Epilogue: towards 1920
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Summary
In this study I have brought the figure of the ghost closer to that of the ghost-seer. In doing so I have shown how thinking about ghosts came to express the spectralisation of the self in the modern world. From the phantasmagoric dislocation, through the notion of dreaming while awake, to the attempt to prove the telepathic theory of ghost-seeing, it became clear that the figure of the ghost radically altered the course of psychological thought, forcing sceptics and believers alike to confront the essential psycho-tropism of the individual towards the ghost. I have outlined some of the cultures of belief and debunking, networks of cross-pollination and formations of the orthodox and heterodox which were central to the construction of meaning between the Enlightenment and the twentieth century, as if ghosts were themselves the Rorschach tests of modernity. Recent scholarship has challenged Max Weber's famous thesis of the disenchantment of the world, and instead argued that wherever religion or superstition have been defeated or superseded new secular forms of magic have swiftly taken their place. Thinking about ghosts and ghost-seeing in the modern age shows how such strategies of re-enchantment were applied to the supernatural in a period which saw the rise of secularism, the triumph of science and the consolidation of society as a spectacle. Whether spectral illusionists, scientific spiritualists, sceptical scientists or spiritual scientists, investigators into ghost-seeing made space for the emergence of a spectral self, a third way in a psychological modernity that embraced seeming contraries with aplomb.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Spectres of the SelfThinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920, pp. 218 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010