Le Maléfan, Pascal

Telepathic Hallucinations during the Birth of French Psychology - 2008.


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Recent researches on the process of empowerment of psychology in the late nineteenth century were able to show how objects, which seem to us today illegitimate participated to a psychological institutionalization of knowledge. Among these objects, we would like to highlight one, the hallucination telepathic, because it was then an area shared and exchanged between the so-called psychic sciences and nascent psychology but also psychiatry. We shall try to show how the hallucination telepathic became an “objet-frontière” within the humanities and mind, sharing ephemeral subject to an adjustment of speech and an affirmation of conceptualizations. Its rejection, its marginalization, its psychiatrisation were signs of another sharing, a segregated one, between what became legitimate and illegitimate in these sciences, not without leaving a remainder took the name of metapsychic.