View source for Unruly Spirits: The Science of Scientific Phenomena in Modern France

{{Infobox book
| name           = Unruly Spirits: The Science of Scientific Phenomena in Modern France	

| author         = M. Brady Brower
| publisher      = University of Illinois Press
| pub_date       = 2010
| pages          = 232
| isbn           = 0252077512
| image          = [[File:Unruly Spirits.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
}} 

	In Unruly Spirits, Brower explores the complex intersection of psychical research, politics and science in nineteenth and early twentieth-century France. Locating the rise of  spiritisme and its accompanying research in the chaos following “the disastrous defeat of France by Prussia in 1870 and in the wake of the terrible fratricidal violence of the Paris Commune (xxi), Brower finds that scientifically structured psychical experiments were a form of response to both French republican political ideology and Church hegemony in a world that was increasingly democratized and secularized. A multiplicity of themes are present in Brower’s work, including the exploration of the concomitant rise of psychological research in France, a reexamination of the role of psychical phenomena within the divisions of the bourgeois public-private sphere, and the meaning of psychical research as a postwar cathartic practice within the larger context of psychology.

	The relationship between spiritism and religion underscored republican and democratic values. Because spiritism “would in essence proclaim itself a scientific faith” (10), it challenged the traditional role of French Catholicism. Its practices, such as séances and possession, “mimicked the sublime and erotically charged communions of Catholic tradition” (15), but with a republican bourgeois twist. Spirit communications were done in the privacy of home and family, and often revealed intimacies reserved before for religious confessions. The line between public and private sphere was transgressed by populist psychic practice. Brower offers the comparative example of Jacksonian America, “where spiritualism was perfectly adapted to traditions of antielitism and intellectual self-reliance” (9).  In France, spiritism’s bourgeois power also challenged the Third Republic’s political dominion. Brower argues that the state relied on science to “to legitimate its efforts to reorganize and regulate the social order” (18), much the way asylums and prisons had. Because of the continuously shifting nature of the relationship between psychic research and science, spiritism often proclaimed itself beyond the reach of science, making the state uncomfortable with its inability to control it. 

	Another of Brower’s central points is that psychical research was part of a larger movement of scientific inquiry that dominated nineteenth-century culture. The secular ideals of republicanism relied heavily on the development of science to better understand “universal moral imperatives” that underpinned a democratized social order (xxi). Science also promised “prosperity, national strength and social peace” (xxiii), and psychic research allowed for deeper and more frequent inquiry into subjective and objective causes of phenomena. The frequent and continuous intersections of psychical research and psychological experiments ultimately influenced a particular kind of French psychology – one that was somewhat resistant to Freudian thought (138). Brower points out that “In the wake of the psychological and moral catastrophes of the Great War, psychical research…seemed to provide a means of redeeming a society disoriented by its self-conscious encounter with its own barbarism” (141). 

	Brower’s thesis ultimately works, but the language and organizational structure of the book is confusing and overly complex, making an already murky subject more so. The book, while offering some transnational comparisons to developments in the United States, would have benefited from encompassing a broader scope of the development of psychical research elsewhere. Moreover, there is more to be mined in the gendered significance of psychic medium practice and study. The chapter on Charles Richet touches upon this, but a more detailed exploration would have enriched the book’s argument about republicanism, the division of public/private, control of the state, and male-dominated scientific inquiry. Parallels could be more richly drawn between the gendered aspects of the occult, parapsychology, and the medical treatment of madness. 

[[Category:Modern European History]]

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[[Category:M. Brady Brower]]