A classic in the field of psychology, From India to the Planet Mars (1900) depicts the remarkable multiple existence of the medium Hélène Smith, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, of a Hindu princess from fifteenth-century India, and of a regular visitor to Mars, whose landscapes she painted and whose language she appeared to speak fluently. Through a psychological interpretation of these fantasies, which consisted in the subliminal elaboration of forgotten memories, Théodore Flournoy vastly extended the scope and understanding of the unconscious, and in particular, of its creative and mythopoetic capacities. In a new introduction to this work, Sonu Shamdasani evokes the rich cultural and intellectual setting in which Flournoy published his findings, and discusses their impact on Freud, Jung, Saussure, and other pioneers of psychology and linguistics.

DURING the time of my relationship to Freud I found a fatherly friend in Théodore Flournoy. He was already an old man when I got to know him.

Unfortunately he died only a few years later. As I was still a doctor at the Burghölzli when I read his book, From India to the Planet Mars, it made a great impression on me. I wrote to Flournoy that I wanted to translate it into German. It was after half a year that I received his reply, in which he apologized for having let my question lie unanswered for so long. To my regret, he had already appointed another translator.

Later I visited him in Geneva, and as I gradually recognized where Freud's limits lay, I went to him from time to time, and I talked with him.

It was important to me to hear what he thought of Freud, and he said very intelligent things about him. Most of all, he put his finger on Freud's rationalism, which made much of him understandable, as well as explaining his onesidedness.

In 1912 1 induced Flournoy to attend the congress in Munich, at which the break between Freud and myself took place. His presence was an important support for me.

I had the feeling in those years and especially after the parting of ways with Freud-that I was still too young to be independent. I still needed support, and above all someone with whom I could talk openly.

This I found in Flournoy, and therefore he soon represented to me a kind of counterpoise to Freud. With him I could really discuss all the problems that scientifically occupied me-for example, on somnambulism, on para- psychology, and the psychology of religion. I had no one else who shared my interests in these matters. Flournoy's views lay completely in my line and gave me many a suggestion. His concept of the "imagination creatrice," which particularly interested me, was an idea I adopted from him.

I learned a great deal from him above all, the way and manner to consider a patient, the loving absorption in its history. This was how I borrowed one of his cases, namely that of Miss Miller in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912), and subjected it to a careful analysis.

ENTER THE MEDIUMS
In the seances at the fin de siècle, women became men and men became women. There was no limit to who one could be or to how many. Terrestrials and extraterrestrials swapped places and exchanged notes on their habitations. Plato and Socrates returned to offer courses in postmortem dialectics. The departed returned to repledge their loves and continue their intrigues. Evidently the spirits had a rather theatrical way about them and a taste for the decidedly camp, not to mention for black comedy. Linguistic and aesthetic forms were broken, which paved the way for the artistic convulsions that were to come. Religious dogmas came crashing down as new creeds were announced. Before telecommunications, the mediums were telepathic transatlantic operators, connecting party lines be- tween the living and the dead. Even then, the switchboards were jammed. Time and space coupled in new, unforeseen combinations. Philosophers wondered about the effects of these rappings on the creaking structures of philosophy. The effects were felt as far away as therapeutic consulting rooms; yet here, if a subject spoke, wrote, or acted, it sought no therapy. There was no desire to end the trance, and for a while psychology itself was entranced.