The Muse of Automatic Writing

Hélène Smith (real name Catherine-Elise Muller, 1861, Martigny (the capital of the French-speaking district of Martigny in the canton of Valais in Switzerland.)― 1929 Geneva) was a famous late-19th century French psychic. She was known as "the Muse of Automatic Writing" by the Surrealists, who viewed Smith as evidence of the power of the surreal, and a symbol of surrealist knowledge. Late in life, Smith claimed to communicate with Martians, and to be a reincarnation of a Hindu princess and Marie Antoinette.

Automatic writing in "Martian" produced by Smith at a séance

Professor Flournoy’s studies of the medium Hélène Smith were turned into a book, Des Indesà la planète Mars, which caused a considerable sensation in psychological and parapsychological circles in Europe and the United States. In it he described the phenomenon of "cryptamnesia," forgotten memories that reappear without being recognized by the subject, who believes they are new. These memories disappear because of their association with childhood sexual emotions. These involve a "subliminal process capable of achieving a degree of complexity and extent comparable to the work of composition and reflection in the thinker or novelist." They are "reminiscences or momentary returns to earlier phases, which have long since been forgotten and which, normally, should have been absorbed during the individual's development instead of recurring in strange forms."

Flournoy asserted that imagination and cryptomnesia were the sole sources of a large number of mediumistic communications. With regard to the remaining part, he referred to the supernormal powers of man as a fact which seemed to make superfluous the assumption of the participation of the dead.

Professor Flournoy's experiments with these mediums resulted in his talking of silliness, childish joy in self -invented comedies, and relapse to a lower stage of development than that occupied by the sensitives in their waking condition.
 Flournoy found that the Martian language was nothing but a childish translation from French; the words were changed but the syntax remained the same. Jung’s dissertation, published in 1903,  "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena." 

The same opinion has been set forth by the German philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann, whose name was often mentioned by psychical researchers. It is by means of telepathy, psychometry, and clairvoyance, he argued, that the contents of the spiritistic messages are obtained, which give them the appearance of originating from the departed. Where the line is to be drawn between the said phenomena is less certain, but relatively of small importance ; clairvoyance exists at any rate in the shape of prevision, as the perception of what has not yet occurred cannot be due to the reading of other people's thoughts.

Hartmann has made his argument against spiritism famous by connecting it with his doctrine of a world-soul, or central mind, in which all individual minds have their root. Through it they can get into communication with each other as over the telephone — a simile he has no hesitation in using — and from it they can draw, not only the particulars of the present world-state in distant places, but also the particulars of future events. For in the central or absolute mind the threads of all casual series meet in one single all-seeing; its omniscience embraces implicitly in the present world-state the future as well as the past.

Hartmann assigned to certain people a supernormal power of perceiving things which were not only distant with regard to space but might also be with regard to time, and which in the latter case might belong not only to the past but even to the future. We found mediums, or automatists, who possessed this power, and we saw that it was, like cryptomnesia, utilized for the fabrication of romances in which their waking consciousness had no share, but considered the products of foreign beings.