Mythopoetic Function of Alternate Personalities: Illustrated by Famous Medium, Helene Smith, in Théodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars

How does the mind create fiction and myth? And how can we ever find out? Fiction writing is done in private. And even fiction writers, themselves, are not entirely sure how they do it, which suggests that it takes place in “the unconscious.”

What goes on in “the unconscious”? And why study mediums to find out? Because mediums make a public spectacle of what usually takes place in private and out of awareness. Mediums turn off their regular consciousness by going into a trance, allowing their “unconscious” to come out and have its say.

“The mythopoetic function…Its great explorer was Flournoy with his research on Helen Smith and other mediums” (1, p. 318).

From India to the Planet Mars

According to historian Sonu Shamdasani, in his Introduction (which has what is relevant to this post): “At the end of the nineteenth century, many of the leading psychologists—Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Bleuler, James, Myers, Janet, Bergson, Stanley Hall, Schrenck-Notzing, Moll, Dessoir, Richet, and Flournoy—frequented mediums…What took place in the seances enthralled the leading minds of the time, and had a crucial bearing on many of the most significant aspects of twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and painting, not to mention psychical research…

“For [Frederic] Myers, whom Flournoy called the founder of subliminal psychology…in contradistinction to his contemporaries such as Freud and Janet, the unconscious, or as he termed it, the subliminal—the secondary personalities revealed in trance states, dreaming, crystal gazing, and automatic writing—potentially possessed a higher intelligence than one’s waking or supraliminal personality and often served to convey messages of guidance…

“Myers ended up embracing the spiritist hypothesis and attempted to unite science and religion in an overarching synthesis…Flournoy, by contrast, attempted to maintain a purely psychological viewpoint…

“For [William] James and Flournoy, the investigation of trance states was a central question if a psychology worthy of the name was to develop. Within this enterprise, the investigation of mediums held pride of place…

“The innovation of From India to the Planet Mars was that it was the first major study of what Myers called pseudo-possession, whose main goal was to disprove the supernatural origin of the phenomena and to give an account of their psychogenesis. In such a manner it established a devastating skeptical paradigm in psychical research…

“Cryptomnesia plays a crucial role in Flournoy’s analysis as the main alternative paradigm to the spiritualistic hypothesis…For Flournoy what was presented as a memory—in the case of Helene, of an anterior existence—in actuality represented a hidden and forgotten memory that had been through a process of subconscious elaboration…Spiritualists were up in arms about the book, for understandable reasons…

The “transition from spiritualism to multiple personality is very clearly developed in From India to the Planet Mars. While Flournoy rejects the extrapsychic existence of the figures in Helene’s trances, and regards them as intrapsychic, he still regards them as personalities…the psychologization of mediumship leads to a multiple personality model. From India to the Planet Mars was the first psychological study of multiple personality to become a best-seller…

“Throughout From India to the Planet Mars, Flournoy never ceases to marvel at the artistic and dramatic powers of Helene’s subconscious creative imagination. On one reading what is left of her romances when shorn of their spiritualistic garb is precisely art…"

The Introduction to From India to the Planet Mars concludes with this quotation from Ellenberger (Psychology Today, March 1973, p. 56), the historian of the unconscious quoted at the beginning of this post:

“Flournoy was a great explorer of the mythopoetic unconscious, particularly in his book From India to the Planet Mars…Today we seldom hear of the mythopoetic unconscious. What psychoanalysts call fantasies represent a minute part of mythopoetic manifestations. We have lost sight of the importance of this terrible power—a power that fathered epidemics of demonism, collective psychoses among witches, revelations of spiritualists, the so-called reincarnations of mediums, automatic writing, the mirages that lured generations of hypnotists, and the profuse literature of the subliminal imagination…unfortunately neither Freud nor Jung became aware of the mythopoetic unconscious” (2, pp. xi-li)

And note: The thing that mediumship makes public is that the mythopoetic “unconscious" is populated by, and is a function of, alternate personalities, who, even when behind-the-scenes, and out of the awareness of the regular self, are usually conscious, and often busy making things up.

1. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York, Basic Books, 1970.

2. Théodore Flournoy. From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages [1899/1901]. With a Forward by C. G. Jung and Commentary by Mireille Cifali. Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994.