In Their Right Minds by Carole Brooks Platt

Author:Carole Brooks Platt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, literature, atypical minds, lateralization, sensed presence, paranormal, mediumship, dissociation, creativity, medium, ouija, hemisphere, neuroscience, Jaynes, language, epilepsy, trauma, occult, peotic genius, Blake, Yeats, Rilke, Hugo, Keats, Merrill, Plath, Hughes
ISBN: 9781845408381
Publisher: Andrews UK Ltd.
Published: 2015-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

What the French Said about Hugo’s Séances

Jean de Mutigny

French doctor Jean de Mutigny analyzed in detail the transcripts from the table. He believed that the phenomenon was similar to automatic handwriting (écriture automatique), which the French Surrealists would also explore to unleash the powers of the unconscious. Mutigny emphasized that the messages never surpassed the intellectual level of the table’s participants and that hidden memories could be brought back by the stress of the séance itself. Under all circumstances, the messages retained a whiff of the nineteenth century about them, no matter which epoch the spirits had come from or what their profession had been. They all sounded like Hugo.

Mutigny’s diagnosis was dissociative identity disorder, or ‘dédoublement de la personnalité’. In France, only two personalities are recognized, and that is what you typically find in the psychological literature. Believing Hugo incapable of trickery and rejecting the possibility of unconscious communication between father and mediumistic son, Mutigny claimed that Hugo’s ‘second’ personality took over to write up the manuscripts, unconsciously expressing his own thoughts about cosmic forces and immortality. For Mutigny, Hugo’s enormous imagination and intuition, his hallucinatory experiences, his persecution complex, his plays on words and neologisms were all evidence of a late-onset mental disorder similar to schizophrenia, called paraphrénie fantastique. In this disorder, a cosmic belief system could exist separately from everyday reality. Hugo, he said, was a delusional megalomaniac for saying he was a messiah whom Moses, Mohammed and Jesus had contacted. Yet, softening his diagnosis, Mutigny concluded that poetic inspiration depends on genius splitting. By exploring a space and time outside of reality, madness makes art timeless, immaterial, magical and even of divine origin and Hugo was the greatest poet.

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