1 - The Society for Psychical Research's experiments in intimacy

Summary

IMAGINING INTIMACY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

How do we conceive of intimacy with another human being? What do we mean when we say we know someone ‘inside and out’? In the 1880s and 1890s one way to answer these questions is to take them literally, to imagine bodies and minds spatially. In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) or the psychotic judge Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903), minds and bodies are invaded by hostile outsiders, filled up with foreign contents, sucked dry of their own. Buildings, bodies and minds can be seen to house ghosts, invaders from the past. Economic models of invasion are often correlated with linguistic models of communication. The dead want to communicate with the living, delivering messages through mediums; the rays which invade Schreber's body are made out of language; Dracula finds himself telepathically connected to the victims whose blood he ingests. At the turn of the century fantasies about language, communication and suggestion are being worked out through economic models, just as formulations, in literary and scientific texts, of the ‘actual’ contents of the body and mind invoke fantasies about how language works to enable and disable communication.