An Inquiry Into Ferdinand De Saussure's Analyses of Glossolalia
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The Flournoy Affair: An Inquiry into Ferdinand de Saussure’s Analyses of Glossolalia Elliot Cooper For my family: Paul, Margaret, Carrie, Kitana and Mutsumi. Contents Preface i Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Müller’s Utterances and Saussure’s Analyses 24 Chapter 2: Interpretations of the Flournoy Affair 61 Chapter 3: The Synchrony and Diachrony of a Case of Glossolalia 87 Chapter 4: Evolution of a Mechanism 125 Chapter 5: Symbolism and Saussure’s View on Glossolalia 153 Conclusion 175 References 192 Abbreviations CGL Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roy Harris (trans.), (Open Court, Chicago, 1986). Numbers refer to pages. Cours Cours de linguistique générale, Ferdinand de Saussure, Édition Critique par Tullio de Mauro (Payot, Paris, 1972). Numbers refer to pages. Des Indes Des Indes à la planète Mars: étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie, Theodore Flournoy, 3rd Edn (Genève, Eggimann, 1900). Numbers refer to pages. FIPM From India to the Planet Mars, Theodore Flournoy, Daniel B. Vermilye, (trans.) (Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York & London, 1900). Numbers refer to pages. FIPM/S From India to the Planet Mars, Theodore Flournoy, Sonu Shamdasani (ed.), (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994). Passages abridged from the original translation are indicated by ab. [abridged] n. [note] p. [page number from which the section was abridged]. SM Les sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique générale de F. de Saussure, Robert Godel (Librairie E. Droz, Genève, 1957). Numbers refer to pages. WGL Writings in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006). Numbers refer to pages. References to texts presented in chapter one. M(X) ‘M’ stands for Müller’s transcribed glossolalic utterances or automatic writings presented in chapter one. ‘X’ stands for the number of the text. S(X) ‘S’ stands for Saussure’s analyses of Müller’s texts presented in chapter one. ‘X’ stands for the document number. Abstract The sources for Ferdinand de Saussure’s thought on the psychology of language are few, and there has been little consensus over their interpretation. Yet, there is one group of writings by Saussure on language and mental operations that has been largely excluded from debate. From 1896 to 1899, the experimental psychologist Théodore Flournoy called on Saussure’s expertise in a study of a case of somnambulism with glossolalia. The subject of Flournoy’s study was Catherine-Élise Müller, who believed that she could communicate with the spirits of the dead, even if it required speaking a language she had never learned. In her somnambulist state she sometimes claimed to make contact with a few inhabitants of 15th century India. On these occasions, the sitters at her séances witnessed her speak and sing in sounds which, she said, were Sanskrit. Flournoy found Müller’s explanations charmingly ludicrous. Nonetheless, as Saussure himself was to find, something in the speech she did produce seemed disturbingly like the Sanskrit Flournoy had himself been exposed to in the undergraduate unit he took on the subject. But how was she able to speak a language without the usual requisite knowledge? Saussure began his analyses of Müller’s utterances with the view to discover what, if any, Sanskrit they contained. But his line of thought soon turned a corner when he began to consider what kind of mental operation would be capable of assembling the sound combinations that Müller produced. Flournoy found the linguist’s ideas to be good evidence for his theory of Müller’s condition, and quoted large sections from Saussure’s analyses in the resulting book of the study, Des Indes à la planète Mars: étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie (1900). Those analyses – a series of twelve documents in the form of letters and other hand-written notes that Saussure passed on to Flournoy – have been published in Théodore et Léopold: De Théodore Flournoy à la psychoanalyse (1986), a hard-to-come-by book by Théodore Flournoy’s grandson, Olivier Flournoy. The present study offers all twelve of these documents in full English translation. Of course, the fact that the father of modern linguistics spent valuable time attending séances, and analysing the seemingly meaningless speech of one individual, has attracted some attention. The majority of commentators who have expressed an opinion on Saussure’s analyses of glossolalia – Todorov (1977), Certeau (1980), Yaguello (1984) and Gadet (1986) – have found them useful as a way of creating a link between Saussure’s general linguistics and symbolism. By arguing that Saussure should have recognised a ‘logic of symbolism’ in Müller’s glossolalia, these authors claim to have discovered a point of failure in his thought. But that ‘logic of symbolism’ is at odds with what Saussure did have to say on symbols in his later analysis of German myths. By framing Saussure’s analyses of glossolalia as an irrational display of sympathy for the scientifically disreputable topic of spiritism, they have long prevented any sustained investigation into this highly interesting episode of Saussure’s career.. Should we interpret Saussure’s participation in Flournoy’s study as a moment of poor discretion, or recognize it as an important event in the history of ideas? Recent accounts by Fehr (1995), Gasparov (2012), Joseph (2012) and Feshchenko and Lao (2013) show that there is more to Saussure’s ideas about Müller’s attempts to speak Sanskrit than had previously been suggested. Though these three treatments are promising, the question of the value of Saussure’s analyses of glossolalia is still in abeyance, because no one has submitted the ideas they hold to the kind of close consideration that befits a thinker of Ferdinand de Saussure’s stature. In a close reading of Saussure’s analyses of glossolalia, I argue that they contain valuable information about the development of psychological ideas that would later be presented in Saussure’s Cours de lingistique générale (1916). I offer two examples of how Müller’s glossolalia provided Saussure with a stimulus for thinking differently about the mental operations behind language. First, I discuss Saussure’s methodological strategy in his analyses, and its relation to his famous dual synchronic and diachronic linguistic methods. Second, I discuss how Müller’s glossolalia helped him develop what he would later call, ‘the language mechanism’. Saussure’s application of his ideas, I argue, allowed him to think more concretely about these psychological aspects of his general linguistic theory. This study finds that Saussure’s analyses of glossolalia are of exceptional value in understanding the early workings out of his key psychological ideas, including synchrony, diachrony and the language mechanism. With a close reading of the primary texts, this study contributes a new understanding of some much overlooked documents, and sheds light on the psychological underpinnings of the Cours. Preface There is a pleasure in catching a genius doing something strange. Consider the case of Paul Broca, the founder of French anthropology, whose most resounding achievement was to discover that parts of the human brain correspond to specific human faculties. On October 19, 1876, Broca made a pact of mutual autopsy with a group of his colleagues (Hecht 2003: 8). As each of them died, those who remained were obligated to cut out, measure, weigh, and preserve the brain of the deceased. Why would anyone want to cut open the skulls and remove the brains of their friends and colleagues? How perverse, how morbid, one might think. But also: how utterly fascinating. The enjoyable strangeness of historical facts such as this one sometimes makes us overlook the often simple and rational explanations for their actions. (They needed human brains to pursue their research, and saw an opportunity to assert themselves as scientists by engaging in practices considered taboo by the Catholic Church.) Rarely is such apparently odd behaviour discussed seriously with the view to discover whether the motivations were rational, or if the outcomes of such actions hold particular scientific, theoretical, or historical value. In the case of Broca we are fortunate to have Hecht’s (2003) balanced exposition, yet in many other cases it is the strangeness that wins out over the ideas. As I began my research into (what was initially a project on) Saussurean thought and psychoanalysis, I was aware of certain influential suggestions that Saussure had an i obsessive side to his personality, shown in his writings on anagrams (Starobinski 1979 [1971]), and in his privileging of speech over writing in linguistic analysis (Derrida 1977 [1967]: 30-64). What I realised, however, was that while speculation over another side to Saussure’s personality may be in some sense entertaining, it does not benefit our understanding of his thought. If we are to understand the value of what he was trying to do in his ‘unorthodox’ moments, then his state of mind should be treated as rational, just as in any normal discussion of his better known ideas. In 2009 I contacted some well-known Saussure experts looking for clues about where Saussure might have learned what he knew about psychology. One of Saussure’s recent biographers, Claudia Mejia Quijano, wrote a long and generous reply in which she mentioned that Saussure had assisted a colleague in a case study of abnormal psychology. That colleague was the professor of experimental psychology at the University of Geneva from 1891 to 1920, Theodore Flournoy, and his study was published in 1900 under the title Des Indes a la Planète Mars: étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie. In Des Indes Flournoy describes many strange automatic phenomena manifested by a medium he called Hélène Smith (I will henceforth refer to her by her birth name, Catherine-Élise Müller). These phenomena mostly occurred while she was in a somnambulist state, and with several witnesses or ‘sitters’ gathered around her.