European Yearbook of the History of Psychology

This paper takes into account a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biological description of mnestic processes: a relatively unknown paradigm labeled ‘organic memory’. Under the influence of Spencer and Haeckel, several authors (the most famous were Theodule Ribot and Richard Semon) described hereditary facts in mnemonic terms, providing an early scientific description of mnestic processes and retrieval. An outline of the relation between these ‘organic memory’ theories and the new theoretical framework about memory introduced by Endel Tulving in 1970-80 is then provided, describing the role of the ‘engram’ concept in the cognitivistic description of the retrieval processes.

During his stay in Dresden in 1867, William James consulted a Dr Carus. The 1920 edition of James’ letters identifies him as the famous physician, psychologist, and painter Carl Gustav Carus. The 1995 edition of James’ correspondence erroneously takes him to be ‘an unidentified physician’ in Berlin. Most probably James consulted not the famous Dr Carus but his son, Albert Gustav Carus, the identification of the 1920 edition constituting a case of what R. K. Merton called the Matthew effect.

In 1857 in the savoyard parish of Morzine, convulsive phenomena of trance affected young and adolescent girls during the period of their catholic first holy communion, and then many women or girls and some men. From 1857 up to approximatively 1870, the crisis was attributed successively and simultaneously to sorcery, diabolic possession, demonopathy, hysteria, mesmerism, spiritualism, nymphomania. Afterwards some witnesses and protagonists, such as physicians or priests, evoked publicly a local and political affair and suspected simulation. This paper analyses how words diagnosing crisis and religious or medical beliefs interplayed on the trances and, conversely, how trances produced and reassured diagnosis and beliefs.

This paper analyses, from a historical and philosophical point of view, the anachronistic and farcical aspects of the hystero-demonopathy occurring in Verzegnis, its extraordinary appeal in medical literature at the time (particularly French), its curious similarities with the case of Morzine in Haute-Savoie (1861), to demonstrate how it has taken on a decisive duplicate role as ‘limiting case’ in the history of epidemics of possession and ‘precursor case’ in that of the modern syndrome of multiple personality. Reading the phenomenon of imitative contagion in a philosophical light, these pages offer an analysis of the concept of ‘spectator’, which was to prove an essential element in the definition of the hysterical subject, both in the report drawn up by Fernando Franzolini and the scientific literature following it, dealing with ‘dédoublement de la personnalité’.

Csaba Pléh

Review Essay. Pavlov Reloaded

Ob ume voobsche, o russcom ume v chasnost’i. zapiski fiziologa ‘[On the mind in general, on the Russian mind in particular. Notes of the physiologist] by Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov. A Russian Life in Science by Daniel P. Todes

Christian G. Allesch

Wundt and the Philosophical Foundation of Psychology. A Reappraisal by Saulo de Freitas Araujo

Alexandre Klein

Histoire de la psychologie by Olivier Houde