Abstract
Abstract This chapter explores the parallel developments of spiritualism and depth psychology in modern Europe, as well as the roles played by women in both discourses. In order to set the stage for the analysis of Smith’s experiences, the chapter turns to Paris and Jean Martin Charcot’s understanding of hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital, then the largest medical institution in Europe, in order to retrace the construction of the female body in the late nineteenth century. This chapter suggests that medical and spiritualist authorities shared similar conceptions of the entranced female body as a passive recipient for the voice of the other. Both discourses also framed the otherness of the female body as a bridge between the marvelous and the scientific: while Charcot and colleagues secularized medicine by displacing the enchanted within female embodiment, spiritualists saw in this mysterious embodiment a gateway to the scientific exploration of celestial worlds.
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