To understand the implications of this theory, it is necessary to look more closely at the studies that link adolescence, occultism and parapsychology, with an especial focus on one case that highlights the main issues involved as published by Dr Joseph Grasset in 1904.
2. Adolescence and Occultism
In many ways adolescence and occultism are moving categories arbitrarily defined as the product of socio-historical constructions. It is not so unsurprising then that they have become so commonly associated in works of popular culture that express our deepest anxieties, such as fantasy and horror movies or – which is possibly more disturbing though increasing prevalent – discourses warning against the evils of young people and occult practices.5 However, real-life experiences can offer a different interpretation of the interaction between teenagers and occultism. As such, it is by listening to teenagers engaging with occult practices (speaking tables, objects moving by thought, investigation of haunted houses etc.) or developing understandings of the expression of adolescent problems through occultism that psychologists seem able to replace reactionary discourse with more appropriate approaches. Consequently, although role-playing games (RPGs), heroic-fantasy universes and heavy metal music are often denounced as precursors of cult membership and/or morbid activities, these discourses on our ‘little horrors’ are not sufficient to exhaust the question of the relationship between teenagers and the paranormal as they do not sufficiently consider what psychological panaceas adolescents can find in these practices and beliefs.6
Auguste Comte gave one of the first descriptions of adolescence in the age of metaphysics, in his ‘Law of the three states’ defined in the Course of Positive Philosophy (1832–40).7 Comte saw adolescence taking an intermediate position in the three periods of human life, one that he matched with a particular moment in the evolution of the human mind. Adolescence expressed a quest for meaning that we cannot expect from religions or from positivist science, a category which Comte thought supported the great philosophical issues of humanity. With its innocence, which is no longer that of a child, and its rationality, which is not even that of the adult, adolescence is thus placed between a belief and objectivity (or science), which reflects the principles of occultism. While the natural curiosity of the teenager, as was believed, made them more open to the occult and magic, it made them equally more inclined to suggestion because of the incomplete development of their rational abilities (as was similarly believed about women, and even more so for young ladies, at that time).
An important example in France, before the onset of spiritualism codified by Allan Kardec, is that of Angélique Cottin. She was 14 in the spring of 1846, when the first events occurred, which lasted for 10 weeks.8 A simple glove weaver in the village of Bouvigny in the Orne, Angélique apparently attracted or repulsed objects around her in an inexplicable manner. Her nickname, ‘the electric girl’, was based on the first hypothesis put forward to contradict the demonic interpretation of the villagers. The unexplained movement of objects seemed to follow strange laws, more or less similar to contemporary representations of electrical energy. The adolescent Angélique seemed to have developed a phobia of touch, which implicitly gave a psychological path for her experiences of repulsive actions. Quickly becoming an object of observation, the young girl was put into the hands of the medical profession and of the Academy of Sciences. A committee was appointed, which quickly curtailed the enthusiasm, through experiments, on 9 March 1846, that were unfavourable to the reality of Angélique’s ‘electrical properties’.9 The girl was immediately sent back home and even suspected of voluntarily producing, by skilful and hidden manoeuvres of her feet and hands, the sudden and violent movements of the chairs on which she sat. Her case remained an isolated one in France, but a year later in America two teenagers quickly became the focus of a more infamous case in the spread of spiritualism.10
3. The Case of Jeanne
At the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emerging field of psychology developed critical tools to explain somnambulistic states, behavioural automatisms and double consciousness. Several psychopathologists relied on teenagers to demonstrate the mechanisms behind the occult and the dangers it represents. Carl Gustav Jung examined his young cousin, the medium Hélène Preiswerk, in his medical thesis11; Théodore Flournoy became famous for his study of the young medium Catherine Elise Muller, who began creating convincing stories of past or extraterrestrial lives during her trance.12 Young mediums who exposed their gifts in front of scientists were often accused of hysteria, melancholia, neurasthenia or other clinical aberrations applied in response (such as ‘mythomania’, by Dupré, applied on Marthe Béraud13). Dr Joseph Grasset, a physician in the south of France, and faithful reader of the psychologist Pierre Janet,14 proposed his theory of the polygon and psychic disintegration of 15-year-old Jeanne at the epicentre of the case of a haunted house. He proposed to use this case as the starting point for a comprehensive study of spiritualism in science.15 Indeed, Flournoy wrote, in the Archives de psychologie, that this case was ‘a beautiful illustration of the English theory explaining Poltergeists by the hypothesis of the naughty little girl’.16 These researchers support the deep movement of modernization of psychology that fought against the marvellous in order to demarcate this discipline as a legitimate science. This movement was led by Janet, who, since his experiments of hypnotizing at a distance in 1885–87, never stopped treating all psychical research with a condescending scepticism.17 In 1902, he gave a presentation at the Institut général psychologique on Meb, a young woman who fraudulently produced ‘apports’ (material objects produced out of the air), so as to suggest that hysteria was the best hypothesis to explain this kind of phenomena.18