In what follows I would like to uncover part of this history [of the phantasmagoria], not just as an exercise in romantic etymology but as a way of approaching a larger topic, namely, the history of the imagination. For since its invention, the term phantasmagoria, like one of Freud’s ambiguous primary words, has shifted meaning in an interesting way. From an initial connection with something external and public , the word has now come to refer to something wholly internal or (...) subjective: the phantasmic imagery of the mind. This metaphoric shift bespeaks, I think, a very significant transformation in human consciousness over the past two centuries—what I shall call here the spectralization or “ghostifying” of mental space. By spectralization I mean simply the absorption of ghosts into the world of thought. Even as we have come to discount the spirit-world of our ancestors and to equate seeing ghosts and apparitions with having “too much” imagination, we have also come increasingly to believe, as if through a kind of epistemological recoil, in the spectral nature of our own thoughts—to figure imaginative activity itself, paradoxically, as a kind of ghost-seeing. Thus in everyday conversation we affirm that our brains are filled with ghostly shapes and images, that we “see” figures and scenes in our minds, that we are “haunted” by our thoughts, that our thoughts can, as it were, materialize before us, like phantoms, in moments of hallucinations, waking dream, or reverie. Terry Castle, associate professor of English at Stanford University, is the author of two books: Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson’s “Clarissa” and Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in 18th-Century English Culture and Fiction . She is currently working on a study of the literature and psychology of apparitions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entitled “Spectropia: Ghost-Seeing and the Modern Imagination.”. (shrink)

The question of the so-called collective hallucination is neither as arcane nor as irrelevant to everyday life as it might first appear. On the contrary, it illuminates a much larger philosophical issue. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, his 1921 book devoted to the relationship between individual and group psychology, Sigmund Freud lamented that there was still “no explanation of the nature of suggestion, that is, of the conditions under which influence without adequate logical foundation takes place.”2 (...) What the science of psychology lacked, in other words, was an understanding of ideological transference—the process by which one individual imposed his or her beliefs and convictions on another. How did an idea spread, so to speak, from one person to the next, resulting in the formation of a group consciousness? The phenomenon of the collective hallucination puts the issue starkly—if ambiguously—in relief. If a ghost or apparition can be said to represent, in Freud’s terms, an idea “without adequate logical foundation,” a delusion, then the process by which two people convince each other that they have seen one—and in turn attempt to convince others—might be taken to epitomize the formation of ideology itself.In what follows I shall examine a case of collective hallucination—certainly the most notorious and well documented in the annals of modern psychical research—precisely as a way of spotlighting this larger problem. My goal in so doing is not so much to expose the folly of people who claim to see ghosts but the difficulty that inevitably besets anyone who attempts to debunk such claims on supposedly rationalist grounds. For in the absence of any satisfying explanation of how such “folly” spreads—how a private delusion becomes a folie à deux —the labors of the skeptic are doomed to result only in a peculiar rhetorical and epistemological impasse. 2. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. and ed. James Strachey , p. 22. Terry Castle is professor of English at Stanford University and the author of Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction . She is currently working on a new study entitled Lesbians and Other Ghosts: Essays on Literature and Sexuality. (shrink)