Andreas Sommer Historians rarely have the opportunity to say something that might be of practical relevance to clinicians or workers in other fields of applied scientific knowledge. As mentioned previously, I was therefore particularly chuffed when psychotherapist Nick Totton invited me last year to contribute an article to an envisaged special issue of the European Journal of … Read more
Bob Rosenberg received a PhD in History of Science and Technology from Johns Hopkins University. He spent two decades at Rutgers University on the staff of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, the last seven as director of the project. Since 2001 he has lived on the San Francisco Peninsula, working from 2005 to 2013 for … Read more
Hearing that I can’t live without quality horror flicks probably won’t come as a shock to you. Imagine therefore my delight when the BBC approached me in November 2014 to discuss an opportunity to get involved in the making of a TV horror drama as a history advisor. Created by Life on Mars and Ashes … Read more
Simone Natale is a Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University, United Kingdom. He is the author of Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2016. You can follow him on Twitter and Academia.edu. One of the peculiarities of spiritualism, a religious … Read more
Last year I was approached by psychotherapist Nick Totton to contribute an article to a special issue on the ‘occult’, which Totton was about to edit for the European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling. As far as I can tell, my essay will be the only one written by a historian, while all other contributions … Read more
Today is the birthday of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the oldest substantial association founded to investigate in a radical empirical spirit the contested phenomena of animal magnetism and spiritualism. Inaugurated on 20th February 1882, the still existing SPR is now 134 years old. To historians of science and medicine, the Society’s history offers … Read more
I’m pleased to see my joint article on telepathic hallucinations in French psychology and psychiatry with Pascal Le Maléfan came out today in the journal History of Psychiatry. Le Maléfan, P., & Sommer, A. (2015). Léon Marillier and the veridical hallucination in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century French psychology and psychopathology. History of Psychiatry, 26, 418-432. … Read more
Today is my second birthday as a blogger. To celebrate, I decided to upgrade my free WordPress account, mainly to get rid of the annoying ads which started appearing as ‘Forbidden Histories’ got more views. Besides, the Premium account comes with its own dinky domain, forbiddenhistories.com (though the old address, forbiddenhistories.wordpress.com, is still working). Whoop. … Read more
Between you and me, I’m really not into the idea that karma will eventually get me and drag my poor soul back to earth after I die. At the risk of appearing a gloomy Gus, for me one life is just about enough. The very idea of reincarnation, of course, has a long tradition not … Read more
The investigation of ‘occult’ phenomena associated with spiritualism and mesmerism occupied the minds of representatives of modern psychology much more than this has been reflected in standard histories of modern psychology. From Gustav Theodor Fechner and William James to Théodore Flournoy and Hans Eysenck, many prominent psychologists were not only interested in the psychodynamics of … Read more