Freud, Phantoms And The Paranormal

As the nights draw in and the shadows lengthen, the thin place between our world and the afterlife is said to open up allowing us to connect with ghosts and ghouls. This has become known as All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween.

The idea that consciousness survives after death - and can return - is as old as human existence. Within this, the supernatural is seen as a manifestation attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding, whilst the paranormal has a psychological element which may one day be explained by science. Both have inspired the imagination of writers and artists over the centuries, but it was the late 19th Century that would become 'the golden age of ghosts'.

In 1886, the same year Sigmund Freud established his clinical practice in Vienna, Robert Louis Stephenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to be followed by M. R. James' Lost Hearts (1895), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). In 1882, some of the greatest rational minds of the time had come together to form the Society of Psychical Research, their mission, to prove through scientific investigation, the authenticity of spiritualism, and the existence of supernatural and paranormal phenomena. Members included Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll, but despite all the scientific possibility offered by the development of electricity, photography and telecommunications, many an eminent career was derailed by a fraudulent medium, charlatan table tapper, or improbable spirit photograph.

One of my favourite characters associated with the S.P.R. is Ada Goodrich Freer. Known to her friends as ‘the Freer’ and professionally as ‘Miss X’, she became one of the first female members of the society in 1888. According to contemporary accounts, Ada was charming and persuasive, and went everywhere with her faithful Pomeranian dog called ‘Spooks’. But who was Ada Goodrich Freer, and where had she come from? Having infiltrated what was ostensibly an old boys club, she set herself up as a folklore magazine editor, ghost hunter, medium, and crystal ball gazer. In an age where family name and class defined your position in society; her background was less clear. Not that this stopped Ada. She soon attracted the patronage of an S.P.R. vice president, the immensely wealthy Marquess of Bute, which put a few stuffy noses out of joint. Armed with all the latest ghost hunting equipment, the pair went on ghost hunts around the country, often over-staying their welcome at stately homes. Their most famous investigation was at a large house in Perthshire, Scotland, which became the subject of her best-selling book, The Alleged Haunting of B---- House. Not everyone was impressed though, and one newspaper report described a lecture Ada presented about seances as, ‘a peculiarly nauseating recrudescence of offensive spiritualistic balderdash’. Unfortunately, the knives were out, and her career ended in ignominy with accusations of plagiarism and fraud.

Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were members of the SPR, however, the focus of their careers was to take them to an even darker place - the unconscious. Let's not forget, psychoanalysis is full of archaic horror: mother love, incest, eye-gourging, and penis worship.

Jung grew up in a household where his mother held seances. He wrote:

‘Paranormal psychic phenomena have interested me all my life, usually ... they occur in acute psychological states, (emotionality, depression, shock etc.) or, more frequently, with individuals characterised by a peculiar or pathological personality structure, where the threshold to the collective unconscious is habitually lowered.’

Freud on the other hand, viewed the paranormal as a ‘neurosis’ - the result of repressed material returning to consciousness. The topic became a source of contention between himself and Jung, and a cause of their falling out. Despite this, Freud never lost his curiosity for 'the uncanny', which can be defined as 'a feeling that may be strange and unsettling about something that is familiar.' Here we enter the weird world of irrational fears and dread: china dolls with small sharp teeth, automaton waxworks with human hair, and the phenomena of doppelgangers.

Freud wrote about this in his essay, The Uncanny, in which he explores the similarity of the German word 'heimlich' which means ‘homely’ with the German word for 'uncanny' which is 'unheimlich', therefore ‘unhomely'.

At this point, Freud goes into overdrive as he presents his hypothesis that neurotic men, and by this he probably meant homosexual men, find female genitalia ‘uncanny’. According to Freud, this neurosis is a repression which may also express itself as a horror of being buried alive. He interprets this as a fear of returning to the mother’s womb, a punishment for deviating from societal norms.

Freud's fascination with the the uncanny finds it’s roots in the 18th and 19th century gothic and romantic traditions. The Austrian Empire - into which he was born - was all about swirling mists and gloomy mittal European castles. Vienna is where East meets West, a bloody battleground of superstition, idolotry and religious wars. Behind the grand wedding cake palaces of Innere Stadt, cobbled neighbourhoods once teemed with alchemists, astonomers and mystical Kabbalists. Not forgetting the part played by Austrian Catholicism, with its baroque churches stuffed with glassy eyed Madonnas, archaic rituals, and jewelled relics.

One of Freud’s favorite authors was the early 19th century German gothic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann who Freud called the ‘unrivalled master of the uncanny’. Hoffmann's short stories are populated by asylums and grand balls, spectres and maniacs, and even a beautiful woman who turns out to be an automaton. One character is haunted by an irrational fear of the Sandman, a benevolent folklore character, who sprinkles ‘sleepy dust’ in children’s eyes to help them have good dreams. Here we see the nascence of the Oedipus complex:

‘The Sandman comes to children when they won’t go to bed and throws a handful of sand in their eyes, so that their eyes jump out of their heads, all bleeding. He then throws their eyes in his bag and takes them off to the half-moon as food for his children. These children sit up there in their nest, they have hooked beaks like owls and use them to peck up the eyes of the naughty little boys and girls.’

Freud wrote The Uncanny in 1919, at the end of the First World War, a time when irrational fears had become a devastating reality in the mud and decay of the trenches. Freud would have seen street posters around Vienna offering seances, and for a while it seemed that communicating with the dead would become more popular than lying on a couch, talking to the living.

Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling that is more powerfully experienced in art than in life, and whilst he had the opportunity to explore this further, he turned down all offers to work with the film industry. In Hollywood, it was Hitchcock who became the master of the uncanny, whether that was in his use of close-up camera angles in Psycho, the doppelganger of Madeleine in Vertigo or Cary Grant being chased into a corn field by a crop duster in North by Northwest.

By the 1960s, a whole cinematic sub-genre known as the 'English uncanny' had emerged with films such as The Wicker Man and The Witchfinder General, and more recently in TV series like The League of Gentlemen and The Third Day. Archaic themes of fertility and legacy are played out in local customs within a half-remembered nostalgic setting. The outcome is often predictable: queer folk draw you in making it difficult to leave, whilst someone licks a toad, and phallic corn dollies hint at sinister goings-on.

Horror movies and psychoanalytic themes go hand in hand. In slasher movies, the idea of decapitation and castration can be interpreted as the cutting off of tricky emotions. The victims are often teenagers who are grappling with unfamiliar feelings around sexuality and body changes. Grief and PTSD are explored with great effect in The Babadook, where a little boy, unable to make sense of his mother's grief following a horrific car crash, unconsciously internalizes it. This gets played out as his frustration and anger. Since this is socially unacceptable, he unconsciously projects these feelings onto the Babadook, a character in a mysterious pop-up book, which in turn terrorises both him and his mother, forcing her to confront what has been kept locked in the basement, a metaphor for her grief and trauma.

Whilst I take the broadly psychoanalytic view that paranormal phenomena is a manifestation of stress or trauma, I also try and leave space for the ‘unknown’. As Shirley Jackson explains in her novel, The Haunting of Hill House. 'Hill House, whatever the cause, has been unfit for human inhabitation for upwards of twenty years. What it was like before then, whether its personality was molded by the people who lived here, or the things they did, or whether it was evil from the start are all questions I cannot answer. Naturally I hope that we will all know a good deal more about Hill House before we leave.'

Shirley Jackson was inspired by Ada Goodrich-Freer's investigation in the haunting of Ballechin House in 1897. Jackson also knew about Borley Rectory, which was known as ‘the most haunted house in England’ in the 1930s, becoming the subject of numerous books by the famous paranormal investigator Harry Price.

Perhaps those who are sensitive to psychic phenomena are unconsciously drawn to supernatural places? Many different people over many decades experienced strange goings-on in the village of Borley, which hints at the supernatural, though by all accounts, those involved were susceptible.

A few years ago, I visited Borley. On that day, the vast Essex skies were heavy with storm clouds, and blustery winds whipped through the wheat fields on the edge of the village giving the place a suitably spooky atmosphere. Nothing remains of the rectory, as it burnt down in 1939. Today, nondescript bungalows sit on the site. An ominous guard-chain stops cars from parking in front of the village church across the road, a reminder that sightseers are disencouraged. I was there with my partner, and as we walked back to the car, we heard footsteps on the other side of a garden wall. It sounded so ordinary - perhaps someone doing some gardening - and I remember feeling guilty that we had been messing around, hunting for ghosts. As we reached the end of the wall, I prepared myself to say 'good afternoon' to whoever was there, but of course, we were alone. Once in the car, we looked at each other, unsure of what we had just experienced. Curiously, a number of Borley ghost hunters have written about a similar experience.

If you are a fan of spooky books and the uncanny you may enjoy:

The Uncanny - Sigmund Freud

The Voices by F. R. Tallis

The Other Girl by C. D. Major

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror by Chris Priestley

Affinity by Sarah Waters

The Natural History of Ghosts - 500 years of hunting for proof by Roger Clarke

The English Ghost by Peter Ackroyd

Nights in Haunted Houses by Peter Underwood