Albert von Schrenck-Notzing: From Psychopathia sexualis to the Materialisation of Dreams
Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing was born in Oldenburg, Germany, on 18 May 1862. After entering Munich University in 1883 to train as a physician, he studied hypnotism under Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy, together with Sigmund Freud, in the late 1880s. Schrenck-Notzing’s secretary and biographer, the philosopher Gerda Walther – a pupil of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl – related how his interest in hypnotism was triggered while he was still a medical student. According to Walther, he jokingly ‘mesmerised’ some of his fellow students, three of whom, to the surprise of the young Schrenck-Notzing, fell into a ‘somnambulic’ trance.2
In 1888, Schrenck-Notzing obtained his MD with a thesis on the therapeutic application of hypnotism, in which he reported the cure of one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients from chorea minor.3 Inspired by the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing in ‘sexual pathology’ and August Forel in hypnotherapy, he began practising as a private physician in Munich, specialising in the hypnotic treatment of sexual deviations, which had recently been transformed from a criminal into a pathological problem by Krafft-Ebing.4 Together with other important authors on hypnotism – such as the French neurologist Hippolyte Bernheim, the Belgian mathematician and psychologist Joseph Delbœuf, the German philosopher–psychologist Max Dessoir, the Swiss psychiatrist August Forel, the French physician Ambroise Liébeault, Sigmund Freud and Albert Moll – Schrenck-Notzing joined the editorial board of the newly founded Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus [Journal for Hypnotism] in 1892, to which he became a regular contributor. In the same year, he published an internationally acclaimed book on hypnotism as a treatment of Psychopathia sexualis, which he dedicated to August Forel ‘in respect and gratitude’.5 Schrenck-Notzing also published on the psychology of dissociation,6 he became an expert in the forensic problems of hypnotism.7 His works were widely cited by authors such as Krafft-Ebing, August Forel, Havelock Ellis and Morton Prince.8
Schrenck-Notzing’s prime interest, however, was in studying and understanding phenomena resisting scientific explanation. While still a medical student in 1886, he became a founding member of the Münchener psychologische Gesellschaft [Munich Psychological Society], whose research programme was modelled on that of the (British) Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the first major organisation scientifically to scrutinise alleged ‘supernormal’ phenomena.9 In Germany, Schrenck-Notzing was among the first to argue for the occurrence of telepathy in the waking state and in hypnotic trance, an epistemological and political bone of contention among early international researchers.10
Schrenck-Notzing also became interested in the even more controversial phenomenon of spiritualism, which had divided German academia since the public debate on the scientific legitimacy of research into spiritualism between astrophysicist Friedrich Zöllner and the founding father of German academic psychology, Wilhelm Wundt.11 Through his marriage to Gabriele Siegle, daughter and heir of the Swabian industrialist Gustav Siegle, in 1892 Schrenck-Notzing gained the financial independence to build a laboratory, reimburse mediums and travel to find suitable subjects in Germany and abroad. Mainly in co-operation with his friend Charles Richet, who in 1913 was to become Nobel laureate in physiology for his studies in anaphylaxis, he began investigating ‘physical’ mediums – ie. persons purported to produce ‘telekinetic’ phenomena, materialisations of ‘spirit forms’ and other incredible feats.12 The life-long friendship between Schrenck-Notzing and Charles Richet began in 1888, when Schrenck-Notzing had asked Richet for permission to translate one of Richet’s experimental studies in hypnotic clairvoyance and telepathy into German.13 In the early 1890s, Richet invited Schrenck-Notzing to attend sittings with the notorious Italian medium Eusapia Paladino, who converted previous sceptics, such as Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Morselli and Pierre Curie, to a belief in supernormal physical phenomena.14
Like Richet and many other investigators of physical mediumship, Schrenck-Notzing rejected spiritistic explanations of the observed phenomena and favoured a psychodynamic approach. He considered the results obtained in sittings with Paladino and other physical mediums as experimentally induced variants of alleged ‘poltergeist’ phenomena – which involved spontaneous anomalous movements and sudden appearances and disappearances of diverse objects and materials, mysterious loud noises, fire outbreaks and other puzzling phenomena – usually causing a stir in the press and occasionally attracting legal attention.15
Schrenck-Notzing held that ‘poltergeist’ phenomena usually centred around and were unconsciously effected by an emotionally unstable person, usually an adolescent, and were to be understood as psychodynamic discharges, or externalised hysteria, acted out ‘telekinetically’ by these unwitting physical mediums:
In certain cases, emotionally charged complexes of representation, which have become autonomous and dissociated, seem to automatically and compulsively press for discharge and realisation through haunting phenomena…. Hence, the so-called haunting occurs in place of a neurosis.16
Schrenck-Notzing found that several physical mediums, such as Stanislawa Tomczyk, the main subject of his study Physikalische Phänomene des Mediumismus [Physical Phenomena of Mediumship], had started their careers as focus persons in poltergeist cases.17 Hence, he aimed at identifying focus persons of poltergeist outbreaks to transform them into mediums available for controlled experiments.
It seems that Schrenck-Notzing’s attitude to physical mediumship co-developed with that of his friend Charles Richet. By 1898, neither Richet nor Schrenck-Notzing had publicly given a positive verdict regarding the reality of the physical phenomena of mediumship,18 and it was only after Richet won the Nobel Prize in 1913 that Schrenck-Notzing, supported by his eminent friend, published Materialisations-Phaenomene [Materialisation Phenomena].19 The book describes Schrenck-Notzing’s experimental séances with the French medium Eva C. (pseudonym for Marthe Béraud), who had been studied previously by Richet and Juliette Bisson (widow of the French dramatist Alexandre Bisson). Bisson had published the results of her investigations of Marthe in French simultaneously with Schrenck-Notzing; Richet, being an occasional co-investigator, vouched for both authors’ methodological competence and personal credibility.20
The phenomena observed and described by the authors were reported usually to commence with the emergence of an initially gauze-like white, grey or dark substance from the medium’s orifices, usually from her mouth, but also from her breasts, navel, fingertips, vagina, and the crest of her head. This substance was called ‘teleplasm’ by Schrenck-Notzing and ‘ectoplasm’ by the Polish philosopher–psychologist Julian Ochorowicz, Richet and his French colleague Gustave Geley (a respected Lyonnais physician). It was photographed by Schrenck-Notzing – who also filmed the emergence of teleplasm – Geley, Bisson, and other researchers, employing stereoscopy and, sometimes, up to nine cameras. Schrenck-Notzing also took probes of the ‘teleplasm’, whose microscopic and physical–chemical analyses suggested that the substance was composed of epithelial cells, isolated fat droplets and mucus, as well as cell detritus that was unlikely to stem from the medium’s saliva, vaginal secretions, or other body fluids.21
As described by the investigators, the teleplasm moved in an autonomous animate manner, responding to touch and, particularly, exposure to light, with the entranced medium displaying signs of pain and physical shock. The substance was reported to develop into rudimentary limb-like forms, often assuming a two-dimensional form first. Occasionally, full human limbs and heads were reported to form, appearing lifelike and responsive to the environment. Finally, the forms would either gradually dissolve, with the teleplasm being reabsorbed by the medium, or suddenly vanish into thin air.
The hypothesis put forth by Schrenck-Notzing to account for these bizarre observations was that of ‘ideoplasty’. Teleplastic processes, he believed, had their origin in the unconscious mind of the entranced medium in terms of ‘materialised dream-images’, that is, ephemeral, externalised precipitates from the medium’s psychical impressions, imagination and memories;22 for instance, certain ostensible materialisations were identified as imperfectly reproduced photographs from magazines and other sources the medium had previously been exposed to. Researchers such as Richet and the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy had reported experiments indicating that memories of forgotten impressions were sometimes restored in altered states of consciousness, such as dreams, and hypnotic and mediumistic trances. Schrenck-Notzing himself referred to Carl Gustav Jung’s treatment of cryptomnesia – ie. the emergence of forgotten or not consciously recorded sensory impressions – in Jung’s doctoral thesis on the psychology and psychopathology of mediumship.23
In 1920, Schrenck-Notzing published his second comprehensive parapsychological monograph, Physikalische Phaenomene des Mediumismus.24 The main focus of the study is on the alleged telekinetic phenomena of the Polish medium Stanislawa Tomczyk, who was discovered by Julian Ochorowicz. Maintaining his theory of ideoplasty, Schrenck-Notzing viewed telekinesis – ie. the supernormal movement or influence of objects – and the phenomena of materialisation as different in degree rather than in kind. The achievement of the telekinetic movement, he suggested, was anticipated by the entranced medium in her dream-like state, whereupon her creative imagination evolved thread-like ideoplastic structures and ‘pseudopodia’, which finally produced the effect mechanically. Schrenck-Notzing believed that ‘the lively wish of lifting an object from a distance leads to the associated idea of a thread, by which the experiment might be performed; the objective phantom of a thread is brought into being by a hallucination that realises itself in matter’.25 The book – also for the first time containing the records of his early experimental sittings with Paladino in the 1890s, as well as observations of phenomena associated with anonymous private mediums and Willy Schneider (see below) – displays photographs of the ‘ideoplastic threads’ allegedly produced by Tomczyk and plates showing their magnified structures, which Schrenck-Notzing argued differed from any known natural fibre.
Schrenck-Notzing’s next book was a collection of records of experimental sittings with the Austrian medium Willy (or Willi) Schneider, held at the Psychological Institute at Munich University and the baron’s private laboratory.26 Alleged phenomena observed were levitations, ‘telekinetic’ writings on a typewriter, manipulations of objects in sealed containers, and rudimentary materialisations. Among the fifty-six witnesses vouching for the reality of the phenomena in an appendix of the book were the neurologist Johannes (Jaroslaw) Marcinowski, the physicist Leo Graetz, the philosopher Erich Becher, the physiologist Hans Winterstein, the mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann, the Nobel Laureate in chemistry (in 1915) Richard Willstätter, zoologists Karl Zimmer and Karl Gruber, psychiatrists Oskar Fischer and Erich Kindborg, the handwriting analyst Ludwig Klages, the biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch, and the writers Gustav Meyrink and Thomas Mann.27
The final phase of Schrenck-Notzing’s work focused on his experiments with Willy Schneider’s brother, Rudi. Sitters such as Driesch, Eugen Bleuler and C.G. Jung confirmed Schrenck-Notzing’s reports of movements of objects and other phenomena previously observed with Rudi’s predecessors.28 The publication of a monograph on Rudi was thwarted by Schrenck-Notzing’s death on 12 February 1929 by cardiac arrest following appendicitis surgery. Records of the sittings with Rudi were compiled by Gerda Walther after Schrenck-Notzing’s death and published, with a foreword by Eugen Bleuler, by his widow.29
‘We Were Companions’: Schrenck-Notzing as Albert Moll’s Comrade-in-Arms and Nemesis
Following the death of Schrenck-Notzing in 1929, Albert Moll published a treatise on the psychology and pathology of parapsychologists, with Schrenck-Notzing serving as a personality prototype and representative specimen for analysis. In an attempt to justify the delicate timing of this vehement attack shortly after the death of Schrenck-Notzing, Moll wrote: ‘A man who accepted carnival jokes as science, who wanted to impose on the world the carnival masquerade of hysterical shrews and other mediums as transfiguration or teleplasm and as the product of the unconscious, must be truthfully scrutinised even after his death.’30
Preceding his assaults on Schrenck-Notzing as a deluded traitor of science in the remainder of his book, Moll referred to Schrenck-Notzing’s pioneering work in hypnotism and sexology: ‘In younger years, we were companions, and he had done much to introduce hypnotism as a therapy’; Moll even graciously identified Schrenck-Notzing as the very first medical psychotherapist in southern Germany,31 concluding his sketch of Schrenck-Notzing: ‘He who wants to name the personalities who rendered pioneering services to psychotherapy in Germany under greatest struggles, must not forget to name Baron von Schrenck-Notzing with gratitude.’32
Here, Moll paid tribute to Schrenck-Notzing as an important figure in the introduction of hypnotism into late nineteenth-century German medicine. In fact, the men had frequently cited one another in their works on hypnotism and sexology, defended each other against attacks on hypnotism by the scientific and medical orthodoxy, and their initial relationship was marked by respect and esteem. Moll, for example, relied heavily on Schrenck-Notzing’s work in all five editions of his celebrated survey of hypnotism.33 Also, Moll reviewed Schrenck-Notzing’s work in the Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus and gratefully acknowledged that Schrenck had identified his lecture at the Berliner medizinische Gesellschaft [Berlin Medical Society] on 26 October 1887 as an event catalyzing wider interest in hypnotism in Germany.34 Moll went on to praise Schrenck-Notzing’s scientific standards: ‘The whole way of presentation, which nowhere shows a glossed-over portrayal of the successes, is marked by a remarkable conscientiousness and critical spirit.’35 In the same report, Moll posited Schrenck-Notzing and himself, both of whom published unsuccessful treatments as well as successful ones, as prime examples of intellectual integrity, while complaining that other authors, especially propagandists of new forms of therapy other than hypnosis, inflated therapeutic effects by selectively publishing successfully treated cases only.36
In an attempt to understand Moll’s transformation of Schrenck-Notzing from an exemplary scientist and previous comrade-in-arms into a charlatan and personal nemesis, let us sketch the nature of Moll’s own involvement in parapsychology, as well as the history of conflicts between the men. While Schrenck-Notzing was a founding member of the ‘Münchner Psychologische Gesellschaft’ [Munich Psychological Society, hereafter MPG] in 1886, Moll was among the early members of a similar organisation founded in Berlin by Max Dessoir and Friedrich Karl Goeler von Ravensburg in 1888, the Gesellschaft für Experimental-Psychologie [Society for Experimental Psychology].37 Its programme was published in the publication organ of the MPG, the journal Sphinx.38 After internal conflicts in the MPG, which resulted in the formation of a separate organisation with a philosophical rather than experimental focus around the work of the philosopher Carl du Prel in 1889, Schrenck-Notzing’s old Munich society fused with Dessoir’s Berlin group under the name of Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung [Society for Psychological Research] in 1890.
The Berlin section under Dessoir and Moll maintained its previous name, but its research programme started centring mainly around hypnotism and dissociation rather than the question of the reality of supernormal phenomena proper. Both the Munich and Berlin sections published their findings in the Schriften der Gesellschaft für Psychologische Forschung [Transactions of the Society for Psychological Research], which contained writings by early German-language psychologists such as Hugo Münsterberg, Theodor Lipps, Arthur Wreschner, Paul Möller, William Stern and August Forel. Owing to the work of some of its members, such as Schrenck-Notzing and Max Dessoir in hypnotism and the psychology of dissociation, the Society became a small but significant hub of international psychology. This is documented, for instance, in its organisation of the Third International Congress of Psychology, held in Munich in 1896, with Schrenck-Notzing serving as General Secretary.39
Moll’s initial involvement in parapsychology can be framed as an exercise in ‘boundary work’ to establish hypnotism as a legitimate scientific and medical problem. In order to facilitate acceptance of hypnotism by orthodox science and medicine, Moll, in accordance with co-pioneers of hypnotism such as Oskar Vogt, August Forel and Leopold Loewenfeld, sought to purge hypnotism from its ‘occult’ ballast. Also in line with Moll’s attempts to professionalise hypnotism, a related focus of his work was on the repudiation of lay healers, particularly practitioners of animal magnetism.40 Between 1888 and 1892, Moll’s activities focused on the demarcation between clinical hypnotism and its ‘forerunner’, mesmerism, resulting in his 1892 study Der Rapport in der Hypnose [The Rapport in Hypnotism].41 The study aimed to settle the question of whether in hypnotism there existed any influence beyond conventional sensory impressions, suggestion and imagination, centring around the notion of a ‘mesmeric’ rapport, that is, the alleged psychic connection between mesmerist and subject. It was based on an unspecified number of experiments over the course of four years which Moll had conducted with Max Dessoir and other researchers.42 Moll’s overall conclusion was that it was legitimate to propose a psychological rapport between hypnotist and subject in terms of a subject’s fixation on the hypnotist as a result of suggestion, but that there was no evidence for the involvement of telepathy or ‘animal magnetism’ in the phenomena of hypnotism. While Moll’s study was mute regarding Schrenck-Notzing’s published experiments in telepathic hypnotism, he included and gratefully acknowledged experimental findings privately provided by Schrenck-Notzing regarding the transference of the hypnotic rapport from the hypnotist to a third person, and on failed or inconclusive experiments on the supernormal identification of ‘magnetised’ water as well as the transmission of pains.43
The first open conflict between the men arose the year after Moll published his findings on hypnotic rapport. Rather than regarding parapsychological matters, the dispute concerned sexological and hypnotherapeutic questions, ie. the aetiology of homosexuality. Moll (along with Richard von Krafft-Ebing) held that homosexuality was usually a congenital ‘condition’, while Schrenck-Notzing maintained that it was the result of a pathological weakness of the will to resist sexually deviant urges, which in themselves were acquired rather than congenital. Schrenck-Notzing had reported cases of allegedly successfully ‘treated’ homosexuality and argued that if it was inbred and genetically determined, it would not be possible to ‘cure’ homosexuals through hypnotherapy. Without providing any support for his suspicion, Moll accused Schrenck-Notzing of having published the successes only and concealing therapeutic failures which would surely invalidate the overall success rate. Moreover, he held that Schrenck-Notzing was in no position to claim lasting effects as he had not observed his patients sufficiently long to conclude that they were permanently cured.44 Schrenck-Notzing’s somewhat irritated reply followed, containing an overall positive follow-up report of the successful cases.45
Moll’s second attack on Schrenck-Notzing occurred when the latter arranged public performances of the French ‘dream dancer’ Magdeleine G. in Munich in 1904. In hypnotic trance, Magdeleine, who maintained never to have received any choreographic training, delivered celebrated performances marked by an unusually high degree of emotional expression and artistic perfection.46 In what appeared a thoroughly calculated publicity strategy to influence public opinion in favour of the still-controversial problems of hypnotism, Schrenck-Notzing was aiming to show that hypnotism not only had clinical, but also aesthetic implications. Moll vehemently attacked Schrenck-Notzing on the basis of the latter’s acceptance of Magdeleine’s claim to have received no training in dance, and he held that these performances had no scientific value whatsoever.47
From about 1904 until after Schrenck-Notzing’s death in 1929, Moll steadily secured his leading position as a debunker of ‘pseudo-scientists’ and medical ‘quacks’ alike, wasting no opportunity to attack what he viewed as enemies of reason and civilisation in countless newspaper articles and other popular channels of information. Increasingly, the weapon of choice became ad hominem attacks and the pathologisation of opponents, with Schrenck-Notzing, who had abandoned sexology and hypnotism research in favour of parapsychological studies around 1911, as only one among many targets. In 1908, for example, Moll published an analysis of lay hypnotists and practitioners of animal magnetism, most of whom he sweepingly ‘diagnosed’ as psychopaths. If the public were informed about his findings that charlatanry was usually equivalent with mental abnormality, he stated, this would prevent patients from consulting such individuals much more effectively than legal prohibition.48
Among Moll’s activities eliciting outrage and protest by parapsychologists was his lecture ‘Über Denkfehler in der Methodik der Okkultismusforschung’ [‘On Errors of Reasoning in the Methodology of Occultism Research’] in April 1921. After stating that mediums were either frauds or hysterics, he concluded that researchers like Schrenck-Notzing, who vouched for the reality of mediumistic phenomena, were a case for either the prosecutor or the alienist. In Moll’s words, Schrenck-Notzing and colleagues were ‘psychologically deranged persons’ [‘seelisch entgleiste Existenzen’] who would usually entertain sexual relationships with their mediums and, afraid of being publicly regarded as ‘dimwits’ [‘Dummköpfe’], preferred, by deliberately covering up obvious fraud, to be ‘swines’ [‘Schweinehunde’] instead.49 Signalling the end of his willingness to consider Moll a serious critic, Schrenck-Notzing replied: ‘With this abandonment of any parliamentary sense of decency, Moll has rendered judgement on himself.’50
In February 1924, Moll gave a talk entitled ‘Zur Psychologie der Okkultisten’ [‘On the Psychology of the Occultists’], which anticipated the basic arguments of his book Psychologie und Charakterologie der Okkultisten [Psychology and Characterology of Occultists], published shortly after Schrenck-Notzing’s death in 1929.51 In July 1925, Moll was charged with defaming the Berlin medium Maria Vollhardt (aka Rudloff) as a fraud, after Moll, who was not present at the séances, claimed that the phenomena reported by the spiritualist Friedrich Schwab were due to conjuring tricks.52 In the course of the trial, one of Moll’s defendants, the district court judge and fierce opponent of parapsychology Albert Hellwig, proposed that rather than deciding the ontological status of alleged supernormal phenomena, it would be more sensible to scrutinise the mental state of those claiming their reality, a strategy that became the basis of both Hellwig’s and Moll’s rejection of parapsychology.53
Asymmetries in Moll’s Debunking Arguments
While it is needless to stress that as an historian I am neither interested nor competent to make ontological claims regarding controversial scientific questions, it is worthwhile briefly to analyse recurring patterns in Moll’s polemics in relation to the argumentative consistency in his own contributions to parapsychology and hypnotism. To begin with, let us consider one of the few diagnostic criteria Moll provided to judge the mental state of ‘the’ parapsychologists. According to Moll, a reliable indicator to diagnose pathological deviance was the general opposition to official science in fields other than parapsychology.54 Many occultists, Moll cautioned, were proponents of homeopathy and animal magnetism, as well as vegetarians and critics of vivisection.55 He predicted that in the very moment official science acknowledged the reality of clairvoyance and homeopathy, the former proponents would immediately turn into the harshest opponents of the doctrines they had previously defended.56 According to Moll, questioning current paradigms of established science was a suspicious feature, if not a clear-cut diagnostic criterion, to identify and professionally disqualify parapsychologists and other deviant scientists.
An apparently strictly methodological argument Moll frequently put forth for the intrinsically unscientific nature of Schrenck-Notzing’s work concerned insufficient documentation. Criticising Schrenck-Notzing’s records of the Willy Schneider sittings,57 for example, Moll complained that the minutes provided in the book were scientifically useless, the signatures of the dozens of scientifically trained witnesses notwithstanding. In order to qualify as valid, he demanded, the book should have contained the complete stenographic records of all sittings. Moll’s verdict, his past praise of Schrenck-Notzing as a hypnotism researcher notwithstanding, was therefore: ‘Unfortunately, the publication is again as haplessly unscientific as one is accustomed elsewhere with regard to Schrenck-Notzing.’58 However, looking at Moll’s own work in parapsychology, one is struck by a nearly complete absence of scientific documentation.59 The report of his experiments on the ‘mesmeric rapport’, for instance, is marked by a grave lack of transparency. The results and procedures presented were rarely based on numerical information, let alone statistics, but on vague statements such as ‘in many experiments’, the ‘overwhelming majority of subjects’, etc. For example, the reader is left in a state of ignorance about the actual number of subjects involved in the study, referred to as ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’, although Moll indicated that there were more than three participants.60 Moll excused the absence of detailed documentation of individual experiments thus: ‘Of the experiments conducted under these conditions, of course I absolutely do not want to describe each individually, as this may be too tiring.’61
Among Moll’s projects to bring scientific enlightenment to the masses was a survey on ‘occult’ experiences in the general public conducted in 1907. The introductory text, published with the questionnaire, is dominated by Moll’s concerns about the rising number of occult clubs and lay healers, and the grave moral and medical dangers for society emerging from such developments. As in previous and later writings, however, he also assured the reader that despite overwhelmingly negative results he had obtained in his own experiments so far, he was not dismissing the existence of ‘occult’ phenomena out of hand.62 According to Moll, who presented his findings at a meeting of the Berlin Psychological Society, the survey generated 291 replies, with 62 participants stating no psychic experiences whatsoever, while 11 replies left Moll with no doubts about the psychopathology of their authors. The remaining 218 replies, claiming ‘psychic’ experiences, allowed no conclusion, Moll held, since not all possible sources of error were excluded by the participants.63 One looks in vain for details or examples of an obvious psychopathology or sources of errors the participants neglected to rule out. Again, Moll offered the reader no evidence for his scientific claims other than his authority.
Successful telepathic experiments reported by others – such as the work of the SPR in England – Moll would either ignore or sweepingly explain away in terms of muscle-reading, involuntary whispering, codes communicated by breathing patterns and other normal channels of communication, notwithstanding that many of those studies had been designed to rule out any kind of conventional – including extremely subtle – communication.64 Overall, a careful reading of Moll’s criticisms and of the original studies he purported to criticise reveals that he regularly failed to acknowledge controls reported by researchers that disqualified his sweeping counter-explanations, and that his reconstructions of apparently successful parapsychological experiments usually focused on and blew out of proportion weak points and minor errors only.65 Likewise, Moll was selective in his criticisms of the controls of physical mediums employed by Schrenck-Notzing, involving their observation by detectives outside the sittings, thorough body – including full cavity – searches and administration of emetics and chemical analysis of vomit to rule out hidden props, the net tunics Schrenck-Notzing’s mediums were sewn into, the isolation of mediums or ‘telekinetic’ targets in sealed containers, and later, increasingly automated electrical controls of mediums, experimenters and sitters alike.66 Rather than examining assumed weaknesses of the applied controls in detail, Moll simply argued that the occurrence of ‘phenomena’, proved beyond any reasonable doubt that controls were absent or lax, and that Schrenck-Notzing and colleagues, reporting independent replications of the phenomena, were ‘in the trick’ with their mediums.67
When Moll was among the first to address the clinical importance of hypnotism in Germany, he bitterly complained about resistance and unfair treatment on the side of scientific orthodoxy. Among the most controversial phenomena claimed by several hypnotists, and accepted by Moll as real, were the hypnotic induction of blisters and other vasomotor effects, in the absence of an understanding of physiological mechanisms explaining these phenomena.68 In his memoirs, Moll described his frustration when, as a young physician, he had turned to Emil du Bois-Reymond to investigate these effects in the latter’s institute, only to be rejected by the great physiologist.69 He also recalled how he was laughed at when discussing hypnotically induced blisters at his 1887 lecture at the Berliner medizinische Gesellschaft [Berlin Medical Society]. Underscoring his role as a pioneer, he wrote: ‘Only one knew that he would be right in the end; and that was me.’70 However, Moll had initially admitted that the hypnotic subjects in these experiments were not observed long and closely enough to rule out that they had produced the said lesions manually, and he wrote:
In such experiments one is faced with a certain dilemma regarding control; too strong mistrust is capable of thwarting the results of suggestion, while on the other hand we can only consider the production of organic lesions through suggestion as objectively proven if all possible precautions have been taken.71
Yet, although the scientific control in these experiments was, according to Moll’s own standards as applied to parapsychology, insufficient, he was fully convinced of the reality of hypnotically induced lesions.
One of the few hypnotists criticising the early experiments in hypnotic blistering and related phenomena had been Schrenck-Notzing. After attempting to replicate these effects, he found, much to the dismay of distinguished colleagues such as Moll and Forel, that his subject, who had been closely observed in two sessions lasting twenty-four hours each, had probably induced a mark using a hairpin in a brief unobserved moment. Schrenck-Notzing held that, in order to realise the hypnotic suggestion, the fraud was the result of the hypnotised subject’s compulsion to produce the effect no matter how.72 Later, this idea of trickery as an unconscious acting out of suggestion was also at the heart of Schrenck-Notzing’s and other mediumship researchers’ observations that many mediums had the tendency to cheat when given the opportunity, especially when no ‘genuine’ phenomena would come forth. Schrenck-Notzing and colleagues such as Julian Ochorowicz and Enrico Morselli held that in response to external pressure, such as experimenters’ and sitters’ expectations, the entranced medium, deprived of the faculty of volitional control, would be compelled to produce phenomena using the path of least resistance. Schrenck-Notzing and his supporters, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler among them, maintained that many exposures of allegedly fraudulent mediums were to be explained in this manner, and that a thorough knowledge of the psychology of mediumistic trance was required to appreciate and control ‘unconscious’ as well as deliberate fraud.73 Schrenck-Notzing and other mediumship researchers considered mediums as highly sensitive psychobiological instruments rather than machines generating effects on demand and in any setting, for the phenomena of physical mediumship had
their origin in the life of the unconscious mind and arise from an instinctive impulse in the medium, who for her part can yield herself up completely to this impulse only upon the condition that her conscious attention is not brought into play by psychological resistances, or by doubt of her honesty on the part of the observers,
and Schrenck-Notzing concluded: ‘The frequent ignoring of this most important consideration, especially in scientific investigations, is a cause of negative sittings even in the case of mediums who in other circumstances give good results.’74
On the other hand, Moll and other critics such as Albert Hellwig, rather than considering the peculiar psychological state of mediums as a potentially crucial item of methodological knowledge, accused Schrenck-Notzing of employing self-immunisation by psychologising and thus trivialising mediumistic fraud, which the sceptics believed was always deliberate and carefully planned. Taking suspicious factors as definite proof of fraud, and disregarding his earlier observation regarding the detrimental effect of doubt in hypnotic blistering, Moll now stated that ‘a process that fails to occur in the presence of sceptics has ceased to have anything to do with science or at least a scientific test.’75
Of all things, Moll also presented the irritated and often aggressive responses by Schrenck-Notzing and other researchers to his accusations of blatant fraud, scientific incompetence and insanity as evidence for the very accusations he raised. In the early days, Moll had protested against the polemic tone of certain critics of hypnotism, such as Emanuel Mendel, who sweepingly accused hypnotism researchers of being mentally unsound pseudo-scientists.76 When Moll himself had been the target of the same type of accusations he would later level against parapsychologists and practitioners of lay medicine, he had protested that the pathologisation of opponents and the aggressive tone of certain criticisms were inherently unscientific.77 Years later, he accused Schrenck-Notzing of being largely responsible for the aggressive tone of parapsychologists in reply to what Moll now held were legitimate scientific criticisms: ‘He who has not read their works and periodicals once in a while…doesn’t know the psyche of the occultists. I am very sorry, but even the fresh tomb of Baron Schrenck-Notzing cannot prevent me from saying here how grave his guilt was in this respect.’78 Moll challenged the reader to present ‘any work of myself or scientific anti-occultists that corresponds, in such a rude tone, to the mindless scolding of the occultists’, and he conceded: ‘It is an advantage at least that the occultists thus reveal themselves; for only he who is not sure about his cause becomes rude.’79 As the height of such ‘mindless scolding’ and ‘rudeness’ he cited a protest by Schrenck-Notzing against Moll’s treatment of parapsychologists, where Schrenck-Notzing describes Moll’s accusations as ‘inventions made up out of thin air’ [‘aus der Luft gegriffene Erfindung’] and ‘grotesque products of fantasy’ [‘groteske Fantasieprodukte’].80 Readers unfamiliar with the article Moll criticised could not know that therein Schrenck-Notzing had also protested against Moll’s use of words like ‘dimwits’ and ‘swines’, and his unfounded allegations that Schrenck-Notzing and his colleagues maintained sexual relations with their mediums. Revealingly, Moll failed to acknowledge, let alone attempt to rebuke, Schrenck-Notzing’s complaint in his own protest against what he felt was Schrenck-Notzing’s unduly aggressive tone.81
While Moll still emphasised the importance of Schrenck-Notzing as a pioneer of hypnotism and sexology in his Psychology and Characterology of Occultists in 1929, later writings would neglect the historical importance of his nemesis altogether. In a chapter on hypnotism in Moll’s 1936 memoirs, somewhat immodestly headed ‘Einführung der hypnotischen Behandlung und der Psychotherapie in Deutschland durch Moll’ [‘Introduction of Hypnotic Treatment and Psychotherapy to Germany by Moll]’,82 no mention is made of Schrenck-Notzing’s pioneering work in hypnotism, nor is he referred to in a chapter on sexology in the same book. Moll affirms that the widespread opinion of Schrenck-Notzing as the great doyen of psychical research in Germany was a ‘fairy tale’ [‘Märchen’], and he epitomised in what respect Schrenck-Notzing’s work would have to be remembered: ‘He employed methods in the evaluation of occultism that bestowed upon him the antagonism of all sober-minded.’83
Policing Epistemological Deviance: Past and Present
Eight years after Moll’s death, Max Dessoir, Moll’s friend and former colleague at the Berlin section of the Psychological Society, left an unflattering portrayal of the noted hypnotist, sexologist, and enemy of parapsychology. In his autobiography, Dessoir characterised the late Albert Moll thus:
His ambition and vanity found fulfilment… because he had two important factors at his disposal: he was economically quite independent and possessed an alarming recklessness…. Moll treated his patients with toughness, never with kindness. […] Dealing with him was difficult, for nothing in the world could make him behave like a gentleman. The slightest dissent made him erupt and talk over the opponent ruthlessly. […] Recurrently addicted to morphine, in his final ten or twelve years he became downright malicious: only to maintain dominion, he frightened and tantalised people whose sore points he knew. […] His talks at the Gesellschaft für Psychologie und Charakterologie [Society for Psychology and Characterology (the successor of the Berlin Psychological Society)], which was run by him highhandedly, were nothing but repetitions, and became increasingly shallow.84
Complaining about the overwhelming bias against parapsychology and its proponents in the press and the scientific community at large, the parapsychological researcher and homeopathic physician Walther Kröner, a contemporary of Schrenck-Notzing and Moll, had remarked that parapsychologists ‘have been portrayed as idiots and criminals first, and thus driven into assuming a defensive position. And in this situation [Moll] takes the greatest share’.85 One is tempted to seek the basis of Moll’s argumentative asymmetry and the unprofessional emotionality of his criticisms in his alleged morphine addiction and apparently generally unpleasant personality, as claimed by Dessoir. However, Moll’s argumentative style was hardly unique. At the forefront of those aggressively and systematically debunking and defaming parapsychologists such as Schrenck-Notzing and their mediums was, apart from Moll and Hellwig, the young psychiatrist Mathilde Kemnitz (a student of Emil Kraepelin). Immediately after the publication of Materialisations-Phaenomene in 1914, Kemnitz launched a vehement attack on Schrenck-Notzing by publishing Moderne Medienforschung [Modern Mediumship Research], a brochure containing ad hoc minutes of an informal sitting with the medium Stanislawa Popielska – not to be confused with Stanislawa Tomczyk – which Schrenck-Notzing had invited her to, and general criticisms of his book.86 Kemnitz claimed that the phenomena were clearly fraudulent and that Schrenck-Notzing was duped by Eva C. and Stanislawa Popielska. Like Moll, she considered the work of Schrenck-Notzing inherently unscientific and raised concerns about the social and cultural threat she saw posed by such grotesque publications.87 As in Moll, it is doubtful that Kemnitz’s aggressive opposition to parapsychology was motivated by a dispassionate scientific spirit, for in the 1930s, while married to General Erich Ludendorff, together with her influential husband she headed a religious cult involving an odd mixture of anti-Semitism and völkisch occultism. In 1937, she republished her attack on Schrenck-Notzing, along with other pamphlets defaming Catholicism and Semitism, and propagating her and her husband’s occult ‘philosophy’.88 With the support of General Ludendorff, she became instrumental in the Nazis’ abolishment of parapsychology in 1941.89
However, authors such as Moll, Hellwig and Kemnitz did not create the market for debunking publications, which was already firmly in place. For example, two of Moll’s most popular anti-parapsychology pamphlets, Der Spiritismus [Spiritism] and Prophezeien und Hellsehen [Prophecy and Clairvoyance], appeared in a book series with the title ‘Wege zur Erkenntnis’ [‘Ways to Knowledge’] (see Figure 1). An advertisement for the series warned, in bold letters, against ‘ignorance and collusiveness’ as ‘cancers of the present time, which to an incredible extent poison our people and paralyse the will’. The book series promised to ‘bring serious enlightenment, which is urgently needed’, and the reader was assured that ‘any one-sided position is prevented’, which would consequently yield ‘a genuine revelation to many’. Books published in this series ‘shall and will be the guide and counsellor to the masses’, and the advertisement concludes with the battle cry: ‘War against the rubbish.’90
Figure 1: Advertisement for the book series Wege zur Erkenntnis [Ways to Knowledge].
Although the overall public response to Schrenck-Notzing’s work was largely congruent with the readily absorbed writings of authors such as Moll, Hellwig and Kemnitz, not all reactions were strictly hostile. Sigmund Freud, for example, in reply to a survey on the first book of his former fellow student of hypnotism at Nancy, merely stated his indifference to the problem of alleged materialisations: ‘I have paid no particular attention to the work of v. Schrenck-Notzing.’91 Other noted intellectuals, such as Charles Richet, Hans Driesch and Eugen Bleuler, continued to vouch for Schrenck-Notzing’s scientific competence and integrity after his death. Richet, in his obituary of Schrenck-Notzing, graciously stated that the only criticism he had to raise against the deceased friend and colleague was that, by employing ethically questionable measures, such as hiring detectives, conducting rectal and gynaecological examinations, or administering emetics prior to the sittings to rule out fraud, Schrenck-Notzing had been too eager to satisfy even the dogmatic pseudo-sceptic.92 In his 1932 methodology of parapsychology, Driesch referred to Schrenck-Notzing as an exemplary researcher ,93 and in his preface to Schrenck-Notzing’s posthumous book on Rudi Schneider, Eugen Bleuler, who had been among the first Swiss clinicians to defend and employ hypnotism in therapy, announced that Schrenck-Notzing’s experimental design was now so fraud-proof that even dogmatic deniers must give in.94
Boundary disputes using pathologisation of parapsychologists continued after Moll’s death in 1939 and after the war. In 1961, the educator Wilhelm Gubisch, who had started his career as a defender of ‘true science’ in the 1930s, published a comprehensive debunking study of parapsychology, arguing that any belief in supernormal phenomena was entirely due to suggestion, cognitive malfunctions and psychopathology.95 In the name of ‘science’ and ‘civilisation’ Gubisch’s work provided one-sided and distorted portrayals of the work of parapsychologists, used ad hominem attacks, exclamations of outrage and innuendo, and he relied on the writings of Moll, Hellwig, Kemnitz, and other problematic authors. The book has not one, but three prefaces, by Professor Walter Gerlach (then director of the Institute of Physics at Munich University), Dr Rudolf Sieverts (then professor of forensics and criminology at the University of Hamburg), and Dr Johannes Wittmann (professor emeritus at the Psychological Institute at the University of Kiel). Through their forewords, these spokesmen of official science extended their authority to Gubisch’s book, stressing its scientific importance, the author’s intellectual integrity, and praising Gubisch for paying an important service to society by protecting the people from dangerous charlatans.
In 1976, the Austrian forensic doctor Otto Prokop and the lawyer Wolf Wimmer published a review of modern occult practices, alternative medicine and parapsychological researchers, arguing that the latter – using the Freiburg University parapsychologist Hans Bender as their main target – were irresponsible charlatans who either systematically deceived the public or, due to a desperate will to believe in an occult something, were the hapless victims of self-suggestion. In the preface, the authors frame the objective of their work: ‘Professors have the ethical duty to convey clear ideas about the nature of this world to their students, in which they have to find orientation’, and, surprisingly, admitting the lack of balance which characterises the whole book, they state: ‘For reasons of mental hygiene, fairness has its limits.’96
Conclusion
Paul Feyerabend, the great enfant terrible of the philosophy of science, once cautioned that western science, which is said to have started as a movement of liberation to overcome ideological suppression by religion, was turning into an institution with problematic power structures not unlike that of the mediaeval Church itself: ‘The very same enterprise that once gave man the ideas and the strength to free himself from the fears and prejudices of a tyrannical religion now turns him into a slave of its interest.’97 In support of Feyerabend’s concern there is strong evidence that the pathologisation of ‘paranormal belief’, and the defamation of parapsychological researchers and other scientific heretics as intrinsically incompetent, fraudulent or otherwise intellectually or morally deficient, is a dominant academic tradition that still goes strong.98 Like Moll, Hellwig, Kemnitz and other self-appointed secular inquisitors tirelessly submitting epistemic deviants to the flames in the name of ‘science’, ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’, later authors such as Gubisch, Prokop and Wimmer have received positive coverage in the popular media as well as in academic reviews of their books, with the critical responses coming almost exclusively from parapsychological researchers; that is, the very targets of the witch hunts.99
The present case study of Moll and Schrenck-Notzing adds historical support to findings by sociologists of science working on mechanisms of rejection of modern experimental parapsychology and other unorthodox disciplines.100 These studies demonstrate not only a strong permeability of the boundaries of popular and supposedly strictly academic forums when the epistemological monopoly of western science is at stake, but also a complete reversal of scientific core values such as honesty and anti-dogmatism.101 Nowadays, the heirs of Moll have institutionalised themselves into popular ‘sceptics’ organisations, several of whose activists make a comfortable living as self-appointed watchdogs of science. Typically eschewing rational and fair criticisms of parapsychology and other stereotypical ‘pseudo-sciences’, renowned scientists employing a deficit – or ‘empty head’ – model of the public understanding of science tend to delegate their intellectual responsibilities to such scientific laymen and professional debunkers, who propagate a naïve idealised image of scientific practice.102 Analysing popular ‘sceptics’ organisations, several of whose activists have been shown to engage regularly in intellectual dishonesty in the name of ‘science’, ‘reason’ and ‘civilisation’, sociological studies raise concerns regarding the embracing and support of self-styled popular guardians of science by major scientists and philosophers.103 Overall, by preferring as bedfellows popular extremists of scientism over trained scientists with research questions touching upon certain western taboos, academia shows an alarming indifference, or lack of internal control mechanisms, regarding standards of intellectual integrity.
Furthermore, while ‘sceptical’ extremists usually target unorthodox scientists or individuals investigated by them, it has become a standard procedure in psychology, psychiatry and the mind sciences at large to present certain types of deviant experience reported by the general public, and belief in ‘paranormal’ phenomena, as clear-cut clinical evidence for schizotypy and other pathological personality traits.104 Rather than basing itself on impartial empirical research, these diagnostic criteria are a priori and reflect the widespread assumption that science has conclusively refuted the ontological basis of such experiences and beliefs.
Stirred by the above observations, the aim of the present historical case study has been to show the historical and current relevance of certain forms of scientific dogmatism as a problem that deserves focused academic attention. For to tolerate its (very real) effects is not only to risk the destruction of careers of potential scientific innovators, it also threatens to undermine basic ideals and requirements for science to maintain and fulfil its role as an intrinsically progressive rather than ideologically regressive project: self-criticism, epistemic pluralism, and intellectual freedom.
