History of Modern Psychology by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691181691
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

205. French, from the other side of the river.

206. Seeress, p. 40.

207. Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868), Austrian writer, painter, and pedagogue.

Lecture 7

* * *

1 DECEMBER 1933

IN TODAY’S LECTURE, I shall discuss Mrs. Hauffe’s symptoms. Her case belongs to the field of mediumistic phenomena. Strictly speaking, these lie outside the field of medicine, and are part of parapsychology. I must mention these phenomena, however, since they do exist and are therefore psychologically important. We can well maintain a critical attitude toward these matters, but we have to heed the facts, keep our minds open, and prevent theoretical biases from obstructing our thinking.

Mrs. Hauffe’s condition was first and foremost of a somnambulistic nature: everyday consciousness slipped away from her. Somnambulism 208 is an exceptional psychic state, not a twilight state. For the Seeress, it constitutes a heightened state of consciousness that, for her, is actually the more normal state than the waking state. Such conditions involve great exertion, however, and therefore cannot be sustained for a long time. If she had managed to maintain these states, she would have been a “higher” being.

For instance, she speaks in verse. Other phenomena include visions and hallucinations; for example, she sees a mass of fire in her body. 209 This phenomenon can also be observed, by the way, in the case of ordinary neuroses; the visions are of a symbolic nature. Another phenomenon in her case is autoscopy: 210 for instance, she was lying in bed while seeing herself sitting beside it, 211 that is, she beheld an exteriorized image of herself. This is not unusual in such cases, and also occurs with the seriously ill and dying.

After that, her eye affliction recurred, and again she shunned light. 212 Outer light was painful to her, and so she concentrated on the inner light. She no longer looked out of the front door, so to speak, but out of the backdoor, into the depths of the subjective world, thus bringing about other positive manifestations of the unconscious, of the background. She saw all kinds of things which she projected into the outer world as ghost figures—some related to her, some related to other people. The ghosts provided her with treatment, notably with Mesmeric sayings 213 and magnetic manipulations. She frequently had a double vision of other people, since behind their personality, perceptible through the senses, there stood another that bore the qualities of the soul. 214

Her condition worsened rapidly on account of all these apparitions. She subsisted on a very poor diet; and when she came to Kerner in 1826 she was already in a very bad state, suffering from malnutrition and scurvy. 215 She had no appetite, which evinces a deficient will to live and corresponds to a sentiment of death, as we can also see in cases of melancholia. Fasting is also a technique in asceticism and yoga; deadening the drives depotentiates the outer world so that the vision can be directed purely inward.

As I mentioned, the Seeress came to Kerner in 1826. He attended to her and examined her as best he could, that is, in a most naive and primitive way.

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