Cryptamnesia

Théodore Flournoy (1854 –1920) was a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva and author of books on spiritism and psychic phenomena.

Interested in philosophy and religion, Théodore Flournoy spent time in Germany to familiarize himself with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose work he later taught at the university. After becoming a medical doctor, he was appointed a professor of physiological psychology at the University of Geneva in 1891.

His 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."

Cryptamnesia is unconscious. "The unconscious possesses a marvelous ability for dramatization, personification, and psychological proliferation; it is endowed with a creative imagination." Flournoy went on to claim that "The unconscious, [is a] submerged sphere from which our instinct for physical and moral preservation confusedly arise, our feelings about sex, about spiritual and physical shame, everything that is most obscure and the least rational in the individual." Concerning dreams, he wrote "By rising up from our hidden source, by throwing light on the intrinsic nature of our unconscious emotions, by revealing our ulterior motives and the instinctive slope of our associations of ideas, the dream is often an instructive probe into the unknown layers that support our ordinary personality."

Flournoy used these hypotheses to explain the supranormal or parapsychological phenomena he studied. They helped compensate for the obscurity and misery of everyday life, attempted to realize sexual desires arising from a forgotten childhood, and served as defenses against internal threats of madness.

Freud was writing about the process of infantile amnesia at the same time, and it is clear just how close Flournoy's claims were to Freud's position. Like his friends William James and Frederick Myers, Flournoy did not treat patients; these men were observers—though that did not prevent them from proposing hypotheses for acting on and modifying phenomena. Flournoy was also one of the few scholars of his time to embrace William James' view of the prime reality of non-dual consciousness (which he dubbed "sciousness") as expressed in his essay, Radical Empiricism.

Professor Flournoy was right when he pictured mediums whose statements originated from their own dream-world, whose non-normal faculties at best consisted in their being able to remember in a trance-condition things that had long ago been obliterated from their waking consciousness, or had perhaps scarcely reached it.

Professor Flournoy related:

" There was hardly, a prominent or well- known man in Geneva who had departed this life who did not soon afterwards manifest to me through some medium, but invariably these manifestations corresponded to the medium's idea of the deceased persons rather than to my own relations with them."

He deduced pure imagination sufficed to explain the phenomenon ; clairvoyance did not play a part.

The most famous among the Genevese mediums, Helen Smith, who composed in trance romances about the conditions on the planet Mars, and for one thing invented for the use of the inhabitants a language that in the most naive manner imitated her own mother-tongue.

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.

Human beings may think and act and manifest aptitudes hitherto unsuspected, unknown to themselves, and without the possibility of their attributing the facts to themselves.
The following, quoted from Esprits et mediums, by Professor Flournoy, is a typical example:

Madame Dupond, a well-bred and cultured lady from Geneva, of literary taste and philosophical and religious leanings, took up the study of spiritism at the age of forty-five. She tried automatic writing, and, at the end of eight days, was able to get the names of dead relatives and friends, who gave her messages of a philosophico-religious nature. About three days later, after having received various communications, her pencil wrote suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, the name of a young Frenchman she knew Rodolphe X., who had recently entered a religious order in Italy. As she did not know that he was dead, she was surprised and shocked; but her hand continued to write, confirming the sad news in the following circumstantial details :
" I am Rodolphe. I died last night at eleven o'clock, the 23rd. I had been ill for several days, and I was not able to write. I had an inflammation of the lungs, caused by a sudden change in the weather. I died without pain, and I have been thinking of you. ... I am in space. ... I see your parents, and I like them also. Good-by. ... I am going to pray for you. ... I am no longer a Catholic, I am a Christian."

After her first astonishment, Madame Dupont believed more and more in the authenticity of this message, because for almost a week she continued to receive communications from Rodolphe, making numerous allusions to their past relations. She had met Rodolphe, who was then a priest, during a stay in the South the preceding spring. He had returned from Italy, where he had spent the winter on account of his poor health, and had stopped a few days at the same hotel. Between this Genevese, a confirmed Protestant and republican, and this man from the north of France, an ardent legitimist and Catholic, in spite of the difference in their ages (he was scarcely twenty), a real moral and intellectual intimacy was formed, as a natural con- sequence of the analogy of their temperaments and the unity of their idealistic aspirations. Each of them had tried, without success, to convert the other to his own ideas; and when they were separated, they had continued this discourse by correpondence, even after Rodolphe had entered the religious order, pouring out their souls to each other in full confidence. At the moment of Madame Dupond's automatic writing, it was Rodolphe who owed a letter to his friend.

Do we not see there an excellent case of the apparent intervention of a " discarnated spirit " to use the expression familiar to the partizans of the spiritistic doctrine in the affairs of this world?

Unfortunately, six days after the first communication from the supposed dead man: . . . there reached her by post a letter from Rodolphe, who, far from being dead, was in perfect health. It shook Madame Dupond's recent spiritistic convictions so thoroughly that she was discouraged from pursuing further such disconcerting experiments.

It is necessary to read in Professor Flournoy's book (Esprits et mediums) he detailed a penetrating analysis to which he has submitted all the circumstances of this interesting case, and which fully justifies, we think [see EMILE BOIRAC], the conclusion he has reached: viz., that all the communications received by Madame Dupond reflected her own dispositions, conscious or not, and corresponded exactly to those which could not fail to be in her. " She alone, in other words, and not Rodolphe, was dead at that moment, and can be considered as the real source of the communications."

Jung’s dissertation, published in 1903, was titled "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena."  He referenced Théodore Flournoy and Hélène Smith.

Sources:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FUTURE BY EMILE BOIRAC-1918
THE EVIDENCE FOR COMMUNICATION WITH THE DEAD BY MRS. ANNA HUDE, PH.D. 1913