Spectres of the Self is a welcome addition to the growing body of historical literature focused on the changing experiences and meanings attached to ghosts in English society. Shane McCorristine's book builds on earlier work by Owen Davies, Peter Marshall, Jean-Claude Schmitt, and Keith Thomas, and it successfully rescues ghostly encounters from the margins of English culture, positioning them instead at the heart of psychological experiences of modernity. McCorristine charts the impact of enlightenment thought, nineteenth-century spiritualism, and the institutionalization of psychical research in shaping the ways that “bourgeois culture” appropriated the ghostly figure to express anxieties linked to the experience of modernity. This included confrontations with death and dissolution: an uncomfortable encounter with which ghost stories have long been associated. McCorristine, however, charts the emergence of a new type of ghost. His specters are rootless and anonymous; they rarely interacted with their percipients and had no discernible didactic message to communicate to those who saw them. The specters that haunt this book are therefore markedly different from the ghosts of medieval and early modern England who were identifiable souls of the dead that engaged with the personal, emotional, and religious concerns of the living. McCorristine's “spectres of the self” were internalized, psychological phantasms that were shaped by the rationalist-empirical philosophies of European enlightenment figures, by a rapid phase of technological change, and by the rise of psychiatry, psychology, and associated medical discourses. McCorristine's specters are closely linked to medical explications of dreams and other interim states of consciousness, which positioned experiences of ghost-seeing as projections of the subjective imagination. As a result, the book tells us as much about the development of philosophies of mind and human perception as it does about the shifting dimensions of the ghost-seeing experience. Indeed, the figure of the ghost is often a mutable presence in the text.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of early modern ghost beliefs and describes the impact of enlightenment medicine and philosophy in challenging the objective reality of ghostly appearances. McCorristine helpfully situates the development of English thought in a broader European context and explores the place of hallucinations and illusions in early French psychiatry and German occult philosophies. Each of these contexts shaped the so-called spectralisation of thinking about the self in which the ghost-seeing experience was increasingly linked to internal phantasms of the mind. The second chapter places the ghost-seeing experience at the center of philosophical developments that distanced ghosts from the tangible sensory faculties and linked them instead to alternate states of consciousness. This point is effectively illustrated through debates about the clothes that ghosts were reported to wear. McCorristine suggests that visual representations of ghosts mirrored the imaginative states of their percipients and that they were steadily aligned with the concept of the waking dream—a notion that was central to natural philosophical explorations of the mind and imagination at the close of the eighteenth century. McCorristine argues persuasively that the association of ghost-seeing with mental states such as hallucinations allowed for the coexistence of realist and skeptical beliefs and emphasized the liminal status of ghost-seeing between the worlds of fact and fiction. Chapter 3 explores ghost-hunting in relation to the Society for Psychical Research, whose members increasingly associated this activity with the phenomena of thought transference and telepathy. Chapter 4 extends this further by outlining the concept of a “community of sensation,” which consisted of an international telepathic community that paints a fascinating picture of the imperial context of ghost-seeing. The significance of geographical variation in shaping the accounts themselves could however be more thoroughly unpacked. The book's final chapter assesses critiques of ghost-seeing and ghost-hunting within Victorian psychological discourse. McCorristine argues that the Society for Psychical Research devised an alternative sociocultural model of hallucination based on the ghost-seeing experience, which further destabilized the objective reality of spectral phenomena by locating them within interim states of consciousness situated between sleeping and waking.
This book is richly researched, impressive in scope, and genuinely interdisciplinary in its methodology. The author's dense narrative is at times difficult to master, yet multiple readings of important sections are ultimately rewarding in the conclusions that they reach. The intellectual rationalization of the ghost-seeing experience is clearly central to the book's narrative, but more detail of the ghostly visions themselves would have added color, depth, and a layer of agency beyond the narrow confines of “bourgeois culture.” Members of the “general public” who contributed the raw material of ghost-seeing experiences remain shadowy figures for the most part. This focus also downplays currents of skepticism in popular cultural understandings of ghosts, although as previous studies have noted, any division of belief drawn primarily along class lines is highly problematic. The ghost of popular culture “with its clanging chains and accusing glare” (2) that McCorristine describes also underestimates the variety and sophistication of beliefs at the community level. Nevertheless, Spectres of the Self offers a fresh perspective on how we should read the relationship between ghost stories and modern subjectivities. McCorristine's book will undoubtedly prove to be a valuable resource for scholars and students with an interest in supernatural beliefs and more broadly in the sociocultural and intellectual history of contemporary Europe.
