This paper revisits the different notions of influence, persuasion and influencebound subjects. It illustrates and critiques the dominant prevailing concept of influence and its effects, which, though diversely denominated and presented through various theories, always comes down to reaffirming the relationship of dominance and the possibility of the nullification of the subject within the relationship with the other. With this aim, it studies the classical theories of interpersonal influence and brings to attention some of the bodies of information which have (...) been systematically neglected or set aside, particularly concerning suggestion, possession, mesmerism and somnambulism. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the meaning that the term “experimental” acquires within spiritualism during the second half of the nineteenth century. It builds upon Paul Janet’s notions of “experience” and “experimentation” in psychology, by stressing the role of physiology and pathology in his reflection. Regardless of the role the concept of “experimentalism” took on in Victor Cousin’s psychology, which arguably indicated more an “internal affection” than actual experimentation, in Janet’s spiritualism the term regains its original meaning of empirical verification. Janet (...) highlights the importance of madness to the development of a new psychological paradigm that could reconcile philosophy and medicine, reason and experience, by taking up pathology as a form of natural and indirect experimentation. (shrink)

The development of psychology includes the rejection of concepts and movements some groups consider undesirable, such as psychical research. One such example was the way psychologists dealt with phenomena such as telepathy and mediumship in the first five international congresses of psychology held between 1889 and 1905. This included papers about telepathy and mediumship by individuals such as Gabriel Delanne, Léon Denis, Théodore Flournoy, Paul Joire, Léon Marillier, Frederic W. H. Myers, Julian Ochorowicz, Charles Richet, Eleanor M. Sidgwick, and Henry (...) Sidgwick. These topics were eventually rejected from the congresses, and provide us with an example of the boundary-work psychologists were engaging during the period to build their discipline. The height of such presentations took place at the 1900 congress, after which there was a marked decline in discussion on the topic that mirrored the rejection science at large showed for psychical research during the period in question. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to understand an important passage in the history of the sciences of the psyche: starting from the psychiatric problematization — and the consequent emergence — of the concept and the object called ‘sexuality’ in the second half of the 19th century, it attempts to show a series of continuities and discontinuities between this kind of reasoning and the birth of psychoanalysis in the first years of the 20th century. The particular focus is therefore directed (...) on two texts: Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The argument runs along three intertwined axes: (1) an historico-epistemological analysis of the concepts and their transformations in the field of the science of sexuality; (2) an analysis of the power relationships between patients and physicians; and (3) an account of the psychiatric technologies of the self that have as an effect the emergence of new forms of ‘objective’ knowledge of the subject. The broader goal is to trace a map of the simultaneous and correlate coming into being and transformations both of new forms of objects and of new forms of subjects through the mediation of scientific concepts and techniques. (shrink)

The two-hundred-year history of hypnosis and its predecessor, animal magnetism, is replete with stories of unusual phenomena. Perhaps surprisingly, a close reading of that history reveals that investigators and students of hypnosis have been unable to achieve an agreed-upon definition of their subject matter. Because of this failure to describe the essential nature of hypnosis, they resorted to lists of hypnotic phenomena as a means for confirming the presence of a hypnotic state in clinical and experimental situations. However, identification and (...) enumeration of hypnotic phenomena proved to be problematic. The content of these lists varied from era to era and from practitioner to practitioner, and the selection of phenomena seemed to be an arbitrary process. With no agreed-upon definition and no definitive list of phenomena that would apply to hypnosis and hypnosis alone, there was no way to ensure that the “hypnosis” that was being studied in clinical and experimental work was the same entity in all cases. Although hypnosis research in recent decades has yielded important insights, significant difficulties and disagreements remain. It is the contention of this article that this confusing state of affairs came to pass because the discussion of hypnosis in the literature was wrongly situated and that there is a need to step back and gain a new perspective on hypnosis and hypnotic phenomena. The proposed fresh look at hypnosis situates hypnosis as a subspecies of trance as defined in a very specific way: a state of profound focus on something accompanied by a diminished awareness of everything else, which evokes appropriate subliminal resources. Hypnosis is then defined as an inner-mind trance characterized by rapport. This new approach and its implications are discussed in some detail. Keywords: hypnosis—trance—rapport. (shrink)