Saussure and the psychic

Abstract

AbstractSaussure’s mid-career involvement in psychologist Theodore Flournoy’s study of the renowned psychic Catherine Elise Müller (alias Hélène Smith) brought him into contact with imaginary languages. Flournoy asked Saussure to see what he could make of some transcriptions of Müller’s trance induced speech, which she had claimed was in Sanskrit or the language of the inhabitants of Mars. Saussure assisted Flournoy in his research from 1896 to 1899 looking for linguistic qualities of Müller’s strange utterances. In doing so found support for Flournoy’s theory of teleological automatism, a process in which unconsciously stored information could be recalled for the purpose of manifesting so-called psychic phenomena. While this episode of Saussure’s career has often been treated as a peculiarity, it is also worth considering points of continuity between Saussure’s analyses of Müller’s glossolalia and the rest of his career. In this essay I will discuss how several of the psychological underpinnings of major concepts expressed in the Cours de linguistique générale found exercise and elaboration as Saussure considered the problem of how Müller assembled her mysterious utterances.