Hélène Smith

This book retraces the story of spiritual medium Hélène Smith, a woman who came to inspire some of the greatest scientists and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing to light archival documents, correspondences, and publications on the medium, author Claudie Massicotte illuminates Smith's important contributions to evolving definitions of the subject during a period viewed by many as one of disenchantment. In retracing the medium's story, she explores the role of gender and occultism in modern understandings of the embodied self and its relation to the spiritual.

Claudie Massicotte is a learning designer in San Diego, California. She previously worked as Assistant Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism at Young Harris College and as a Postdoctoral fellow in French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Seances, 1850-1930.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Hélène, or the Ghosts of Depth Psychology
Chapter 1. Bodies
Ventriloquizing Agency: Magic Dolls and Spiritualist Authorship
Chapter 2. Desire
Bearing, Authoring, and the Symbolizations of Excess in Psychoanalysis
Chapter 3. Languages
Extra-Planetary Signs and the Haunted Origins of Modern Linguistics
Chapter 4. Creativity
The Muse of Surrealism: Automatism and the Creative Unconscious
Conclusion: The Enchanted Unconscious
Bibliography
Index