Date: Sat, 28 Sep 1996 10:00:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: Re: wayne/Space/Codes/vocabulary



Who can help jumping in?

According to Henri Ellenberger in his nearly 1000 page long _The Discovery
of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry_
(pp.75-76): 

"Deleuze met with success where Faria had failed, the revival of magnetism
in France is usually ascribed to him.  He too gave a public course and
published a clear and well-organized textbook.  Deleuze stated that the
era of 'prodigious healings' had gone with Mesmer and Puysegur, and that
the period of the elaborate and codified technique had set in.  He also
noted that the old quarrel between the 'fluidists' (who believed in
Mesmer's physical fluid), the 'animists' (who believed in psychological
phenomena), and the intermediate theory (held by those who believed in the
physical fluid's being directed by the will) was a thing of the past; the
practitioners had come into their own.  He gave excellent descriptions of
the phenomena occurring during artificial somnambulism, was sceptical
about alleged preternatural manifestations, and warned against the various
dangers inherent in magnetic treatment.  Deleuze was predominantly a
clinician and an empiricist ...." 

Later Ellenberger writes (118-119) that Deleuze warned against "the evils 
resulting from too frequent or too prolonged hypnotic sessions.  Such 
subjects gradually became addicted to hypnotic sessions: not only did 
their need for frequent hypnotization increase, but they became dependent 
on their particular magnetizer, and this dependency could often take on a 
sexual slant.  This well-known fact was rediscovered by Charcot ...."

But unfortunately, the Ellenberger book breathes not a single word about
that mysterious Guattari fellow and only the briefest one footnote mention
of an equally enigmatic man named Jacques Lacan (but word has it that he
had little to do with the actual discovery of the unconscious and more to
do with a certain kind of colonization of it). 

Deleuze's usefulness for hunters of raccoon or possum may be negligible
though I dimly recall hearing once of an expedition he joining some guy
named Carroll in search of the snark. 

Greg