The workshop, organised by the History of Science and Medicine Working Group, will feature Emese Lafferton (CEU), who will discuss her current book project.
The session with Emese Lafferton is based on her current book project, Suggestive Encounters. Sciences and Cults of the Mind in Central Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century. The workshop takes us back to the nineteenth - and early twentieth- century fascination with the human mind’s hidden recesses and powers. What connects mesmerism and animal magnetism with the spiritualist movement of the 1850s? How was experimental medical research into hypnosis related to studies of psychic phenomena, psychoanalysis, and shell shock? Lafferton addresses the ways in which subversive explorations of elusive psychic phenomena challenged the boundaries of science. She asks, what could these explorations possibly bring at a time of religious uncertainty, materialism, and positivism? And what new insights can the Central-Eastern European perspective offer into the emergence of the modern European mind?
In the first part of the session, Lafferton discusses the structure and overall approach of her book and presents two chapters that are also pre-circulated for participants. The presentation is followed by an open discussion in the second part.
The first of the chapters to be discussed is a case study of a fatal hypnotic séance that took place in a provincial castle in the easternmost region of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1894. Through its popularisation in mass media, the case exerted massive influence on psychiatric circles and wider society in Europe and beyond.
The other chapter focuses on shell shock and psychiatrists’ approaches to understanding and treating the affliction, demonstrating the centrality of suggestion in its healing. These cases allow us to redraw the boundaries between science and the social, the scientific and the popular, the orthodox and the marginal, the professional and the amateur, and the respectable and the disreputable.
Please register for the event to receive the readings.
Speaker's bio: Prof. Emese Lafferton is a historian of science and medicine. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at Central European University, Vienna. Her research explores medical and scientific traditions in Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on biopolitics, the history of ‘racial sciences’ and psychiatry in the Habsburg empire and its successor states. Her relevant publications include her monograph Hungarian Psychiatry, Society and Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century published by Palgrave Macmillan (2022) and an edited volume Race, Science and Medicine in Central and Eastern Europe around 1900 (Thematic issue of East Central Europe, 2016/1-2). She taught and held prestigious fellowships in Cambridge, Edinburgh, London, and UC Berkeley. She is member of the Editorial Board at the European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health (Brill).
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