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SUMMARY:How the Harvard archives reveal that William James was a highly sk
 illed hypnotist - Thibaud Trochu (University of Paris-I Sorbonne)
DTSTART:20110223T130000Z
DTEND:20110223T140000Z
UID:TALK28557@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau
DESCRIPTION:The Houghton Library at Harvard University is well-known for h
 ousing an important quantity of unpublished data related to William James'
 s lifelong \nscientific researches in the broad field of Psychology. There
 fore\, when digging into the philosopher's personal library - in his notes
 \, manuscripts and letters - one is astonished\, if not startled\, to stum
 ble upon a staggering amount of documents dealing with 'induced somnambuli
 sm'\, \nentranced mediums\, hallucinations as well as many private reports
  from unorthodox healers\, drug-experimenters and the like.\n\nThis materi
 al has long been ignored by historians\, as it was usually related to Jame
 s's controversial involvement with the British Society for Psychical Resea
 rch and therefore considered irrelevant. A minute historical study of this
  material\, however\, leads us to propose another point of view\; namely\,
  the hypothesis that\, thanks to that very material\, one can rebuild a co
 herent lifelong 'research program' which is not prima facie clearly visibl
 e in James's published writings - yet highly significant in appraising his
  thought and character as well as his important scientific and medical con
 tribution.\n\nA key document in this respect is a never-published handwrit
 ten list of a dozen booklets\, which James's wife entitled 'Valuable and h
 ighly prized by \nWJ'\, and which shows the way in which throughout his sc
 ientific career James undertook what we could call 'systematic experimenta
 tions on altered \nstates of consciousness'. The aim of this talk is to pr
 esent some of the main steps of James's research program with an emphasis 
 on his initiation to the practice of hypnosis during the 1880s\, and to sh
 ow that he came to master various techniques for inducing secondary states
  of consciousness for experimental purposes.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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