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Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920
Spectres of the Self is a fascinating study of the rich cultures surrounding the experience of seeing ghosts in England from the Reformation to the twentieth century. Shane McCorristine examines a vast range of primary and secondary sources, showing how ghosts, apparitions, and hallucinations were imagined, experienced, and debated from the pages of fiction to the case reports of the Society for Psychical Research. By analysing a broad range of themes from telepathy and ghost-hunting to the notion of dreaming while awake and the question of why ghosts wore clothes, Dr McCorristine reveals the sheer variety of ideas of ghost seeing in English society and culture. He shows how the issue of ghosts remained dynamic despite the advance of science and secularism and argues that the ghost ultimately represented a spectre of the self, a symbol of the psychological hauntedness of modern experience.
286 pages, Paperback
First published September 6, 2010
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About the author
Shane McCorristine
15 books4 followersDr Shane McCorristine is Reader in Cultural History at Newcastle University specialising in the history of crime, exploration, and the supernatural. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and his books include William Corder and the Red Barn Murder: Journeys of the Criminal Body (2014) and The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration (2018).
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December 15, 2015
Blithe and frustrating though it is, there’s also something obdurate about this book: bite down in frustration, and your teeth define something real.
Shane McCorristine sets himself the task of writing a cultural history of ghost-sightings, one in the wake of Owen Davies’s earlier, and similarly themed book, that looks not as ghosts as objects of memory but as parts of the self. He confesses up front—page 4, as a matter of fact—that the book is “selective.” And it is, which is a large part of its frustration. I felt like a pool ball, constantly knocked in one direction or another, McCorristine going from one observation to another, far away observation, without doing a lot of the necessary connection or surveying the wider context. (The book focuses mostly on the ideas of the professional middle class in England, but there are wide excursions elsewhere.) He is wont to make sweeping generalizations—that’s the blithe part.
He also is not consistent on how he sees the relationship between ghost-seeing and modernity, which is ostensibly the very center of his story. He charts an uninterrupted path of ghost-seeing throughout the modern period, and yet is also quick to write about “re-enchantment,” which makes little sense. He scouts out and describes lots of different subcultures, but is loathe to make sense of them all except to say that ghosts are specters of the modern self, in any of many various ways.
At the back of all of this—as it is at the back of many such studies on how modernity is haunted, wether those be literary (The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the 'spectral turn'), historical (this book), sociological (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination), or geographical (Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography)—is Jacques Derrida, ad his “Spectres of Marx.” The ghost is a central figure in discussions of modernity, and haunting a key activity. This book is another riff on what the ghost means, and what the haunting looks like.
The book comprises an introduction and five chapters, divided into two sections. The introduction offers an overview and, from the beginning, announces McCorristine’s commitment to seeing ghosts as a reflection of the modern self. He roots his history here in a different pace than elsewhere int he text—more frustration—arguing that ghost-seeing starts out as a critical project in Germany, thanks to the Romantic psychology that grows up there, Mesmerism, and the work of Swedenborg. It spread across the continent—and to Britain and America—helped in part by a revolution in feeling that crystalized around the middle of the 1800s, with new forms of communication—telegraphy, soon enough telephony—making it seem likely that there could also be communications between the mundane world and the night side of nature, as the Germans called it, the souls of the living and dead.
This revolution in feeling connected with the rise of spiritualism, which for a time, McCorristine notes, held off what Foucault called the blackmail of the Enlightenment (one could either accept Enlightenment—or reject it, but then be forced to make arguments without the aid of rationality, which was considered the sine qua non of the Enlightenment.) The strength of spiritualism came from the ubiquitous knowledge of ghosts and the sensorial evidence of spiritualism: people saw things, ectoplasm or moving tables. It was supernatural, yes, but rooted in the material, too, and therefore begged for investigation and explanation.
Eventually, ghost-seeing became understood as a kind of dreaming while awake—which had many different connotations, and which opened the door to many different kinds of investigation, some in a debunking mood others rooting ghosts in the empirical world, still others finding a science for the soul. These are the questions he takes up in part one. In part two, he zeroes in on the work of the British Society for Psychical Research, which tried to distance ghost-seeing from pathological notions of hallucination, and tried to find a community of support for its research. These attempts did not really work, though McCorristine is reluctant to give a fully fleshed out reason for the failures, choosing instead to rely on mystery, which he thinks more apt to the entire project of understanding ghosts. He does note, however, that parts of the work was cannibalized by psychology, other parts were pushed aside by a turn toward the laboratory, and still others to different ideas about ghosts that arose in the wake of the Great War.
Chapter one covers huge time period, from 1750 to 1850, describing how ghosts were turned into products of the mind. He notes—briefly and blithely—the concept of ghosts in the Middle Ages was unified: ghosts were revenants from purgatory returned to warn or counsel individuals; they were not unexpected, and nestled easily in the cosmology of the time. (This is rather a too quick gloss, I think.) They became more problematic in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Reformation’s banishment purgatory. (He notes at one point that English commentators blamed Germany for this loss of an enchanted realm, but does not connect it to his musings on Germany in the introduction.)
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, ghosts became understood as part of the mind—indeed, the mind was conceptualized as haunted. There were realms of the mind unknown to itself, so-called phantasmagoric realms, which were likened to phantasmagoric theatrical plays. Specters, then, were products of the mind—their existence stood against a (new) common sense. (He doesn’t explain the origin of this new common sense, just takes it for granted.) A mind attuned to common sense and possessing a strong will could thus convince itself that what it was seeing when it saw a ghost was not real, but a phantasmic projection. At the same time, there were still those who drew on Biblical writings to defend ghosts as something more than products of the mind: as keys to a transcendent plane.
McCorristine then switches to France, leaving Britain alone for a time. French understanding of ghosts, he shows, was more fraught, with ideological and political debates—though he mentions these more than explaining them. The upshot, as far as I understand it, is that the French tied ghost-seeing more closely to insanity and hallucinations. Some French savants posited an organ in the brain that created dreams, and suggested that this could be controlled—or it could create images, such as ghosts.
He then switches back to Britain and America, offering readings of a short story by Hawthorne and Dickens’s Christmas Carol to show how ideas of waking dreams, hallucinations, and mind-tricks worked as explanations for ghosts. ("Why do you doubt your senses? "Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”)
The second chapter is also a patchwork of ideas, jumping from point to point—but nonetheless making interesting arguments. He starts with German ideas about ghosts—which at another point in the book he says was off-trail from what was going on in America, France, and Britain, not explaining how this fits with his other ideas about the relationship of German thoughts to the rest of the world. First he tackles Kant, arguing that thinking about ghosts forced him to completely change his philosophical system. (This fits with another point McCorristine wants to make: that ghosts were good to think with, and consideration of them was not fringe but central to intellectual developments of the modern period.) Kant read Swedenborg’s treatise on ghosts and angels and saw a reflection of his own metaphysical system. It irritated him, so first he set about arguing against Swedenborg then destroying his own work and doing a more critical philosophy, examining the limits of rationality. He came to believe that phantasms were the result of imaginative faculties unchecked by reason and rationality.
Basing the next section of the chapter on Corrine Trestle’s “Science of the Soul, McCorristine turns his attention to Schopenahuer, who was more open to the possibility of ghosts, and used them to invent a metaphysical system that opposed positivism and materialism—this would be allied with the Romantic psychology that McCorrisitne mentions in the introduction to the book. Schopenhauer believed that ghost-seeing was a kind of second-sight, the ability of the mind to see traces of the departed or things that had happened in the past. (Importantly, this explained why ghosts wore clothes, which would become a point of attention.) Schopenhauer’s ideas, though, were generally fatalities of the turn toward materialism by the mid-century generation of German physiologists tutored by Helmholtz. (McCorrisitine himself doesn’t make this point, oddly—more frustration—but it seems obvious.)
This oddly structured chapter then jumps back to Britain, without connecting what came before. He notes—building on what he’d written in the French section—that ghost-seeing was closely tied to insanity and hallucinations, which raised questions about the very nature of evidence and the reliability of eyewitness testimony—questions that would become more complicated as the century wore on. Before, one dismissed ghosts based on common sense and will. But as research into the mind continued, it became increasingly clear that nothing one saw could be taken at face value, which of course also went some way to decomposing faith in simple empiricism: that is to say, the quest to explain ghosts forced skeptics to give up some of their own faith in the senses.
McCorrisitne then throws a few random bits into this stew—it’s all interesting, but the connections are hard to fathom, his transition sections straining for effect but not making the links clear. He notes that there were some skeptics who saw ghost-seeing and spiritualism as throwback to primitive mentalities—the anthropologist E. B. Tylor was the biggest proponent of this idea (which continues to be used even today). Others though, such as Francis Galton, noted that the mind itself was capable to producing all kinds of effects, even among the highly educated. There is then a long digression on the clothes of ghosts, which was an important question but is not connected to what came before very well: if ghosts really were souls, why should they appear in certain kinds of clothes? There were many answers to this question, all hypothetical.
The second section then focuses on the Society for Psychical Research, exploring its growth and debates against the broader ideas bought up earlier. There is a lot of repetition in this section—and between this section and what came before—as well as long sections that are introductory without going anywhere. The point of the third chapter seems to be—beyond introducing the SPR and its players—to argue that the SPR was focused on possibilities: that it was hope for breakthroughs that provided the motivating the impetus, against the skeptical communities. There is some connection here, too, with the broader idea of modernity: if materialism meant the end of faith or belief in transcendence, then it was desperately important to prove that science could detect a realm of transcendence. (I am reminded here of Walter Stephens “Demon Lovers,” which makes a similar argument about the witch trials, but McCorristine doesn’t reference it.)
For the SPR, ghost-seeing was not pathological, but something to be studied, a key to a new form of communication—that revolution in feeling mentioned in the introduction. (McCorrisitne does not draw these points together, and part of what I am trying to do in this review is take a poorly written smart book and make its arguments clear.) To do that—to stand against skepticism and the loss of Christian faith—was to find a supporting public. This is it did by taking a census of beliefs, by gathering oral ghost stories and compiling them into datasets. The SPR created a “community of feeling,” a group of people who had experiences that could not just be dismissed as mental disorders. The argument of its members was that there was a scientific—material, kind of—explanation.
Chapter four looks at the forms the SPR’s arguments took. One argument was the spiritualism—the seeming contact with the dead through mediums—could be explained as a form of telepathy. Telepathy was not accepted as a fact—it had been a parlor trick before becoming an object of scientific interest—but it was a hypothesis that had some resilience, given all the other transformations in communication (and the network of communication the SPR itself had established, though this network was maintained by letters). The telepathy took a certain form: at a moment of crisis, when someone was dying, that person could project their thoughts to another person. Thus, ghosts were the products of the mind, a form of hallucination, but ones that were under control and could be shared. The Anglican Church was not high on this idea—which also derided the possibility of transcendence—and tried to compete with spiritualism by reinvigorating the old practice of communing with the saints, but that effort was not taken up very much. (Catholics had an entirely different take on the mater, though McCorrine investigates this only a little.)
There was a dissenting voice in the SPR, though; that was Frederic Myer, who did want his research to discover a form of transcendence. He was especially torn up by the declining faith in Christianity and hoped to find in psychical research a surrogate faith—an argument McCorrine borrows from Janet Oppenheim. To do this, he relied on new forms of psychology—different than the ones that had underwritten spiritualism. Spiritualism understood the soul to be unitary; that was how it could appear after death. Myers thought the human self was fragmented—in line with more modern ideas—the human being existing in both the material and spiritual realms. And parts of the soul, those in the spiritual realm, could reach out and touch others: the remnants of the dead contacting those still alive in both the material and spiritual realms. Myers work would inspire neo-Romantic philosophies in the 1890s and after, ones that valued intuition above reason.
Chapter five is bit hard to characterize. It is supposed to go further into depth on the SPR, but really only ever circles any points. The main argument seems to be that the SPR never made its case; that for all its hope to make a breakthrough, there was no fundamental new understanding of the mind, and so ghost-seeing could still be understood as hallucination without telepathy or crisis. And that by the 1910s, the scientific investigation of psychical research was being replaced by parapsychology, which took the studies out of the field—no more canvassing for folklore—and into the laboratory, where mediums could be tested directly.
The conclusion looks toward World War I, worrying that it is too obvious a transition point, but seduced to see it as one anyway. The battles made ghosts into something even more fantastic: there were believed to be whole phantom armies and intervening angels, a world of enchantment much bigger than the one offered by the SPR. McCorrine calls this a re-enchantment, but in light of the rest of his argument that seems like a misnomer: even when the SPR was trying to explain spiritualism empirically, there was always a sense of enchantment. He further notes that ghost-investigation fundamentally changed in the wake of the war(s). After 1929, 1929 Harry Price’s research, “signalled [sic] the arrival of a new type of ghost-hunter who, though media-savvy and weighed-down with equipment and investigative gadgets, redirected thinking about ghosts towards the traditional idea of the ghost as a malevolent force or restless spirit—a feature of popular culture that survives to this day” (227).
The conclusion, though, does offer the clearest view of what McCorrine has been trying to argue through this otherwise often confusing book: that there was a general drift after the Enlightenment of explaining ghosts as a fallacy or error (as opposed to seeing the ghost as a positive force in earlier times). Conceptualizing ghosts as the product of “dreaming while awake” proved a resilient formulation, one that influenced skeptics and believers alike.
And this conceptualization can be further refined to understanding the ghost as a spectral product of the human mind—whether its a phantasmagoric dislocation of the hidden brain into the environment, a hallucination, or a telepathic projection, in all these cases the ghost is thought of as part of the self. The ghost, therefore, was an important object of study in modern psychology and the definition of the modern self.
Shane McCorristine sets himself the task of writing a cultural history of ghost-sightings, one in the wake of Owen Davies’s earlier, and similarly themed book, that looks not as ghosts as objects of memory but as parts of the self. He confesses up front—page 4, as a matter of fact—that the book is “selective.” And it is, which is a large part of its frustration. I felt like a pool ball, constantly knocked in one direction or another, McCorristine going from one observation to another, far away observation, without doing a lot of the necessary connection or surveying the wider context. (The book focuses mostly on the ideas of the professional middle class in England, but there are wide excursions elsewhere.) He is wont to make sweeping generalizations—that’s the blithe part.
He also is not consistent on how he sees the relationship between ghost-seeing and modernity, which is ostensibly the very center of his story. He charts an uninterrupted path of ghost-seeing throughout the modern period, and yet is also quick to write about “re-enchantment,” which makes little sense. He scouts out and describes lots of different subcultures, but is loathe to make sense of them all except to say that ghosts are specters of the modern self, in any of many various ways.
At the back of all of this—as it is at the back of many such studies on how modernity is haunted, wether those be literary (The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the 'spectral turn'), historical (this book), sociological (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination), or geographical (Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography)—is Jacques Derrida, ad his “Spectres of Marx.” The ghost is a central figure in discussions of modernity, and haunting a key activity. This book is another riff on what the ghost means, and what the haunting looks like.
The book comprises an introduction and five chapters, divided into two sections. The introduction offers an overview and, from the beginning, announces McCorristine’s commitment to seeing ghosts as a reflection of the modern self. He roots his history here in a different pace than elsewhere int he text—more frustration—arguing that ghost-seeing starts out as a critical project in Germany, thanks to the Romantic psychology that grows up there, Mesmerism, and the work of Swedenborg. It spread across the continent—and to Britain and America—helped in part by a revolution in feeling that crystalized around the middle of the 1800s, with new forms of communication—telegraphy, soon enough telephony—making it seem likely that there could also be communications between the mundane world and the night side of nature, as the Germans called it, the souls of the living and dead.
This revolution in feeling connected with the rise of spiritualism, which for a time, McCorristine notes, held off what Foucault called the blackmail of the Enlightenment (one could either accept Enlightenment—or reject it, but then be forced to make arguments without the aid of rationality, which was considered the sine qua non of the Enlightenment.) The strength of spiritualism came from the ubiquitous knowledge of ghosts and the sensorial evidence of spiritualism: people saw things, ectoplasm or moving tables. It was supernatural, yes, but rooted in the material, too, and therefore begged for investigation and explanation.
Eventually, ghost-seeing became understood as a kind of dreaming while awake—which had many different connotations, and which opened the door to many different kinds of investigation, some in a debunking mood others rooting ghosts in the empirical world, still others finding a science for the soul. These are the questions he takes up in part one. In part two, he zeroes in on the work of the British Society for Psychical Research, which tried to distance ghost-seeing from pathological notions of hallucination, and tried to find a community of support for its research. These attempts did not really work, though McCorristine is reluctant to give a fully fleshed out reason for the failures, choosing instead to rely on mystery, which he thinks more apt to the entire project of understanding ghosts. He does note, however, that parts of the work was cannibalized by psychology, other parts were pushed aside by a turn toward the laboratory, and still others to different ideas about ghosts that arose in the wake of the Great War.
Chapter one covers huge time period, from 1750 to 1850, describing how ghosts were turned into products of the mind. He notes—briefly and blithely—the concept of ghosts in the Middle Ages was unified: ghosts were revenants from purgatory returned to warn or counsel individuals; they were not unexpected, and nestled easily in the cosmology of the time. (This is rather a too quick gloss, I think.) They became more problematic in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Reformation’s banishment purgatory. (He notes at one point that English commentators blamed Germany for this loss of an enchanted realm, but does not connect it to his musings on Germany in the introduction.)
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, ghosts became understood as part of the mind—indeed, the mind was conceptualized as haunted. There were realms of the mind unknown to itself, so-called phantasmagoric realms, which were likened to phantasmagoric theatrical plays. Specters, then, were products of the mind—their existence stood against a (new) common sense. (He doesn’t explain the origin of this new common sense, just takes it for granted.) A mind attuned to common sense and possessing a strong will could thus convince itself that what it was seeing when it saw a ghost was not real, but a phantasmic projection. At the same time, there were still those who drew on Biblical writings to defend ghosts as something more than products of the mind: as keys to a transcendent plane.
McCorristine then switches to France, leaving Britain alone for a time. French understanding of ghosts, he shows, was more fraught, with ideological and political debates—though he mentions these more than explaining them. The upshot, as far as I understand it, is that the French tied ghost-seeing more closely to insanity and hallucinations. Some French savants posited an organ in the brain that created dreams, and suggested that this could be controlled—or it could create images, such as ghosts.
He then switches back to Britain and America, offering readings of a short story by Hawthorne and Dickens’s Christmas Carol to show how ideas of waking dreams, hallucinations, and mind-tricks worked as explanations for ghosts. ("Why do you doubt your senses? "Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”)
The second chapter is also a patchwork of ideas, jumping from point to point—but nonetheless making interesting arguments. He starts with German ideas about ghosts—which at another point in the book he says was off-trail from what was going on in America, France, and Britain, not explaining how this fits with his other ideas about the relationship of German thoughts to the rest of the world. First he tackles Kant, arguing that thinking about ghosts forced him to completely change his philosophical system. (This fits with another point McCorristine wants to make: that ghosts were good to think with, and consideration of them was not fringe but central to intellectual developments of the modern period.) Kant read Swedenborg’s treatise on ghosts and angels and saw a reflection of his own metaphysical system. It irritated him, so first he set about arguing against Swedenborg then destroying his own work and doing a more critical philosophy, examining the limits of rationality. He came to believe that phantasms were the result of imaginative faculties unchecked by reason and rationality.
Basing the next section of the chapter on Corrine Trestle’s “Science of the Soul, McCorristine turns his attention to Schopenahuer, who was more open to the possibility of ghosts, and used them to invent a metaphysical system that opposed positivism and materialism—this would be allied with the Romantic psychology that McCorrisitne mentions in the introduction to the book. Schopenhauer believed that ghost-seeing was a kind of second-sight, the ability of the mind to see traces of the departed or things that had happened in the past. (Importantly, this explained why ghosts wore clothes, which would become a point of attention.) Schopenhauer’s ideas, though, were generally fatalities of the turn toward materialism by the mid-century generation of German physiologists tutored by Helmholtz. (McCorrisitine himself doesn’t make this point, oddly—more frustration—but it seems obvious.)
This oddly structured chapter then jumps back to Britain, without connecting what came before. He notes—building on what he’d written in the French section—that ghost-seeing was closely tied to insanity and hallucinations, which raised questions about the very nature of evidence and the reliability of eyewitness testimony—questions that would become more complicated as the century wore on. Before, one dismissed ghosts based on common sense and will. But as research into the mind continued, it became increasingly clear that nothing one saw could be taken at face value, which of course also went some way to decomposing faith in simple empiricism: that is to say, the quest to explain ghosts forced skeptics to give up some of their own faith in the senses.
McCorrisitne then throws a few random bits into this stew—it’s all interesting, but the connections are hard to fathom, his transition sections straining for effect but not making the links clear. He notes that there were some skeptics who saw ghost-seeing and spiritualism as throwback to primitive mentalities—the anthropologist E. B. Tylor was the biggest proponent of this idea (which continues to be used even today). Others though, such as Francis Galton, noted that the mind itself was capable to producing all kinds of effects, even among the highly educated. There is then a long digression on the clothes of ghosts, which was an important question but is not connected to what came before very well: if ghosts really were souls, why should they appear in certain kinds of clothes? There were many answers to this question, all hypothetical.
The second section then focuses on the Society for Psychical Research, exploring its growth and debates against the broader ideas bought up earlier. There is a lot of repetition in this section—and between this section and what came before—as well as long sections that are introductory without going anywhere. The point of the third chapter seems to be—beyond introducing the SPR and its players—to argue that the SPR was focused on possibilities: that it was hope for breakthroughs that provided the motivating the impetus, against the skeptical communities. There is some connection here, too, with the broader idea of modernity: if materialism meant the end of faith or belief in transcendence, then it was desperately important to prove that science could detect a realm of transcendence. (I am reminded here of Walter Stephens “Demon Lovers,” which makes a similar argument about the witch trials, but McCorristine doesn’t reference it.)
For the SPR, ghost-seeing was not pathological, but something to be studied, a key to a new form of communication—that revolution in feeling mentioned in the introduction. (McCorrisitne does not draw these points together, and part of what I am trying to do in this review is take a poorly written smart book and make its arguments clear.) To do that—to stand against skepticism and the loss of Christian faith—was to find a supporting public. This is it did by taking a census of beliefs, by gathering oral ghost stories and compiling them into datasets. The SPR created a “community of feeling,” a group of people who had experiences that could not just be dismissed as mental disorders. The argument of its members was that there was a scientific—material, kind of—explanation.
Chapter four looks at the forms the SPR’s arguments took. One argument was the spiritualism—the seeming contact with the dead through mediums—could be explained as a form of telepathy. Telepathy was not accepted as a fact—it had been a parlor trick before becoming an object of scientific interest—but it was a hypothesis that had some resilience, given all the other transformations in communication (and the network of communication the SPR itself had established, though this network was maintained by letters). The telepathy took a certain form: at a moment of crisis, when someone was dying, that person could project their thoughts to another person. Thus, ghosts were the products of the mind, a form of hallucination, but ones that were under control and could be shared. The Anglican Church was not high on this idea—which also derided the possibility of transcendence—and tried to compete with spiritualism by reinvigorating the old practice of communing with the saints, but that effort was not taken up very much. (Catholics had an entirely different take on the mater, though McCorrine investigates this only a little.)
There was a dissenting voice in the SPR, though; that was Frederic Myer, who did want his research to discover a form of transcendence. He was especially torn up by the declining faith in Christianity and hoped to find in psychical research a surrogate faith—an argument McCorrine borrows from Janet Oppenheim. To do this, he relied on new forms of psychology—different than the ones that had underwritten spiritualism. Spiritualism understood the soul to be unitary; that was how it could appear after death. Myers thought the human self was fragmented—in line with more modern ideas—the human being existing in both the material and spiritual realms. And parts of the soul, those in the spiritual realm, could reach out and touch others: the remnants of the dead contacting those still alive in both the material and spiritual realms. Myers work would inspire neo-Romantic philosophies in the 1890s and after, ones that valued intuition above reason.
Chapter five is bit hard to characterize. It is supposed to go further into depth on the SPR, but really only ever circles any points. The main argument seems to be that the SPR never made its case; that for all its hope to make a breakthrough, there was no fundamental new understanding of the mind, and so ghost-seeing could still be understood as hallucination without telepathy or crisis. And that by the 1910s, the scientific investigation of psychical research was being replaced by parapsychology, which took the studies out of the field—no more canvassing for folklore—and into the laboratory, where mediums could be tested directly.
The conclusion looks toward World War I, worrying that it is too obvious a transition point, but seduced to see it as one anyway. The battles made ghosts into something even more fantastic: there were believed to be whole phantom armies and intervening angels, a world of enchantment much bigger than the one offered by the SPR. McCorrine calls this a re-enchantment, but in light of the rest of his argument that seems like a misnomer: even when the SPR was trying to explain spiritualism empirically, there was always a sense of enchantment. He further notes that ghost-investigation fundamentally changed in the wake of the war(s). After 1929, 1929 Harry Price’s research, “signalled [sic] the arrival of a new type of ghost-hunter who, though media-savvy and weighed-down with equipment and investigative gadgets, redirected thinking about ghosts towards the traditional idea of the ghost as a malevolent force or restless spirit—a feature of popular culture that survives to this day” (227).
The conclusion, though, does offer the clearest view of what McCorrine has been trying to argue through this otherwise often confusing book: that there was a general drift after the Enlightenment of explaining ghosts as a fallacy or error (as opposed to seeing the ghost as a positive force in earlier times). Conceptualizing ghosts as the product of “dreaming while awake” proved a resilient formulation, one that influenced skeptics and believers alike.
And this conceptualization can be further refined to understanding the ghost as a spectral product of the human mind—whether its a phantasmagoric dislocation of the hidden brain into the environment, a hallucination, or a telepathic projection, in all these cases the ghost is thought of as part of the self. The ghost, therefore, was an important object of study in modern psychology and the definition of the modern self.
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September 11, 2015133.10942 M1316 2010
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