This article considers a long-neglected episode in the disciplinary evolution of the border sciences in Germany: the so-called animism versus spiritism debate. While historians have long acknowledged the significance of this dispute, which introduced a range of new hypotheses and nomenclature to the field, there has been little detailed analysis of it. Looking closely at the arguments of the main combatants, this article attempts to highlight not just the complex multi-frontal conflicts that took place during the late 19th century between (...) academic psychologists, spiritists and psychical researchers over the parameters and proper objects of the nascent field of psychology, but also the epistemological and methodological battles between spiritists and psychical researchers over the nature of both psychology and the unconscious. It is concluded that researchers such as Hartmann and Aksakow in their pursuit of a new scientific psychology based on the phenomena of the unconscious were just as representative of contemporary psychology as were Wundt and his colleagues. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the small but growing body of scholarship dedicated to a reappraisal of German occultism in the period prior to the Second World War. Moving beyond those analyses of the German occult movement which have viewed it solely in terms of its links--often tenuous--to National Socialism, this paper considers German occultism, specifically parapsychology, as a mode of cultural critique utilised by Germans from across the political spectrum. Concentrating on the experimental study of materialisation and its (...) theorisation as "supernormal biology," this paper argues for strong links, forged primarily by the biologist, philosopher, and neo-vitalist Hans Driesch, between parapsychology, as a way of understanding life and mind, and epistemological reforms within biology and psychology. It argues, furthermore, that for Driesch, as for a number of European scholars, parapsychology provided scientific validation of a belief in the naturalness of liberalism and pacifism. (shrink)