Sometime between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, a ‘Monsieur Jourdain syndrome’ seems to have spread among basic researchers and clinicians in fields as diverse as neurology, psychology, psychiatry, behavioural studies, physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology. Almost overnight, they realised that they were but neuroscientists.

Self-inflicted injury, or ‘self-harm’, has been a topic of much debate in recent years. The media in the Western world has tended to portray the issue as an increasing ‘trend’, relating it to various contemporary concerns, including the so-called ‘celebrity culture’ and urban decline. The past decade in the UK has seen the publication of various clinical guidelines, a National Inquiry into Self-Harm in young people, and almost continual media speculation. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, speculation also occurred around ‘self-mutilation’, an area newly defined by alienists (asylum psychiatrists). This topic has received little historical attention; yet, had ‘self-harm’ been on the agenda in the 1970s and '80s, nineteenth-century self-mutilation would no doubt have been presented as part of a discourse on professionalisation, in which the creation of a new psychiatric category was presented as part of the ‘medicalisation’ of psychiatry, through observation and classification within asylums. More recently, a changing historiography has led to histories of self-harm being located within a schema for ‘making up’ people, such as attention to the development of a patient profile for the apparently new behaviour of ‘delicate self cutting’ in the mid-twentieth century. This article builds on this concept to explore broader social issues around the creation of the concept of ‘self-mutilation’, which help to explain the occurrence of an impetus for ‘making up people’ in a particular period or culture. In particular, the impetus is related here to changing ideas of what constituted the ‘self’ and the relation of the individual to society in the late nineteenth century.

The English music theorist and philosophical writer Edmund Gurney was the first ‘fulltime’ psychical researcher in history. While he was primarily concerned with empirical evidence for telepathy, Gurney significantly contributed to the late nineteenth-century literature on hallucinations in the sane, and the psychology of hypnotism and dissociation. He conducted the first large-scale survey of hallucinations in the general public and, with Pierre Janet, was the first to publish experimental data suggesting dissociated streams of consciousness in hypnotism. This paper sketches Gurney's contributions to psychology and dynamic psychiatry in the context of his friendship with Frederic W.H. Myers and William James. It is argued that although Gurney's research into hallucinations and hypnotism had been embraced and assimilated by contemporary psychologists such as William James, Alfred Binet and others, his contributions to psychology have subsequently been marginalised because of the discipline's paradigmatic rejection of controversial research questions his findings were entangled with.

William James is often described as one of America's foremost philosophers and the founder of American psychology. During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century he published several key texts on a broad range of topics, including the psychology of religion, ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. Many are still in current use, and contemporary philosophers continue to pore over them. Biographers, meanwhile, happily speculate on everything from James's parental relationships to the state of his marriage. However, there has been relatively little detailed exploration of how James's published writings and his private life may have intersected. This article explores one such intersection: that between James's protracted experience of ill health and the elaboration of the notion of evil in his writings.