Search

The theatre of Robert Pinget was acclaimed at the Avignon Festival till the 1980s, until it became in spite of itself a representative of the theatrical avant-garde greeted by numerous critics and academic texts. It appears, however, that Pinget’s theatre was the victim of a real misinterpretation. Adventurous life, where romance and destiny mingle, lay the foundations of pingétienne irony, this search for personal tone subjects to uncertainties and other contradictions Robert Pinget’s affiliation with Max Jacob’s is an attempt to approach the avant-garde, but to turn away from it in a subtle way in the last moment. This waltz-hesitation of Pinget will be the basis of a tendency to put this work in the “new novel” or the theatrical avant-garde. The literature of Pinget can be considered as a form of the art of the escape the expression of an incessantly renewed amazement through an acousmatic voice. It is through the theory of the double and the quest for secrecy that we can now reposition Pinget’s theater in the perspective of a classical theater on the very margins of the avant-garde and a striking example of an ontological incomprehension between adaptation and the message left by the author.

It is often said that the advent of the Freudian talking cure around 1900 revolutionised the psychiatric setting by giving patients a voice. Less known is that for decades prior to the popularisation of this technique, several researchers had been experimenting with another, written practice aimed at probing the mind. This was particularly the case in France. Alongside neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s spectacular staging of hypnotised bodies, ‘automatic writing’ became widely used in fin-de-siècle clinics and laboratories, with French psychologists regularly asking entranced patients to scribble down words to validate their nascent theories on the divided self. This article traces the emergence of automatic writing in French psychological discourse at the close of the 19th century. By focusing on the early work of Dr Pierre Janet and some of his contemporaries, it re-examines the role played by this practice in what Henri Ellenberger famously called ‘The Discovery of the Unconscious’. It also considers the various levels of reconstruction at play in recent historical accounts. What does it mean to give subjects a (written) voice? How does automatic writing differ from the Freudian talking cure as respective expressions of the unspeakable? And how might these questions inform future historical practice?

It is argued that psi-critics Reber and Alcock have lifted the debate from the impasse concerning the evidence for the existence of psi phenomena, toward focusing on understanding the nature of the phenomena. This focus concerns the demand to show that statistical findings are not anomalies but reflect real cause and effect relationships and to find a common theoretical framework for what otherwise appear to be heterogeneous rogue phenomena. It is maintained here that the demand for showing causal relationships is already met by a methodology using real-time recordings of changing target imagery along with receiver mentation. The demand by critics for a theoretical understanding linking all or most of the rogue phenomena, led to the proposition advanced here concerning thought-forms and co-conscious states. According to this, the many “rogue phenomena” both in psychology and parapsychology (such as automatic writing, lucid dream characters, spirit possessions, and entity experiences in psychedelic states) are to be understood as representing dissociated thought-forms with varying degrees of co-consciousness and in some cases the development of a genuine degree of autonomy and identity. Keywords: altered states, thought-forms, consciousness, psi, skepticism, automatic writing, co-consciousness, possession

The article deals with the influence of Western esotericism and occultism on the life and works of William Butler Yeats and Fernando Pessoa, particularly on their poetic technique of “creative dissociation” or “depersonalization” (which is how Pessoa described his heteronymy). This technique is the main shared characteristic of Yeats’s and Pessoa’s poetics, which is not only paradigmatically modernist but also emphatically esoteric. The term “esoteric” here refers to different currents that evolved throughout history in parallel with organized religion, on the one hand, and Enlightenment rationalism on the other, forming the so-called third pillar of Western culture. Yeats based his theory of the Mask on the ideas he developed during his years as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, while Pessoa’s practice of spiritualism, mediumship, and automatic writing influenced his creation of heteronyms. In this regard, we can view the work of both authors as a modernist artistic expression that was formed in close contact with Western esotericism.

This essay analyses the influence of Capuana on the work of Luigi Piran- dello. From the reflections on spiritualism, and from the supernatural experiences of automatic writing, Capuana elaborates the theory of artistic hallucination and proclaims the principle of an art that creates living characters, capable of acting in reality as au- tonomous beings. Between 1904 and 1915, the young Pirandello gathered some ideas from those reflections, as is clear in the scene of the seance from Il Fu Mattia Pascal and, above all, in both the short story Personaggi and in Six characters in search of an author. The mystery of sensitive perception is the common knot of the two Sicilian writ- ers who, at the cusp of the twentieth century, seem to exchange the baton on questions related to the principle of the duality of being.

This article explores connections between Dadaism and William Carlos Williams. Williams's attitude toward Dadaism was ambivalent. However, he made ample use of the radical strategies of Dadaism to compose four of his more experimental and less studied texts, namely: Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), The Great American Nove l (1923), and the purely Dadaist A Novelette (1932). Dadaism provided Williams with the techniques (illogicality, collage, parody, contradiction, playfulness, confrontation, automatic writing, chaos) and the conceptual scaffolding he needed to pursue his self-appointed—and intrinsically Dadaist—mission to both wipe out and revive American literature.

Recently, automatic writing evaluation (AWE) platform has been widely used in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). It is popular in teaching of college EFL writing for its convenience and efficiency. “Pigai.org” is such an AWE platform with functions of automatic ranking, analyzing and giving advice on users’ English writing. This study aims to explore the influence of students’ writing behaviors based on “Pigai.org” on their writing scores. Firstly, a comparative analysis was conducted between times of submitting writing assignments for self-correction and the increases on scores. The analytical result show a positive correlation between times of self-correction and grade improvement. However, with submitting times increasing, phenomenon of language fossilization in self-correction appeared, which may result from metalinguistic awareness limitation. The result show that instant feedback and self-correction function on “Pigai.org” motivate the students to correct their compositions and improve their metalinguistic awareness.

A definition of virtual or virtuality is not an easy task. Both words are of recent application in Philosophy, even if the concept of virtual comes from a respectable Latin tradition. Today’s meaning brings together the notions of potentiality, latency, imaginary representations, VR, and the forms of communication in digital media. This contagious, and spontaneous synonymy fails to identify a common vein and erases memory as a central notion. In the present essay, I’ll try to explain essential features of the concept of virtual, taking the investigation of memory troubles in Pierre Janet’s work as an exemplification. Pierre Janet’s work represents a rare combination of medical observation and description of symptoms of mental illnesses, therapeutic guidance in hypnosis and philosophical writing about the main psychological themes of an epoch in transition from a Metaphysics of the Soul to the modern Experimental Psychology. Pierre Janet’s intellectual evolution since the 1880s until the end of his life (1947) is dominated by the philosophical project of a theory of the psychic system supported by three basic pillars: a concept of personality, a theory of memory and a sketch of a general theory of conduct. Such complex endeavour cannot be abstracted from the initial connections with Jean-Martin Charcot’s school at La Salpetriere which meant a turning point in the tradition of the “animal magnetism” concerning the treatment of epileptic-hysterical symptoms along with the contributions of Hyppolite Bernheim’s “Nancy School” of hypnotism. J.-M. Charcot’s or H. Bernheim’s theorising about the organic and psychological aspects of the hypnotic treatment of the hysterical symptoms was already aware of the difficulty in dealing with the extent of the dissimulation of the patients regarding the symptoms of the illness, under hypnotic suggestion, even if Charcot insisted in the identification and cataloguing of the organic expressions, such as contractures or the posture of the body in arc during the attacks. The precise location of the “great hysteria” in the organic-psychic corridor was itself a riddle. If a symptom is a special type of sign, in the case of the “great hysteria” nobody knew for sure what it stood for. The clinical symptom of the attack stood for an organic trouble with cerebral causes, a psychological interruption of the normal sensorial and muscular movements or a disguise of the female desire? Pierre Janet described many hysterical patients, somnambulism and multiple personality since his articles in La Revue Philosophique de la France et l’ Etranger, a Journal founded by the philosopher, experimental psychologist and his intellectual predecessor Theodule-Armand Ribot. The description of the case of the “great hysterical” Lucie, treated by him, is an example of a theoretical hypothesising on multiple personality and discontinuity of memories fragments. There are more cases revealing the same relation between hysteria, somnambulism, personality dissociation and “alternating memory”. Decisively inspired by and corroborating P. Janet’s ideas, S. Freud conceived also the essential of the hysterical sicknesses as disorders of memory. The theme of memory came even more to the foreground in the dissertation L’Automatisme Psychologique (1889). Here, the strange world of somnambulism was scrutinised along with hysterical contractures and convulsions, anaesthesia, the compulsion to repetition, obsessions, “automatic writing” in hysterical patients, multiple personality and “alternating memories”. In the depicted cases memory could not be taken as a homogenous series of remembrances or as a stock of disposable information but as a variable of the depth of the personalities’ inner formation. The so-called “seconde existence” of some somnambulists referred not only unconscious representations and unconscious thoughts but complete or inceptive latent personalities provided with multiple virtual existences and multiple memories. Hypnosis was the privileged technique to access to such multiple memories ignored by the official personality. Later and after the writing of his M.D. Dissertation, Contribution a l’ Etude des Accidents Mentaux chez les Hysteriques (1893), P. Janet addressed again the themes of memory and alternating memories in a series of lectures at the College de France (1927–28) but now according to the larger framework of a general theory of conduct which included a description of the social actions participating in the narrative construction of personal memories, and the role of social memory.

This article explores the paradoxes posed by American spiritualist poetry in relation to the female voice within nineteenth-century culture. Due to the associations between the passive and sensitive feminine ideal, as well as women’s supposedly innate moral and spiritual superiority, the ideology embraced by the spiritualist community granted its female followers a central role in the emerging movement while remaining compliant with the values of the period. As an example, spiritualist authors Lizzie Doten and Achsa Sprague made use of trance poetry to challenge the stereotypes which were meant to prevent women from participating in public life. By tracing the connections between mediumship and the act of writing it is possible to disclose the diverse strategies that such poets borrowed from spiritualist discourse in order to adapt their work to a readership that would rather believe in ghosts than in self-sufficient female authorship. Este artículo explora las paradojas planteadas por la poesía espiritista americana en relación con la voz femenina en la cultura decimonónica. Debido a las asociaciones entre el ideal de femineidad pasivo y sensible, además de la superioridad moral y espiritual supuestamente innata de las mujeres, la ideología adoptada por la comunidad espiritista otorgaba a sus seguidoras un papel central en el movimiento emergente mientras, al mismo tiempo, permanecía de acuerdo con los valores de la época. Por ejemplo, las autoras espiritistas Lizzie Doten y Achsa Sprague utilizaron la poesía escrita en trance para poner en cuestión los estereotipos que impedían a las mujeres participar en la vida pública. Al trazar las conexiones entre la naturaleza de la médium y la escritura es posible revelar las diversas estrategias que aquellas poetas tomaban prestadas del discurso espiritista para adaptar su trabajo a lectores que preferían creer en los fantasmas antes que en la autoría femenina autosuficiente.

The text refers to the surrealist invention of automatic writing examined in the anthropological and historical perspective. The aim of the article is to show the relationships of automatic writing with other non-literary cultural practices, especially graphological and spiritualistic. These practices explore the unconscious, strictly individual components of writing, aimed at revealing the social and psychological truth about the subject. They are also to show the domain of what is rejected by modern rationalism. In this article I want to show that the link between modernity, the avant-garde and the subconsciousness or superconsciousness is a complex epistemic fight with modern political and social administration that goes beyond the field of art to the field of broadly understood culture.

This paper proposes a new scientific way to study the concept and technique of automatic writing in Surrealism. Based on the specialists of André Breton’s work and the experts of automatism, we expose here the literary, psychiatric, neurological and parapsychological influences that Breton had to create his own concept and writing technique. We suggest here that we have to add to all these influences, the spiritist one, specifically, that of Allan Kardec, whose doctrine and concepts, such as psychography, were a direct impact to the surrealist automatic writing, even when Breton wanted to dissociate his movement from Kardec’s doctrine. Automatic writing has been studied from many angles, specially from literary and art theory and criticism, but also from history of science, philosophy, neurology, psychology and psychiatry and even from occultism, hermeticism and esoterism. Nevertheless, we don’t know any contemporary scientific experiment on this surrealist practice, maybe because materialist principles that support traditional Neurosciences are unable to study automatic writing. For this reason, we propose to study automatic writing, not from regular Neuroscience principles that we disapprove here, but from a post-materialist Neuroscience viewpoint, which agrees with the values that Surrealism defended

Although Bunuel said the goal of Surrealism was to destroy bourgeois society by attacking its stultifying excess of cultural baggage, in Un Chien andalou we find, surprisingly, an aesthetic of erudition comparable to Gongoras culteranismo. This article examines the traces of a strong Spanish baroque heritage in this film made by Luis Bunuel with help from Salvador Dali, near the beginning of their careers. Although the film is a paragon of Surrealist filmmaking, it also contains a complex interweaving of intertexts taken from the discourses of Freudian psychoanalysis, Greek mythology, baroque painting and poetry, and entomology. The film is, therefore, not so much an example of automatic writing, as its makers preferred to claim, but rather an avant-garde text crafted with recourse to the rich erudition of Spains baroque tradition, what we might call a ‘Surrealist culteranismo’.

Flying tables, moving curtains, deceased relatives appearing out of the dark, noises of knocking, sighing, and crying coming from nowhere—in many homes in central Europe around 1900, strange things happened. From the viewpoint of today, we may consider these phenomena as mere curiosities—as phenomena which seem to be typical of an age of decadence, obscurantism, and hysteria, typical of the so-called fin de siecle in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Munich, and Prague. The question is how the cultural practices of spiritualism and occultism are related to the syndrome of modernity, and how they were used by writers and painters to outline the basics of their aesthetic principles. Automatic writing, photographs of thoughts, and paintings of revenants: are these phenomena proof of the capability of artists and writers to ‘look behind the curtain’? To hear the voices from ‘beyond’? Or are they rather ‘old wine in new bottles’, i.e., traditional patterns of an artist’s self-fashioning? Focusing on some poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, this article looks for a new model of symbolism in art and literature by referring to spiritualism and occultism.

This essay surveys a number of different interpretations of the metaphor of “voice”. It begins by exploring the use of free writing exercises as a means of nurturing the emergence of physical (audible) voice in creative writing classes before assessing some of the ramifications and implications of the trope, both diachronically and synchronically. A key issue of this discussion is whether voice is regarded as individual or social.

Taking seriously the performances of mediumistic trance creativity, this chapter proposes that automatism brought back to life important questions about both the limits and possibilities of authorial agency. In 1896, a Geneva medium named Helene Smith perceived in trance the words from an inhabitant of Mars, "michma michtmon mimini mimatchineg", that her audience dutifully transcribed. A more nuanced view of the psychological tradition, however, might suggest that Breton's automatic discourses entailed serious research into the modalities of unconscious creativity. The Magnetic Fields, written through automatic writing in six consecutive days, indeed became a turning point for the French surrealist movement, whose members increasingly resorted to writing techniques aimed at liberating inhibited forces of creativity. The text presented the trance communications of members of the group during the seances, whose regular sitters included Breton, Max Morise, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel, Benjamin Peret, and Robert Desnos.

Creativity is a multilevel process with a biological substratum. Studies of creativity signify the irreducibility of mind and may show the way beyond the quantum consciousness, unraveling its near-paranormal nature. The human mind should be regarded as a means of communication, constituting both a highly sophisticated receiver and a transmitter. The current genetic and psychopathological views of creativity are rooted in the reductionist model of consciousness. They are challenged by the parapsychological perspectives that offer us a broader vision of consciousness. Without adequate intellectual tools and an expanded model of the brain–mind consciousness complex, studies of creativity are inevitably erroneous. Psychography and evidences of discarnate existence may indicate that some original ideas may be flourishing in another dimension, in readiness for transfer to the minds of creative individuals. The assumed link between generativity and mental disorder can be clarified only when we elucidate the creative process, and parasciences may be able to clarify some of the conceptual confusions. Age related decline of creativity supports strongly the view that creativity has also a biological foundation.

The 1919 edition of CA came out after Yeats’s life had been through the upheavals of repeated proposals of marriage, first to Gonne and then to her daughter Iseult, an actual marriage to George Hyde-Lees and the beginning of the automatic writing sessions. The essays responded to the period during which they were written but all that happened after the Easter Rising could not be recorded. Between 1916 and 1919 Yeats wrote little critical and theoretical prose, being occupied mainly with the battle to have Sir Hugh Lane’s unofficial codicil to his last will approved so that his collection of paintings could be restored to Dublin (UP2 414–26). Furthermore, the theatre, which had suffered financial losses due to the war, kept his attention. However, the limited number of pieces is compensated for by their quality, as it was at that time, between February and May 1917, that he completed what is now regarded as one of his best essays, Per Amica Silentia Lunae (PASL).

Focussing on a few poetic legacies of the 20th century, this article discusses the function of handwriting in which the “manus propria” becomes the “manus aliena.” Handwriting did not lose its significance with the rise of the typewriter; rather, it manifested itself in a new function, one which is not reducible to manualness but which renders psychic automatism visible. In this article, particular attention is devoted to automatic writing among the surrealists and in Fernando Pessoa. At the same time, the function of illegibility is conceptualized, which makes it possible for something to persist in the realm of the recorded that cannot be articulated at the level of literal meaning. If the surrealists initially excepted that automatic writing would grant them the possibility of being liberated from the bonds of the symbolic law, Djuna Barnes reminds us in her play The Antiphon of how the hand, which an alien force begins to guide from within, places us at the very intersection of all the tensions of the symbolic. The final part of the article is devoted to the later poetic legacy of Djuna Barnes; there the text presents precisely the extreme (but never finished) handwritten elaboration of the typed pages in a new manner of existing that resists legibility and transcription, while nullifying the opposition between presence and absence on which the logic of the signifier is based.

French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948–1983) is one of the few composers, perhaps the only one, to use an invented language throughout his entire compositional career. Vivier's use of what he called his langue inventée (‘invented language’) spanned the first vocal work in his catalogue – Ojikawa (1968) – to his final work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1983), completed only shortly before his murder in March 1983. Despite the pervasiveness of this technique – in fact, it is the only technique that remains a constant across all of Vivier's stylistic periods – relatively little attention has been given to the langue inventée in scholarship. This article presents a description of Vivier's langue inventée in three parts, beginning with a general introduction. The second part presents the langue inventée as a product of automatic writing and engages directly with Vivier's sketches to propose a method that Vivier likely used to write much of his langue inventée text. The final section of the article presents Vivier's langue inventée as a form of grammelot – a term revived by playwright, actor and director Dario Fo (1926–), which is associated with the dialect theatre of the Commedia dell'arte tradition. This article aims to demonstrate that Vivier's langue inventée is not a just a string of unintelligible nonsense syllables, but rather a very purposeful grammelot, freely composed in a two-stage approach to automatic writing, that reaches beyond linguistic semantics.

my sane and ordinary inner speech is itself likely to be a swarm of quotations, often from anonymous and vanished others. The dead chatter away as the inner speech of the living.Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, The Force of LanguageAll the dead voices.Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot^What follows is not an attempt to avoid or plug the "epistemological vortex" of The Unnamable (Connor 2010, xix-xx), but to think about mediumship's role in forming this vortex. Voices are extremely important in the trilogy - indeed, C. J. Ackerley suggests that the "mystery of the voice" may be Beckett's "most profound literary creation" (40) - and these acousmatic and disembodied voices often defy explanation. Yet, there are numerous references to voices in Beckett's work that could be interpreted as forms of mediumistic channelling (that is, when a person channels the voice of the dead), such as in the late television play Eh Joe. I want to suggest that this later exploration of mediumship is already present in a more obscured, vague, and spectral form in the trilogy. Peter Fifield has analysed references to voices that persist after death, specifically the protagonists of The Unnamable, Malone Dies and "The Calmative," in terms of Cotard's syndrome; as a supplement to this insightful neuropsychological analysis, I want to suggest that mediumship might also offer an appropriate frame for Beckett's use of the voice in these texts. Beckett was interested in the possibility that strange, unknown, foreign voices might end up in one's brain; the trilogy is testament to this enduring fascination.Numerous critics have linked writing to occultism, with varying degrees of playfulness. In "The Death of the Author," Roland Barthes suggests that writing itself begins when "the voice loses its origin [and] the author enters his own death" (49). Although Barthes doesn't push this metaphor, it skirts close to what we might term the au dela - literally the beyond, the land of the dead. Beckett is quite willing, where Barthes is not, to engage with these occult associations. Beyond Barthes, Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature has suggested that literature and telepathy are deeply interdependent. As Pamela Thurschwell puts it, the telepathic question par excellence is: whose thoughts are these, inhabiting my inner world (125)? This a question The Unnamable asks with frantic urgency. Telepathy shares with mediumship an inexplicable transference of knowledge and voices, but of the living rather than the dead - and the transferred content often remains internal rather than being externally channelled or performed through the voice or automatic writing. Leon Surette has compellingly argued that occultism had an important influence on modernism, suggesting that Ezra Pound read T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) as a text which shared certain traits (its seemingly random jumps in time and space as well as across multiple disembodied voices) with seances (69). But the most prominent modernist with an interest in mediumship is W. B. Yeats, as evidenced in The Words Upon the Window Pane (1934).Beckett's voices raise many issues, as critics have long been aware. As Wilma Siccama observes: "Beckett's characters hardly ever speak 'themselves': voices come to them, or they say it as they hear it" (175). Anthony Cordingley adds that: "the narrators and characters of Beckett's novels are increasingly haunted by the sense that their voices are the legacy of not only 'their' past selves/characters in earlier works by Samuel Beckett, but also of an estranged voice or voices inside them" (135). Extending the trope to the author himself, Siccama suggests that "Beckett does not 'speak' with his own voice: he is more like a medium, a receiver and transmitter of another voice, one that he hears in his head" (186). Although this is a rather unusual proposal, numerous interviews suggest that Beckett consciously invoked the trope of mysterious voices when discussing his compositional process. …

WWE-pigai is a kind of upgraded automated writing evaluation (AWE) system and there are 444,877,400 essays submitted and corrected on this platform. Some previous research on AWE system indicates that students do not tend to utilize AWE feedback to revise essays and improve writing abilities. The major objective of this study is to investigate Chinese EFL college students’ writing through the comparison of WWE-pigai and traditional writing method. The study lasts two terms and 120 Chinese colleges students participate in the research. The findings reveal that WWE-pigai can motivate EFL students to revise and resubmit their essays more than ten times, improve the scores, increase students’ grammar accuracy and vocabulary richness. The surface-level spelling errors (including punctuation mark misuse) are the most common for freshmen. WWE-pigai is not very effective to correct certain grammatical errors besides spelling and conjugation errors. For certain grammatical errors that the students cannot correct by themselves, the assistance of EFL teachers is necessary. We argue that the results reached through this study can offer useful implications for the usage of EFL writing strategies.

Writer and academic Gilly Smith examines the use of a new creative writing technique for school children inspired by the Automatic Writing of the Surrealists and the Free Writing of novelists and p...

The paper examines the experimental design, typography and editorial strategies of the rare avant-garde publication Four Pages - Onanism of Death - And So On (1930), published by Oskar Davičo, Đorđe Kostić and Đorđe Jovanović, probably the first Surrealist Edition of the Belgrade surrealist group. Starting from its unconventional format and the way authors (re)shape and (mis)direct each page in an autonomous fashion, I further analyze the intrinsic interaction between the text, its graphic embodiment and surrounding para-textual elements (illustrations, body text, titles, folding, dating, margins, comments). Special attention is given to the concepts of depersonalization, free association and automatic writing as primary poetical sources for the delinearisation of the reading process and 'emancipation' of the text, its content and syntax as well as its position, direction, and visual materiality on the page. Resisting conventional classifications and simplified distinctions between established print media and genres, this surrealist single-issue placard magazine mixes elements of the poster, magazine, and booklet. Its ambiguous nature leads us toward theoretical discussion of the avant-garde magazine as an autonomous literary genre and original, self-sufficient artwork, as was already suggested by the theory of Russian formalism.

University College London, London, UKControversy and disagreement lie at the heart of scientificadvance and hypnosis has had its fair share of detractors,given its chequered history in some areas of medicine andlong standing association with mysticism and stage hypno-tism (Raz and Shapiro, 2002). Nevertheless, despite someunderstandable scepticism, hypnosis’s compelling behav-ioural and experiential phenomena continued to providea small number of neuroscientists with a rich paradigm forunderstanding the nature of hypnosis and using it to manip-ulate aspects of phenomenological consciousness (Spiegelet al.,1982; Kihlstrom, 1987; Crawford and Gruzelier, 1992;Kirsch and Lynn, 1995; Oakley, 1999; Kosslyn et al., 2000; Razet al., 2002; Barnier and McConkey, 2003).Recently, however, hypnosis has begun to attract renewedinterest from cognitive and social neuroscientists interestedin using hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion to test predictionsabout normal cognitive functioning (Jamieson, 2007; Oakleyand Halligan, 2009; Terhune and Kadosh, 2012; Del Casaleetal.,2012;Priftisetal.,2011;Connors,2012;Hoeftetal.,2012).This renewed interest was partly facilitated by the growingacceptance of consciousness as a legitimate field of enquiryfor cognitive neuroscience (Marcel and Bisiach, 1988;Velmans, 1996) but also critically, by the findings fromneurophysiological tools (Hinterberger et al., 2011) and inparticular the widespread availability of functional-imagingtechniques (Raz and Shapiro, 2002; Oakley and Halligan,2009). In tandem with improvements in experimental designand subject screening, these studies are now making inroadsinto the functional anatomy of hypnosis (Jamieson, 2007)aswell as paving the way for its use as an experimental tool forneuroscience research (Oakley, 2006). In particular thesestudies have begun to address the sceptic’s concern regardingthe subjective reality and comparability of hypnoticallysuggested phenomena previously dependent on the subjects’largely unverifiable report and behaviour (Raz and Campbell,2011; Terhune and Kadosh, 2012).As one indication of the progress made, the cover of thisspecial issue brings together one of the very first and one ofthe most recent ways of demonstrating objectively the powerof suggestion. The foreground contains Chevreul’s pendulumwhile the background provides a representation of brainactivations seen following hypnotic suggestion during func-tional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The pendulumeffect was described in 1833 by the French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul in an open letter to the physicist Andre´Ampe`re (Chevreul, 1833; Spitz, 1977). The effect involvesamplifying small, unconscious (ideomotor) movements of thehand, arm and body of the individual holding the pendulum.The origin and direction of the movement is determined bythecontentoftheconcurrentsuggestionsprovidedbyanotherperson, by environmental cues and/or by implicit expectan-cies (via autosuggestion) on the part of the person holding thependulum, who experiences the movement as occurring ‘allby itself’. This ideomotor response captured by the Chevreulpendulum effect is a classic hypnotic phenomenon respon-sible for the apparently spontaneous movements experiencedin the context of water divining, automatic writing, the use ofouija boards and table turning in se´ances. It is also a goodexample of ‘cold control’ e described by Dienes and Hutton(2013). The background image on the cover features approxi-mate surface projections of activated voxels revealed by fMRIduring hypnotically suggested heat pain (Derbyshire et al.,2004), superimposed on a glass brain. These activations weresimilar to those produced by an actual painful heat stimulusbut different from those seen when the hypnotised subjectwas instructed to imagine the same pain experience.

World War I erupted at a time when artistic avant-gardes were particularly thriving across Europe. Young poets, writers, painters and sculptors were called to arms or voluntary enrolled to fight, and several of them died during the conflict. Among others, it dramatically changed their creative output, either through specific wounds or through personal encounters and experiences. These individual events then significantly modified the course of the literary and artistic avant-garde movements. Three particularly illustrative examples of avant-garde French poets are presented here: Andre Breton (1896-1966), Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) and Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961). The deep source of the surrealist movement can indeed be found in Andre Breton's involvement as an auxiliary physician with critical interest in neuropsychiatry, which caused him to discover automatic writing. Guillaume Apollinaire's right temporal subdural hematoma strongly modified his emotional state and subsequent artistic activities. Alternatively, after losing his right, writing hand, Blaise Cendrars not only substituted it with a phantom but also rapidly switched from poetry to novels after he learnt to write with his left hand.

The discussion about facilitated communication is mainly about the origin of the messages produced—that is, whether they originated in the disabled person or the facilitator. The article by Boynton (2012) directs the focus of this discussion from the disabled person to the facilitator. She tells her own story as a facilitator, including how accusations were made about sexual abuse through the process of facilitation, and raises the question of how this could happen. The present article discusses the nature of the facilitation process and why accusation of sexual and other forms of abuse have been so frequent. Facilitated communication may be conceived as a form of automatic writing, and studies of facilitated communication represent evidence concerning human consciousness and how the mind works. Source of funding: No source of funding reported.

The article is devoted to three films made by Jean Cocteau - Le Sang d'un poиte, Orphйe, Le Testament d'Orphйe, that form a trilogy of a kind. The author analyses the main image system of the trilogy in Apollonic and Dyonisic terms and comes to certain typological conclusions about Cocteau's mythology. Beside exploring the "modern" myth of Poet and Death, the article describes the cultural context around each of the mentioned ilms

One of the earliest observations Frieda Wroth makes in Michiel Heyns's third novel, The Typewriter's Tale (2005), (1) about her position as amanuensis to the writer in Henry James's household is that she is "neither guest nor servant". This rueful remark is prompted by her perception of the "distinctions and boundaries, differences subtle but strong, between 'living in' servants and 'living out'" (TT: 6); boundaries which govern her relations with the domestic staff and dictate, for example, which entrances she may or may not use to enter James's house; and yet others which define her relations with James and his guests: "She was the typewriter, tout court, and persons of quality did not as a rule dine with their typewriters" (TT: 33). However, the liminal condition of being "betwixt and between"--to use Victor Turner's helpful phrase (1992: 50)--extends beyond the petty imperatives of domestic and social privilege. It also describes her status as both writer and amanuensis; of being, on the one hand, in possession of a keen "intellectual hunger" (TT: 76) and in an exclusive position of physical and mental proximity with her master, but fated, on the other, to be little more than a device, or a "wistful presence peering in at the windows, as it were, of the stronghold of his art" (TT: 77). Intriguingly--and this will be the subject of this essay--the conditions that describe Frieda's occupation, as well as the role she plays in the novel, index Heyns's own narrative practice in The Typewriter's Tale as a writer of biographical fiction. My interest here is in the particular characteristics, opportunities and pitfalls associated with writing a novel about a historical person who is also a writer. This type of novel represents a relatively new and increasingly popular trend in contemporary fiction, and one in which Henry James has been given a startlingly central and recurring position. (2) The most obvious connection between Frieda and Heyns, wherein the allegorical dimension of the story is established, is suggested in the penultimate sentence of the novel, where Frieda sits down at her typewriter, and writes the opening sentence of the novel we have just finished reading. The boundaries between narrator, central consciousness and author are substantially blurred thereby, and the sympathetic link between Frieda and Heyns is made clear. Like Frieda, Heyns is neither "guest nor servant" of Henry James. Heyns's status with respect to his subject is similarly liminal: he is neither exclusively a reader of James's work (a "guest"), nor biographer of his life (a "servant"). Nor is he purely an "author" in the Romantic, pre-Barthesian sense of one who "originates". His position is characterised by an unavoidable belatedness, yet his imaginative participation in James's life story is in many respects primary, creative and original, too. Like Frieda, Heyns is "betwixt and between". His erratic tenancy of these domains (reader, biographer, author) is motivated and complicated by a conflict that might be considered particular to writers of biographical fictions about authors--and especially about Henry James, who famously maintained a vigilant resistance to personal exposure, much to the chagrin of his biographers and the editors of his letters. (3) Just as Frieda cannot repress her need to write, in spite of James's demand that she be "blank" (TT: 15) and "non-participatory" (TT: 16; italics in original), so Heyns cannot resist the temptation to "write" Henry James. On the one hand, to write a fiction about Henry James, to turn him into a partially fictional character, is to succumb to the beguiling chimera of intimacy that is created by a deep-seated familiarity with James's texts: an illusion of transparent access instantiated by automatic writing in The Typewriter's Tale. On the other hand, this fantasy of untrammelled access is attenuated because neither James's material being nor his imaginative self can be satisfactorily or completely recuperated, and the writer's relationship with his subject becomes uncomfortably similar to that of the "living out" servant. …

The article discusses the relationship between Kruchenykh's esthetic conceptions and French surrealism. The techniques of the awakening of the subconscious, derived from psychiatry (Freud) and mysticism – automatic writing, rapid writing et cetera – become the most important means, in the words of Artaud, “to change the very starting point of artistic creation”.

This essay in the history of psychoanalysis investigates C.G. Jung's psychotherapeutic technique of active imagination, a state of consciousness in which images from the unconscious are brought to conscious awareness and are expressed artistically in a number of different forms such as writing, painting, sculpting, or dance. This essay outlines the state of psychotherapeutics at the turn of the twentieth century and situates Jung's practice of active imagination in other researches concurrently being undertaken in France, England, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States.

After realising Beckett’s unquestionable presence in her choreographic work, F embarks on a journey whose aim is to identify the ways in which Beckett appears lately in contemporary choreography. The article focuses on choreographers Vera Mantero, Maguy Marin and Jerome Bel and discusses their works and thinking in relation to several points on the work of Beckett raised by Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Steven Connor and Jonathan Ree. In particular, F explores Mantero’s suggestion that with Beckett ‘thinking replaces talking’ alongside the choreographer’s question ‘what am I saying when I’m dancing?’ and her use of language and automatic writing when creating choreographic work. Furthermore, Marin’s reflections on her recent work Umwelt lead to a consideration of her views on the notion of exhaustion in Beckett, both as physical exhaustion of the human body and as in the exhaustion of possibilities via combinatorial mathematics. F then picks on Bel’s attempt to re-define theatre via the scene of Krapp listening to his tapes or eating his banana, in order to shed light on how such view of theatre allows Bel to arrive at a maximum of theatre via a minimum of action. Finally, F draws on her encounter and discussion with choreographer Xavier Le Roy, to highlight a sense of Beckett’s pervasive ‘everywhereness’ in contemporary choreography; such presence on the one hand appears as a preoccupation with structure and method, and with the notion of a philosophy of theatre, but on the other hand seems to resist any attempt to pin down what exactly it is and how it is really manifested. What emerges is a sense of the ‘very much Beckett’ and the ‘not at all Beckett’ appearing at the same time, so that Beckett’s presence is finally defined as that of a phantom who hasn’t appeared yet, but at the same time cannot cease appearing; F’s attempt proves justified, but is also in a way always bound to fail.

Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison have a distinctive place among authors who have apparently lived legendary lives, inasmuch as numerous biographies have been dedicated to them as well as biopics such as Agnieszka Holland’s Total Eclipse (1995), which focused on the relationship between Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, and Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991). In particular, biographies on both Rimbaud and Morrison generally include accounts of many experiences with intoxicants of different kinds. From Rimbaud’s first taste of Parisian life in the autumn-winter of 1871 that has been described as ‘five months of drunkenness and squalor’, to Morrison’s summer of 1965 in which he ‘began taking daily doses of LSD’, there have been countless tales of their excesses (Robb, 2000, p. 153; Davis, 2004, p. 72). Nonetheless, the effective function of mind-altering substances in the artistic process of either of them is still unknown. It is thus imperative to abandon the figure of the myth and approach that of the author when dealing with a topic such as intoxication in Rimbaud and Morrison or, more precisely, to follow Etiemble’s famous suggestion regarding Rimbaud’s poetry: ‘revenir au texte, a son sens’ (1952, p. 444).1

On 9 May 1912, William Butler Yeats was attending a s6ance in London when a mysterious voice emerged from the end of a tin trumpet placed in the middle of the table around which the participants sat. Addressing itself to "Mr. Gates," the voice declared that it belonged to a spirit that had been with the poet since his birth.' In what Yeats later noted to be a stagy Irish accent, this spirit ultimately named itself as "Leo the writer and explorer" (A, 19). Subsequent research by Yeats turned up the figure of Leo Africanus, born alHasan ibn Mohammed al-Wezaz, al-Fasi, the sixteenth-century North African Christian convert, papal advisor, and writer of the most authoritative early modern account of North African geography, translated into English by John Pory as A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600). What followed was a six-year esoteric dialogue between Yeats and his imagined Africanus through various psychic media such as s6ances, card readings, and automatic writing sessions. Though skeptical, Yeats began to write a series of letters to Africanus, as well as their replies. He notes in his s6ance diaries, "He asked me to write a letter addressed to him as if to Africa giving all my doubts about spiritual things and then to write a reply as if from him to me. He would control me in this reply so that it would be really from him" (A, 13). These letters, only recently published, indicate the centrality of Africanus to Yeats's poetic and philosophical project. His discovery that the sixteenth-century Moor was "a poet among his people" (A, 19) proved irresistible to such a lover of the dialectic, and Yeats quickly adopted Leo as his antiself or daimon, an objectively existing spirit figure which came to replace his earlier concept of mask. Africanus was the poet's counter-personality: "He was drawn to me because in life he had been all undoubting impulse . . . I was doubting, conscientious and timid. His contrary and by association with me would be made not one but two perfect natures" (A, 13). This esoteric formulation proved central to Yeats's artistic project, as

In drawing out the uncanny relationship between Andre Breton's Nadja and Leonora Carrington's Down Below , this essay examines surrealism's ideological and aesthetic construction and representation of madness. In leaving behind his experiments with automatic writing, inspired by his early psychiatric training with shell-shocked soldiers, Breton turned to the "outmoded' figure of the hysteric to define surrealism's revolt against the Cartesian subject of bourgeois, liberal ideology. But although Nadja's madness fuels the creative and revolutionary significance of Breton's project, her real-life incarceration haunts the sublime nature of his project, serving to unearth the ghosts of his own past. By the time Carrington came to write of her own experience of psychosis over a decade later, Nadja had already become the iconic surrealist text on madness. While Down Below is framed within the rubric of surrealist investigation, it nevertheless interrogates a male modernist reading of the madwoman, an image desce...

The second volume of R.F. Foster's biography, W.B. Yeats: A Life: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (the first volume was the award-winning The Apprentice Mage) clearly completes a major achievement in literary biography every bit as masterful and illuminating as Richard Ellmann's life of James Joyce. Despite this obvious achievement, however, I come away from finishing my reading of it disturbed. What disturbs me is not the usual kind of complaint about literary biography, that the biographer has poured so many facts into his text the writer's work has been overwhelmed by the contexts of history and personal life. Foster has already demonstrated brilliantly in the first volume, and he continues the demonstration here, that he can marshal all the facts and place the work in context and still do justice to its large formal structures and major themes. Although close textual analysis of a specialized kind is apparently not Foster's forte, for purposes of literary biography it is not really necessary, and in fact would just get in the way, stopping the onward dynamic thrust of the story he has to tell. Basically, that story is how the fifty-two year old W.B. Yeats (whom Foster consistently refers to, for short, as WBY), on marrying the twenty-four year old Georgie Hyde Lees in October 1917 finds not only an erotic and domestic partner, willing to bear him children and run his everyday life more efficiently and sympathetically than anyone else ever could. But he also finds, for the first decade of their marriage at least, an occult muse whose automatic writing, dream-visions, and oracular medium-like trances give him, as the spiritual Instructors later claims, "metaphors foi poetry," not to mention the most sustained and successful sexual relationship in his life. Indeed, she gives him, as Foster shows, metaphors for the experience of poetic inspiration and visionary

Yeats's Vision Papers, Volume 4 collects "The Discoveries of Michael Robartes," a dialogue between Robartes and Owen Aherne, an untitled dialogue on the same topic, and Version B [The Great Wheel" and "The Twenty-Eight Embodiments"], a very early version of the central sections of both versions (1925, 1937) of A Vision. All four of these fugitive prose pieces represent the earliest available attempts by Yeats to begin to make sense of the materials collected in the previous three volumes of Yeats's Vision Papers, the many but still incomplete transcriptions of Yeats's sessions with his young wife, Georgie Hyde Yeats, as he tries to make sense of the various communications, in the form of automatic writing, from the often antic spirits. As becomes clearer every year, the practice of mediumship for Yeats served as an effective model for his own method of poetic composition. This fourth volume completes the publication of all the available materials which went into the work on A Vision. Unfortunately, there are gaps in the record, perhaps due to the sensitivity of the spiritual communications, but what there is here and in the previous volumes makes it crystal clear that Yeats, whatever hesitations and qualifications he often expressed publicly, acted as if his occult beliefs were true. I think that the role of the occult

While completely repudiating representational or realistic art in The Yellow Sound, Wassily Kandinsky embraced some models of avant-garde drama and prefigured others. Influenced by the principles of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the symbolist theory of “correspondences,” Kandinsky also explored some of the themes of expressionistic drama, such as the eternal contradiction between Dionysian frenzy (yellow) and Apollonian “classicism” (blue) and the never-ending battle between the spiritual and the physical. In emphasizing the importance of collage and the juxtaposition of different arts within a total work of art, he also anticipated the dadaist theories of automatic writing, chance collages, and random stage compositions. Finally, however, The Yellow Sound in its pure form cannot be identified with any particular avant-garde movement: instead, it is sui generis, presenting its own form and perhaps its own movement. This essay explores The Yellow Sound—a stage composition, as Kandinsky described it—in depth.

A category of religious experience that still preserves much of the original blurring and fusion between art and religion is mediumistic or spirit painting. Performed by spiritualist mediums in different locations around the world, this form of religious experience is characterized by the supposed ability of an individual to serve as an instrument for deceased artists to continue to perform their works. In the manner of so-called automatic writing, mediums try to reproduce aspects of the style of deceased painters, in order to demonstrate their identity and survival of bodily death. Little scientific research has been conducted concerning this topic. We present a brief analysis of painting activity performed by Jacques Andrade, a Brazilian medium. Born in 1945, Andrade, who has been active in the Brazilian Kardecist movement for many years, has dedicated most of his religious life to mediumistic painting at his center (The Leonardo da Vinci Salon of Mediumistic Art). Data about the medium were collected on several different occasions, from 1998 to 2013, and include psychophysiological measures (hand temperature, heart rate, bilateral skin conductance, muscle tension, and electrical brain activity), psychological measures (Dissociative Experiences Scale, Tellegen Absorption Scale, Revised Transliminality Scale, and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire), artistic material, observational data (photographs of paintings, observations of the medium in action), and some basic socio-demographic and biographical information. Basically we sought to evaluate: a) general aspects of the painting technique and style employed by the medium, b) the main features of his pictorial production, and c) the general behavior shown by the medium during the mediumistic activity. In an effort to combine and integrate our findings about this case, we propose a biopsychosocial approach to the study of what might be called creative dissociation. NeuroQuantology | December 2013 | Volume 11 | Issue 4 | Page 544-572

Our sense of self includes awareness of our thoughts and movements, and our control over them. This feeling can be altered or lost in neuropsychiatric disorders as well as in phenomena such as “automatic writing” whereby writing is attributed to an external source. Here, we employed suggestion in highly hypnotically suggestible participants to model various experiences of automatic writing during a sentence completion task. Results showed that the induction of hypnosis, without additional suggestion, was associated with a small but significant reduction of control, ownership, and awareness for writing. Targeted suggestions produced a double dissociation between thought and movement components of writing, for both feelings of control and ownership, and additionally, reduced awareness of writing. Overall, suggestion produced selective alterations in the control, ownership, and awareness of thought and motor components of writing, thus enabling key aspects of automatic writing, observed across different clinical and cultural settings, to be modelled.

The year is 1920. Cottingley Dell, just outside of Bradford. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle opens a letter from Edward Gardner, a well-known lecturer on occult subjects and president of the Blavatsky Lodge of Theosophy in London. Gardner reports an amazing discovery: fairies have been photographed in the north of England. The same letter informed Doyle that the images capture an angelic ten-year-old girl, Frances Griffiths, playing with hand-sized and togaed pixies. The photographs were taken about three years earlier by Frances’s sister Elsie: Elsie said she wanted to photograph them, and begged her father to lend his camera. For long he refused, but at last she managed to get the loan of it and one plate. Off she and Frances went into the woods near a water-fall. Frances ‘ticed’ them, as they call it, and Elsie stood ready with the camera. Soon the three fairies appeared, and one pixie dancing in Frances’ aura. Elsie snapped and hoped for the best. It was a long time before the father would develop the photo, but at last he did, and to his utter amazement the four sweet little figures came out beautifully!1 Gardner wrote excitedly to the girls’ mother, Polly, asking for permission to see more photos and to interview the children. The mother, a fellow Theosophist, was honored and agreed.2 After just a single meeting with the girls, Gardner speculated that the fairies had appeared to the children because they were both natural mediums, especially Frances, whom Gardner describes as having “a beautifully clear, yet loosely knit, etheric aura, yielding easily accessible ectoplasmic material.”3

For all of their apparent flash and flaunting, British decadents have proven notoriously difficult to pin down, especially when it comes to prose writers. Some authors, such as Walter Pater and Vernon Lee, were never interested in being connected with the term ‘decadent’, while others, such as Oscar Wilde, presented themselves or their works as deca- dent only to turn around and contradict their claims. Indeed, it is rare to find a piece of British prose of any considerable length that does not repeatedly move away from beingdecadent to describing decadence— that is, from embodying its character to representing it at a remove. By the 1890s, the very subject of representation over embodiment—surface over essence, mask over face—had saturated the discourse of decadence to such a degree as to push it over the edge into the self-referential. Writing in 1893, Arthur Symons, in his article ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, portrays decadence as ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refine- ment, a spiritual and moral perversity’.1 In the end, for Symons, there can be no coherent decadent self, only ‘a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul’.2 How, then, could decadent prose hope to trace the form of a phenomenon characterized bv disembodiment?

The year is 1884. Philadelphia . A LONE woman, dressed in black, leaves the house of Shakespeare scholar H. H. Furness. In her bag is a train ticket to New York. She has little else in the world. She is 51 years old, destitute, single, childless, nearly friendless, and longing for a drink. She is Margaret Fox, the high priestess of American Spiritualism.

The year is 1913. Edinburgh . We are at the deathbed of Edward Dowden, author of Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), Shakespeare Primer (1877), and a study of The Sonnets (1881). It should have been a moment of Shakespearean serenity and supinity. As Gordon McMullan’s recent Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2010) documents, throughout much of the nineteenth century, critics and biographers generally linked Shakespeare’s work to his life and invariably did so with one aim in mind: to demonstrate that Shakespeare himself progressed morally and spiritually, that he was a “genius standing at the brink of heaven.”1 What was so of Shakespeare was equally true, at least in theory, of those who spent a lifetime studying his works. It certainly should have been true of Dowden, who so often claimed a penetrative understanding of Shakespeare’s artistic and spiritual coalescence. In Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) he famously conflated the wizard Prospero with Shakespeare: “we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakspere himself … If I were to allow my fancy to run out in play after such an attempted interpretation, I should describe Prospero [i.e., Shakespeare] as the man of genius, the great artist, lacking at first in practical gifts which lead to material success, and set adrift on the perilous sea of life in which he finds his enchanted island, where he may achieve his works of wonder.”2