Unruly Spirits: The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France

"M. Brady Brower clearly demonstrates the importance of the French strain of psychical research and shows it to be a crucial and unjustly neglected episode in the story of modern psychology What he has uncovered should provoke a searching revision of the standard account of the resistance psychoanalysis faced in fin-de-siecle and interwar France." –-John Warne Monroe, author of Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France
Unruly Spirits connects the study of seances, telepathy, telekinesis, materializations, and other parapsychic phenomena in France during the age of Sigmund Freud to an epistemological crisis that would eventually yield the French adoption of psychoanalysis Skillfully navigating experiments conducted by nineteenth-century French psychical researchers and the wide-ranging debates that surrounded their work, M. Brady Brower situates the institutional development of psychical research at the intersection of popular faith and the emergent discipline of psychology.
In characterizing psychical research as something other than a mere echo of popular spirituality or an anomaly among the sciences, Brower argues that the questions surrounding mediums served to sustain the scientific project by forestalling the establishment of a closed and complete system of knowledge. By acknowledging persistent doubt about the intentions of its participants, psychical research would result in the realization of a subjectivity that was essentially indeterminate and would thus clear the way for the French reception of psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious and its more comprehensive account of subjective uncertainty.