– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
Historians of psychology generally acknowledge Puységur’s role in “the discovery of the unconscious,” but they usually relegate this role to a subordinate one, to that of a catalyst, as Henri Ellenberger put it in his famous study. For Méheust, this is an inappropriate reading-backwards, an illegitimate adoption of a later ideology that is then anachronistically imposed on an earlier system that did not subscribe to the rules and limitations of the later ideology. And indeed, Puységur’s magnetic sleep, much like Myers’s subliminal Self, was no Freudian unconscious. This was a form of mind of immense metaphysical proportions and astonishing psychical abilities. Accordingly, authors like Méheust and Adam Crabtree reject the notion that Puységur’s magnetic sleep was somehow an ill-formed or incomplete version of a later Freudian psychoanalysis. Rather, Méheust argues, Freud’s psychoanalysis acted in effect as a “Guardian of the threshold”, a compromise-formation that, by incorporating, refashioning, and domesticating select aspects of these new models of the psyche, rendered them relatively harmless to the reigning materialism and scientism of the day. In one of Méheust’s most striking images, psychoanalysis was a kind of “back fire” (contre-feu) set in the hills to stop the spread of an approaching metaphysical blaze. The image is nearly perfect, as it suggests, correctly in my opinion, that psychoanalytic theory participated in the same fiery nature of that which it battled and finally stopped.
Méheust also points out, again correctly in my opinion, that an epistemological system like that of psychoanalysis grants very particular insights that the earlier mesmeric and magnetic models simply could not (e.g., oedipal and libidinal dynamics), even as the earlier models granted very particular insights that psychoanalysis could not (e.g., telepathy and the subliminal Self). Freud thus opened the Western world up to a “new continent” of the psyche with features ignored by the earlier models and now intricately described with what Méheust calls a kind of hallucinatory precision: enter the domains of the primary processes, the archaic, and the infantile. One of the results of Freud’s stunning success, however, was that the earlier discoveries of the magnetists and psychical researchers were effectively overshadowed. Eventually, they more or less disappeared. There is no “free lunch” for Méheust, then, no perfect system. Every system, any system, conceals as it reveals and reveals as it conceals. As Fort once put it so precisely, to “save” one class of data is inevitably to “damn” another: “To have any opinion, one must overlook something.”
This, then, is a story of more than a forgetting, more than a simple suppression. For, as we see here with psychoanalysis, Méheust argues that major twentieth-century intellectual movements incorporated aspects of psychical research, but primarily as a strategy to resist them, to stop them in their tracks, as it were. In this way, these movements functioned like those immense padded stops at the end of a train line that are designed to stop the momentum of a moving locomotive in an emergency. Méheust defines these “stop concepts” (concepts butoirs) as “notions which, no doubt possessing an incontestable heuristic power, have at the same time a strategic function, that of limiting, by tacit convention, an obscure domain of experience, thus stopping the flight of thought into the unknown” In effect, such concepts function on a cultural level as means to stop a moving “train of thought.” They are defense mechanisms invoked by the internal logic of a social system in a cognitive or metaphysical emergency.
By far, Méheust’s most extensive and analyzed example here is again psychoanalysis, particularly in its notion of the unconscious and its methods of dream interpretation. Personally speaking now, I find this view of psychoanalysis as a kind of cultural shock zone before a psychical challenge especially convincing, as it helps me to relate what are essentially two opposite and seemingly exclusive views of psychoanalysis: one, about which I have written a great deal, as a kind of secular mysticism that is uniquely suited to the interpretation of mystical literature (especially erotic mystical literature); the other, by far the more orthodox reading, as a purely materialist and reductionistic method that has no place in its worldview for the mystical or the paranormal. What Méheust does, for me anyway, is show how both of these positions are true, how psychoanalysis, in effect, comes to be between the two competing worldviews, acting as a buffer or stop zone between them. This seems exactly right to me.
Pp. 220-2