succumbing to the Spiritualist interpretation,
admits that this type of mental illness is a hermeneutic problem:
If a dozen years ago, and previously to the first development of the Spiritual
phenomena, an hypothesis of the relations of disembodied spirits to men, like that
which has since come to distinguish a numerous sect, had belonged to a single
individual, that man would have been, without doubt, mad. . . . The simple belief,
then, in spiritual phenomena, as actual or possible facts in her experience, was
not previously to her attack of mania, and is not since her convalescence, an
insane delusion. It became an insane delusion only when it was associated with a
condition of insanity; which is, therefore, something still beyond27.

I would argue that the association between multiple personalities and hysteria
is a temporally bound problem of language. Prior to the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, states of alternate consciousness were understood to be sequential with
the waking state 28. An unconscious state, as we now think of it as omnipres-
ent but out of reach in all but cases of hypnotism or insanity, simply did not
exist before the second half of the century. Later designations of hysteria as a
repressed trauma assume an almost spatial relation of the conscious state to the
unconscious one traumas require a place in which to be repressed and pro-
ceed to thwart the well-being of the conscious state from its locus of inaccessi-
bility.
As with the case of C., insanity is determined not by unconscious workings
but by the display of the lack of control, specifically the lack of control in
language. As the century progressed, the catch-all term hysteria would be
sliced into finer and finer symptomological distinctions ranging from schizo-
phrenia to neurasthenia. The overriding theme that hysteria would maintain,
however, was the loss of language. The distinction between psychological and
Spiritualist interpretations of the lack of linguistic control turned upon

26
Anonymous, Case of Mania, 326.
27
Anonymous, Case of Mania, 337.
28
See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 39-41 and 57.
68 CATHY GUTIERREZ

whether the resulting speech was productive. The diagnosis of hysteria pre-
supposes that productive paths of language have been blocked off for the vic-
tim and replaced by more cryptic and unproductive forms of communication.
Elisabeth Bronfen neatly summarizes this in her discussion of hysteria as a
malady of representation:
In other words, to produce hysterical symptoms be this the loss of conscious-
ness, control over body functions, or control over the vagaries of the mind is for
those afflicted the only possible way to articulate a psychic disturbance, but the
improper recourse to language of the body signals that the patient cannot effec-
tively use symbolic language 29.

In certain cases, as with C., the lack of control determines the presence or
absence of a psychological problem. The referent of alternative language be-
came paramount. Spiritualist trance speech repeatedly refers to subjects out-
side of the self; indeed, the farther from the waking self and its perceived
abilities, the more likely trance speech was to be regarded as authentic. One of
the hallmarks of true mediumship was the ability to pass certain tests wherein
the testers did not believe that the medium could discuss such topics due to a
lack of education or intelligence. This was seen particularly in the case of
women who were generally thought to be incapable of waxing eloquent about
philosophy or politics30 . The referent of trance speech thus pointed as far away
from the subject as possible.
The ability to speak in other languages was a sure sign of mediumship. New
York State Supreme Court Judge John Edmonds, the most influential Spiritu-
alist in the years preceding the Civil War, recounts the development of a young
medium whom he had shepherded through her career. According to
Edmondss developmental model, speaking in tongues is a distinct stage on the
path of spiritual acquisition, coming after the ability to see events from a dis-
tance and before the ability to see spirits and heavenly dramas. He writes,
She next became developed to speak in different languages. She knows no lan-
guage but her own, and a little smattering of boarding-school French. Yet she has
spoken in nine or ten different tongues, sometimes for an hour at a time, with the
ease and fluency of a native. It is not infrequent that foreigners converse with
their spirit-friends through her in their own language31.

29
Bronfen, The Knotted Subject, 117.
30
For the account of a famous example of this, see Fornell, The Unhappy Medium, 81. Cora
Hatch, the most exalted medium of her generation, was given a series of questions in her trance
state that she was specifically not expected to be able to answer in her waking one. The judging
committee included professors of science and government officials, and Mrs. Hatch was ex-
pected to respond to queries such as how gyroscopes worked.
31
Edmonds and Dexter, Spiritualism, 45.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 69

The young lady proceeded to move from recognizable foreign languages to

the development of a strictly spiritual language, incomprehensible to all but
herself and the dead 32. Heteroglossia is not perceived as an impediment to her
development; rather, it is the sign of the refinement of her skills.
Ann Braude has argued that Spiritualisms appeal to women was that trance
states gave legitimacy to womens speech in a sort of paradox of proto-
feminism by acting as the passive vehicles for famous dead males, women
could expound upon philosophy and politics and be listened to33. Women com-
prised the vast majority of the movement and did indeed attract audiences in
the thousands to their trance-induced lectures, giving womens speech pride of
place in Spiritualism. However, women were lauded not only for disquisitions
on venerable topics but also when their speech was technically nonsense. The
disease of language becomes the gift of language, and the womans voice is
productive of new knowledge even at its most incomprehensible. The line be-
tween madness and mediumship would also be decided by the instrumentality
of the body and what it did or did not produce.

5. The Hysterically Pregnant Body

The New York Times made a several decades-long career of mercilessly lam-
pooning Spiritualism, pausing in its mocking tone only when famous men
were converted 34. In 1868, the paper joyously and smugly recounts an aston-
ishing event in Newark, New Jersey, where a group of Spiritualists with unusu-
ally strong millennialist tendencies decided that the millennium had indeed
arrived, and ergo the conditions of Edenic perfection could be reinstated.
Much to the papers delight, this included public nudity.
It appears from the account that a small group of Spiritualists were led by a
team who had appointed themselves to inaugurate the millennium by assuming
the roles of Adam and Eve. The paper reports,
About 9 oclock on New-Years evening, the street pedestrians who had occasion
to pass Mrs. Reeves house, were rather more astonished than delighted to behold
McEwan standing in front of the open window clad in the habiliments of Adam
before the fall, while the fair Miss Reeves, impersonating Eve, was seen to flit to
and fro under the gas-light like a fawn gamboling in the Garden of Eden35.

32
Edmonds and Dexter, Spiritualism, 45.
33
Braude, Radical Spirits, Chapter four.
34
Robert Hares embracing of Spiritualism warranted a lengthy front-page treatment. See the
New York Times, Nov. 24, 1855.
35
New York Times, Jan. 5, 1886.
70 CATHY GUTIERREZ

The couple proceeded to invite passersby inside, and McEwan delivered a

lecture on the new dispensation. The Times reports, They ignore human insti-
tutions, laws, and customs, and act solely from the promptings of spirits of
just men made perfect36 . The group created quite a stir, and the police were
eventually involved. The couple were deemed insane by local doctors and sen-
tenced to the Insane Asylum in Trenton. While this account is highly unusual
for Spiritualist behavior, it was also precisely the sort of episode that got the
most publicity. In fact, the Timess correspondents occasionally lamented how
tame and reasonable the majority of Spiritualists were37.
While such displays were an anomaly in Spiritualist circles, the theme of
creation, and indeed the creation of life, were not. Birthing imagery accompa-
nied womens ascent into the public eye, and it too was accused of being las-
civious or at least sacrilegious. Margaret Fox, one of the original sisters who
founded American Spiritualism, was appalled by the association of spirits and
giving birth that she had witnessed in London. The New York Herald reports,
They even go so far as to have what they call spiritual children! They pretend
something like the immaculate conception! there are other sances, where
none but the most tried and trusted are admitted, and where there are shameless
goings on that vie with the secret Saturnalia of the Romans 38.

While such negative accounts make it impossible to ascertain what the Spiritu-
alists thought they were doing, there was certainly a symbolic association be-
tween mediums and pregnancy. In certain cases, this symbolism goes so far as
to be indistinguishable from what psychoanalytic discourse has termed hys-
terical pregnancies, a subset of hysteria which may be part of a larger constel-
lation of symptoms or may manifest itself as the sole symptom. As with hetero-
glossia, the crux of the argument is the interpretation, rather than the existence,
of the phenomenon of alternative consciousness.
Incidents of hysterical pregnancies and birthing symbolism writ large are
numerous in the history of American Spiritualism. As the domestic sphere
tightened and familial bonds became increasingly emotional rather than eco-
nomic, the still-high infant mortality rate became an unbearable psychological
burden on mothers. Braude writes,
The focus on human agency and moral accountability suggested that individuals
were responsible for their own failure to receive the spirit. Because of the new
possibility that human beings might cause a conversion, the death of an unregen-
erate individual engendered more anxiety than in the Puritan era when people left

36
New York Times, Jan. 5, 1886.
37
See the New York Times, Jan. 4 and Jan. 8, 1853.
38
Cited in Fornell, The Unhappy Medium, 176.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 71

election to Gods hands alone. This was especially true in the case of infants and
children, who died before they had an opportunity to exercise their own agency
toward conversions By seeking, and sometimes finding, intimate contact with
the dead, Spiritualists found evidence for the rejection of death as a final separa-
tion39.

In tandem with the psychological aspects of infant mortality, the material con-
ditions of the middle decades of the nineteenth century also indicate a wom-
ens appropriation, or in this case, reappropriation, of prevailing mores about
death. In A History of Death in Antebellum, Anglo-Protestant Communities,
Gary Laderman argues that the rise of capitalism with rapid industrialization
radically altered the gendered roles surrounding death. Whereas in the first
half of the century the corpse and its attendant duties fell firmly in the womans
orbit of care, by the 1850s death had become a commodity-driven industry run
almost solely by men. Laderman states,
Despite their intimacy with the corpse in the early part of the century, in the
public sphere women were often segregated from the dead [T]he services of
the undertaker and the attendant emerging funeral industries located the corpse in
a network of commercial activity that was just beginning to operate in a hereto-
fore untapped market. The dead were inserted into an arena where consumerism,
class differentiation, and mass-produced goods and services ensured that their
treatment depended on a slowly developing economic regime 40.

Thus, the historical location of Spiritualism would support an argument that

women were contesting theological ideas about infant damnation as well as
reappropriating their roles as caretakers of the deceased, albeit after the fact.
However, these factors are inadequate to locate the events of hysterical preg-
nancies in Spiritualist mediumship. The incidents of hysterical pregnancies do
not reflect the birth of children, and most frequently not even spirit children.
Rather, I will argue, hysterical pregnancies were the vehicle for womens ap-
propriation of an alternative discourse.
If one grants that hysteric or alternate states manifest something symboli-
cally through the use of the body, the metaphoric occurrence of hysterical
pregnancies in Spiritualism may shed light not only on the situation of Ameri-
can women in the Gilded Age but also on hypnoid states which have heretofore
been largely pathologized in the discourse of psychoanalysis. As with the case
of the unnamed woman who gave birth, or life, to a machine, in an era when
electricity was the cutting edge of technology, the birth imagery of medium-
ship repeatedly refers to scientific, or pseudo-scientific, progress.

39
Braude, Radical Spirits, 50-51.
40
Laderman, A History of Death, 36-37.
72 CATHY GUTIERREZ

By the fin de sicle, the marriage of Spiritualism and science appeared in

the form of ectoplasm. The Spiritualist phenomenon of ectoplasm made its
debut in the first decades of the twentieth century, when it was both pedigreed
and popularized by the noted scientist Lombroso, the inventor of modern
criminology41. The term ectoplasm was in fact coined by the physicist Sir
Oliver Lodge when it appeared at a sance comprised entirely of academics.
Lodge writes,
As far as the physics of the movements were concerned, they were all produced,
I believe, in accordance with the ordinary laws of matter. The ectoplasmic forma-
tion which operated was not normal; but its abnormality belongs to physiology or
anatomy it is something which biologists ought to study. It was something
which Richet, as a physiologist, found repugnant and was very loth [sic] to admit,
but the facts were too much for him42.

Manifestations of ectoplasm were soon seen on this side of the Atlantic, and
Margery Crandon was at the apex of this historical moment, not only for her
ectoplasmic productions but also because her mediumship provoked the life-
long and venomous dispute between Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Performing a sance for the members of the Scientific American Journal (of
which her husband was president), Margery produced pseudopods from her
navel. One observer testifies, It was the most beautiful case of teleplasm and
telekinesis with which I am acquainted. One is able to handle the teleplasm
freely. The materialized hands are connected by an umbilical cord to the me-
dium; they seize upon objects and displace them .... The control is irreproach-
able43.
While I have no intention of arguing that the production of ectoplasm was
solely the result of an involuntary hypnoid state, the choice of symbolism re-
mains fecund ground for an exploration into the role of trance-induced preg-
nancies in Spiritualism. In both Spiritualism and psychoanalysis, the body is
the conduit of an alternative discourse to speech. Various feminist theorists
have analyzed the semiotic code of the body as a language of protest against
masculine-controlled speech. Dianne Hunter, in Hysteria, Psychoanalysis,
and Feminism, argues persuasively,
Hysteria can be considered as a self-repudiating form of feminine discourse in
which the body signifies what social conditions make it impossible to state lin-
guistically .... Hysteria expresses in the language of the body what psychoanaly-
sis says in words. Both psychoanalysis and hysteria subvert the reigning cultural

41
Brandon, The Spiritualists, 130-132.
42
Cited in Brandon, The Spiritualists, 134.
43
Cited in Brandon, The Spiritualists, 186-187.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 73

order by exploding its linguistic conventions and decomposing its facade of or-
derly conduct 44.

In rebutting Hunters thesis, Elaine Showalter cautions against the feminist

appropriation of what is in fact a psychologically excruciating illness. Further-
more, she argues that hysteria has hampered the causes of feminism precisely
because it is not productive. Showalter writes,
[H]owever, the hysterics deviance and rebellion are carefully programmed and
delimited by the social order. Hysteria is tolerated because in fact it has no power
to effect cultural change; it is much safer for the patriarchal order to encourage
and allow discontented women to express their wrongs through psychosomatic
illness than to have them agitating for economic and legal rights 45.

Although compelling on their own terms, neither Hunters nor Showalters

theses withstand the scrutiny of hysterical symptoms in Spiritualism. While
some mediums dissociative states may easily be seen as a non-linguistically
articulated form of protest (the lower-class medium who produced rats from
the spirit world for her wealthy clients, for example) 46, hypnoid states in Spir-
itualism uphold the scientific and progressivist mores of the epoch. Further-
more, those women who were periodically overtaken bodily by spirits were
also the same ones who ran practically all of the reform movements of the
nineteenth century, including the platform for womens rights. Indeed, hysteri-
cal mediumship routinely advocated equality between the sexes and brought to
the movement the theological buttress that all people were equal in the after-
life.
From electricity to ectoplasm, hysterical pregnancies in American Spiritu-
alism produced the discourse of science. As numerous scholars have noted in
connection with rituals of passage, women may give birth to babies but men
give birth symbolically to culture47. Through the vehicle of hysterical pregnan-
cies, women in Spiritualism claimed birthing symbolism in service of the pro-
duction of culture, the pseudo-scientific progressivism of the day. By posing
an alternative discourse to that of psychoanalysis, Spiritualists proposed that
the hypnoid state was continuous with consciousness and that it should be
intermittently culled for its knowledge. In so doing, Spiritualists articulated
the hypnoid body, the womans body, as a site of epistemic possibility; far

44
Hunter, Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism,113-114.
45
Showalter, The Female Malady, 161.
46
See Carrington, The American Sances.
47
For an excellent treatment of this phenomenon in rabbinic Judaism, see Boyarin, The
Great Fat Massacre.
74 CATHY GUTIERREZ

from requiring a cure, the hypnoid body was generative and productive, fertile
with the latest in technology.

6. The Master Mesmerists: Freud and Breuer

Freud and Breuers landmark work of 1895, Studies in Hysteria, was widely
recognized as providing the Rosetta stone for the workings of the unconscious.
While Freudian methods of analysis have largely dropped out of vogue in
favor of treating neurotic symptoms with medication, Freuds legacy remains
an intellectual behemoth of the twentieth century. As Edward Shorter has
documented, Freuds work caught fire in America even before the first transla-
tion of Studies in Hysteria and remained the most influential theory for treat-
ing mental illness through the 1970s48. While Freud was by no means the only,
or even the first, person to propose the presence of an unconscious, his particu-
lar articulation of the theory held the most sway and is emblematic of his gen-
eration of thought49. By the turn of the twentieth century, Spiritualism was
contending with the existence of an unconscious, and the proponents of the
unconscious were being contentious about Spiritualists hysterical symptoms.
Hysteria was Americas introduction to the new school of psychoanalysis
spearheaded by Freud and Breuer. Hysteria was also the backdrop for the in-
vention of the talking cure, provided to Breuer by his patient Bertha
Pappenheim, pseudonymously recorded as Anna O. The introduction to the
case studies details the theoretical contributions of the work, in which Freud
and Breuer assert that the manifestation of hysteria is the result of a repressed
memory of a traumatic psychological event and that language is the therapeu-
tic key to dislodge it.
The relationship between the repressed memory and the hysterical symp-
toms is metaphoric: the body concretizes the trauma by symbolic associations.
Freud and Breuer argue,
In other cases the connection is not so simple, there being only, as it were, a
symbolic relation between the cause and the pathological phenomenon, just as in
the normal dream . We have studied patients, who were wont to make the most

48
See Shorter, A History of Psychiatry, 160-189.
49
The terminology for similar theoretical constructs changes rapidly in the course of the nine-
teenth century, from the double consciousness of early Mesmerists, to the use of subcon-
scious in a way that is analogous to Freuds term unconscious (and distinct from what Freud
means when he uses the term subconscious), and finally to a Freudian unconscious. For the
sake of clarity, I have used unconscious in the Freudian sense to denote an ever-present part of
the psyche where traumata are repressed and attempt to make themselves known to conscious-
ness. However, the term is not without its precedents, and many Spiritualists writings use older
terms.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 75

prolific use of such symbolization [W]e must maintain that the psychic trauma
or the memory of the same acts like a foreign body which even long after its
penetration must be considered as an agent of the present, the proof of which we
see in the most remarkable phenomenon 50.

The past traumatic event embedded in the unconscious asserts itself symboli-
cally through the body, and hysterical symptoms disappear in their entirety
when the memory is brought to consciousness and thoroughly talked out.
The hypnoid state is the pharmakon for Freud and Breuer: hysteria is a state
of hypnosis which is most effectively cured by therapeutic hypnosis, under
which the patient is induced to remember the repressed event which caused the
hysteria in the first place. The centerpiece of their argument, the implementa-
tion of the talking cure, is the primary form of instrumentality the repressed
memory is quite literally lodged into the womans body and uses the body as
an instrument to proclaim its existence. The talking cure unseats the memory
from the unconscious and moves it into conscious reflection, along with the
repressed affect and its concomitant associations, thereby dispelling its hold
on the hysteric. The result is catharsis; the instrument of the voice conquers
and supercedes the instrumentality of the body51.
Language is not only the cure for hysteria, it was symptomatic of being
hysterical. The loss of language, and sometimes the loss of the right language,
were indications that hysterical symptoms had progressed. Anna O. lost her
ability to control words, syntax, grammar, and eventually lost her ability to
speak her native German, although under hypnosis she was able to speak three
other languages fluently52. The restoration of language is tantamount to the
restoration of sanity, since the vehicle of words is necessary to conquer the
symbolic manifestations in the body.
The relationship of psychoanalysiss disease of language to classical reli-
gious heteroglossia begs the question of whether psychoanalysis has served to
recast historically religious questions in scientific discourse, and effectively,
in the twentieth century, to replace religiosity with secular individualism.
While it is outside the scope of this work to tackle psychoanalysis for its usur-
pation of traditional religious forms, I would posit that the Spiritualists intu-
ited precisely such a movement and aggressively sought to counter it. By the
Freudian era, the alternate consciousness posited by Spiritualists from the out-
set was thoroughly medicalized and stuffed into the basement: the higher
trance state which made spirits accessible became the lower constant state

50
Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 2-3.
51
Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 12.
52
For an excellent treatment of this, see Showalter, The Female Malady, 155-156.
76 CATHY GUTIERREZ

which made pathology possible. In short, Freud successfully inverted a model

of consciousness which the Mesmerists and Spiritualists had handed him the
alternate consciousness was now omnipresent and a danger to consciousness.
The writings of fin de sicle Spiritualists engage the psychoanalytic con-
struction of the unconscious, and take issue with its characterization of the
unconscious as a subterranean breeding ground for pathology. While agreeing
that alternate states of consciousness existed, those states were not naturally
occurring but rather required cultivation and talent. Indeed, the argument went
further into the nature of the psyche itself. Some Spiritualists altogether denied
the existence of an unconscious, and argued that alternate states of conscious-
ness sprang from a different source. The 1912 how-to manual, Spirit
Mediumship How to Develop It, published by the Reverend E.W. Sprague,
specifically refutes the psychoanalytic constructions of the unconscious:
J. S. Loveland says: A dual body implies dual consciousness. We prefer to be-
lieve that there is but one consciousness belonging to each of us, and when it
enters the vibration of the spiritual, or etheric body, which is enveloped within
the physical body, it discerns spiritual things. It is then that mediumship becomes
operative... Therefore the theory of the Sub-conscious Mind of Thomson J.
Hudson, and other theoretical dreamers, is not an independent entity endowed
with all knowledge not possessed by the conscious mind, nor with so-called oc-
cult powers not possessed by the normal man. The discovery (?) of a scientist,
like many others coming from similar sources, passes away under the light of true
science, as the dews and fogs of the morning disappear before the penetrating
light of the rising sun 53.

Like the Freudian understanding of hysteria, alternate states of consciousness

do not necessarily imply individual agency while the cultivation of such
states was imperative in order to develop mediumship, spirits also foisted
these states on the unsuspecting. Sprague continues,
Somnambulism borders closely upon clairvoyance and sleep-walkers are some-
times controlled by spirits while in this strange condition. Persons while in this
unconscious somnambulistic state have written wonderful essays and sermons ...
and written poetry and other things that were beyond their ability when in their
normal state. This may be mental mediumship. Somnambulism is also closely
related to the trance condition. The medium acts and does things which exceed
his powers when awake 54.

Thus, in the post-Freudian epoch, the language of the will begins to pale in
Spiritualism. The new discursive enemy, the unconscious, had to be contested

53
Sprague, Spirit Mediumship, 102.
54
Sprague, Spirit Mediumship, 80.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 77

on its own grounds spirits could account for an apparent lack of agency as
well as the clear demonstration of it.
Taking the Mesmeric legacy one step further, Spiritualism disputed the con-
struction of the unconscious as disjunct from consciousness: alternative psy-
chic states certainly existed, but for the theological (and economic) betterment
of humanity. Sprague argues,
Every mental medium when placing himself in a condition to be hypnotized by
his spirit helpers, becomes subject to suggestion; therefore it is detrimental to the
mediums development and to the results of the sances to suggest that there are,
or may be, evil spirits present ... When a medium gets his mind full of Hudsons
theory of the Subconscious Mind and is filled with fear of Evil Spirits, he
had better cease trying to develop his mediumship. A belief in either of these
theories is almost sure destruction to his development55.

Spiritualists took aim at not only the proximate causes of hypnoid states in
psychology but also their results. In 1900, Hudson Tuttle, arch-defender of the
faith, laid bare the distinction of referents between the movements. He writes,
Theorists attempt to account for the mental manifestations, as trance, writing, etc.
[sic], by mesmerism or psychology. ... But mesmeric impressions do not go out-
side of the person or objects en rapport with the subject. They never reveal what
is unknown to those in connection. Spiritual impressibility reaches outside of
surroundings, and reveals the thoughts of the spirit who is en rapport56.

Thus the limited range of psychology is questioned; the self-referentiality of

the unconscious gives way to the self-referentiality of the tool to measure it.
While the spirits play an analogous role to the repressed memory in hysteri-
cal attacks, the memory is by definition traumatic in both its inception and its
role in governing the character of the hysterical symptoms. The distinctions
between the causal forces are three-fold. First, time is essential in the Freudian
understanding of hysteria. Hysteria is a psychological condition referring
backward to some prior traumatic event. Mediumship refers backward in time
only inasmuch as the spirit controlling the body is no longer of this world; in
all other senses the spirit is fully present. Secondly, the interpretations of the
phenomena differ radically: Freud pathologizes the hypnoid state and grants it
the status of a psychological disease, whereas Spiritualists interpret the same
condition theologically. Finally, the instrumentality of the body is at stake.
Hysterics are victims of their unconscious which symbolically manifests the
repressed memory in the body. The constellation of symptoms refers to one
event, the repression of which blocks associative affect. For Spiritualists, the

55
Sprague, Spirit Mediumship, 33.
56
Tuttle, Arcana, 10-11.
78 CATHY GUTIERREZ

body is an instrument of the spirit world, but, as I have argued, that instrumen-
tality is overdetermined and highly associative.
Many contemporary scholars have taken Freud to task on his insistence that
hysterical symptoms mean only one thing. In The Forms of Violence Leo
Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit forcefully argue that Freud himself first claimed
that the unconscious was riddled with overdetermined symbols and then pro-
ceeded to argue that these overdetermined elements pointed to a single
referent57.While understandably the Spiritualists were lacking a vocabulary of
narrative theory, I would argue that this is precisely the first leg of their argu-
ment against psychoanalysis alternate states, trance speech, and even the
womans body are overdetermined.
Much academic work has been done on the gendered effects of the talking
cure. In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter argues that the remarkable con-
tribution of Freud and Breuer was their willingness to listen to womens sto-
ries. Departing from the objectifying photographic construction of hysterics
by their predecessor Charcot, Freud and Breuer undertook the project of cur-
ing hysteria not only by seriously listening to women but also by asserting that
hysteria is the by-product of bright and talented women whose potential is
being socially stifled. Showalter writes,
The feminist critique of Freud should not obscure the fact that the early years of
psychoanalysis offered a considerable advance over the biological determinism
and moralism of Darwinian psychiatry. In principle, although not always in
practice, psychoanalysis was not moralistic; it did not judge the hysteric as weak
or bad, but saw the hysterical symptoms as the product of unconscious conflicts
beyond the persons control. Finally, psychoanalysis was attentive to the process
of therapy . ... The patient became an active, although not an equal, partner in the
cure58.

For psychoanalysis, the body represents the problem that only the voice can
correct. The process is inherently self-reflexive; the hysteric is a partner in
curing herself.
By setting hypnoid states in the context of the doctor/patient relationship,
Freud and Breuer essentially re-introduce the element that American Spiritual-
ists had dispensed with the need for a mesmerizer. As it were, the hysteric has
inadvertently hypnotized herself to avoid confronting a trauma; she requires a
doctor to hypnotize her to force her to recall the trauma. By reinfusing the
hypnoid state with the power dynamic of medical practice, the womans body
is subject to the definitive interpretation by someone other than herself.

57
Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence, 104-125.
58
Showalter, The Female Malady, 161-162.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 79

As the initial headiness of the young republic died down, Spiritualism itself
sought legitimacy in the scientific discourses of its day. However, it never re-
linquished the individualism of self-induced trance states and the hermeneutic
privileges associated with them. As a feminine discourse, Spiritualism intro-
duced some provocative ideas; however, it was by no means the utopia that
was ousted. The mere fact that a mediums speech referred to anything but
herself begs the question of how protofeminist the interpretive stance was.
Freud and Breuer at least encouraged women to worry about their own health.
Nonetheless, the mere choice of interpretation has interesting consequences,
and raises more questions. The medical model dictates that diseases of the
psyche have single causes; Spiritualism was under no such constraints.
In contrast to Freudian constructions of the hysteric in which the
metaphoricity of the body refers to a single traumatic event, the hysterical
body in Spiritualism promotes multiple layers of meaning. Hypnoid language
produced scientific discourse by merely existing; hysterical pregnancies al-
lowed mediums corporeally to give birth to the discourse of science. Words
and bodies were productive and multivalent; by undermining the hegemony of
psychoanalytic discourse, Spiritualism offered not only a different interpreta-
tion but also a different interpreter of the bodys language.

Cathy Gutierrez (1967) is Assistant Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. She
is currently working on a book about the influence of Neoplatonism on American Spiritualism.

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De llectricit lectoplasme: Hystrie et spiritisme amricain.

Cette tude est consacre la relation entre le diagnostic psychologique de lhystrie, et le ph-
nomne religieux que reprsente le spiritisme dans lAmrique du dix-neuvime sicle. Alors
que lun et lautre ont en commun plusieurs caractristiques, limpulsion hermtique prsente
dans le spiritisme a fourni un rfrent diffrent pour ce qui concerne les secrets du cosmos, car
le spiritisme trouvait ces secrets dans le pass plutt que dans le soi. Lauteur dveloppe lide
selon laquelle le spiritisme a cr dlibrment un type dinterprtation des aspects de lhystrie
autre que celui qui tait couramment admis, et quil se comprenait comme cette interprtation
mme. Il fournissait ainsi aux croyants, principalement aux femmes, une explication thologique
de ce que le discours psychanalytique examinait sous langle de la pathologie.
 FROM ELECTRICITY TO ECTOPLASM 81

Lauteur dfend lide selon laquelle, dans le spiritisme, le corps de la femme est considr
comme producteur dune connaissance qui revt des formes tant verbales que tangibles. Des
exemples de ce qui semble ressortir lhystrie sont tudis et considrs par les spirites comme
ressortissant lhtroglossie. Ds lors que le spiritisme tait compris par ses croyants comme
quelque chose dabsolument scientifique et dempiriquement vrifiable, de tels faits taient
compris comme susceptibles de produire de la connaissance scientifique, ce qui procurait aux
femmes un forum dans lequel elles pouvaient prendre part un discours normalement domin
par les hommes.
Larticle se termine sur une analyse des Etudes sur lhystrie, de Freud et Breuer, et tudie
dans ce contexte les ramifications masculines et fminines de lhystrie considre comme lan-
gage de protestation et comme rponse au dbat fourni par le spiritisme. Lauteur prsente lide
selon laquelle le mouvement spirite est une anticipation de lusurpation, par linstitution mdi-
cale, de discours religieux fminins, et sest non sans agressivit employ contrer les interpr-
tations psychologiques de ce que disaient les femmes, et des manifestations de leur corps. Cette
bataille hermneutique portait sur linterprtation de ce qutaient ces tats autres de conscience,
mais aussi sur la question de savoir qui pouvait tre autoris interprter.