Heather Wolffram
Biographic Data
| ID | 1147343 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Heather Wolffram |
| GIVEN NAMES | Heather |
| FAMILY NAME | Wolffram |
| SIGNATURE | WOLFFRAM H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Canterbury |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7596-3317 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Psycho-Politics between the World Wars
Forensic Psychology in Germany
Crime and hypnosis in fin-de-siècle Germany
Lurid tales of the criminal use of hypnosis captured both popular and scholarly attention across Europe during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, culminating not only in the invention of fictional characters such as du Maurier's Svengali but also in heated debates between physicians over the possibilities of hypnotic crime and the application of hypnosis for forensic purposes. The scholarly literature and expert advice that emerged on…
History of hypnotism in Europe and the significance of place
Since the 1990s a number of studies, such as Alan Gauld's A history of hypnotism , Alison Winter's Mesmerized , Daniel Pick's Svengali's web , Andreas Mayer's Sites of the unconscious and, most recently, William Hughes' That devil's trick , have elucidated the scientific as well as the popular cultures in which mesmeric and hypnotic practices thrived in the nineteenth century.1 By the end of the nineteenth century – that is, the time on which the…
The Criminological Construction of Female Mediumship in Early Twentieth-Century Germany
During the early twentieth century, several prominent fraud trials that featured mediums as defendants captured public attention in Germany. Of particular note were the trials of the “flower medium” Anna Rothe in 1902 and the criminal-telepath Else Günther-Geffers in 1928, which were given substantial coverage in the German daily press. While these sensational trials focused the public on the question of the reality of mediumistic phenomena and p…
Violent Sensations
A study of sensations and scandals involving some of the most reviled and marginal figures inhabiting the modern metropolizes of Berlin and Vienna at the fin de siècle, Scott Spector’s Violent Sensations is an ambitious work likely both to stimulate debate and spur further research. Based on a wide range of archival and primary sources, including novels, scientific treatises, court transcripts and newspaper articles, Spector attempts to reconcile…
That Devil's Trick
William Hughes's That Devil's Trick is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the history of mesmerism and hypnosis, treading ground that historians of hypnotism in the British context have large
The Corrigible and the Incorrigible
In The Corrigible and the Incorrigible , Greg Eghigian analyses correctional rehabilitation in Germany since 1933 by concentrating on the ‘correctional imagination’, that is, ‘the ideas, values, policies, practices, subjects and objects associated with public attempts to reform and rehabilitate criminals’ (p. 10). This approach liberates Eghigian’s study from the assumptions that have coloured the work of other historians of German penal policy, …
God save us from psychologists as expert witnesses”
This article is focused on the jurisdictional battle between psychiatrists and psychologists over psychological expertise in legal contexts that took place during the first decades of the 20th century. Using, as an example, the debate between the psychologist William Stern, the psychiatrist Albert Moll, and the jurist Albert Hellwig, which occurred at the International Congress for Sexual Research held in Berlin in 1926, it aims to demonstrate th…
Investigating the Supernatural
Journal Article Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychists in France, 1853–1931 Get access Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychists in France,1853–1931. By Sofie Lachapelle. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011. 198pp. £26.00. ISBN: 978 14214 0013 6. Heather Wolffram Heather Wolffram University of Canterbury Search …
Hallucination or materialization? The animism versus spiritism debate in late-19 th -century Germany
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…
An Object of Vulgar Curiosity
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German medical hypnotists sought to gain a therapeutic and epistemological monopoly over hypnosis. In order to do this, however, these physicians were required to engage in a complex multi-dimensional form of boundary-work, which was intended on the one hand to convince the medical community of the legitimacy and efficacy of hypnosis and on the other to demarcate their use of suggestion fr…
Crime, Clairvoyance and the Weimar Police
During the Weimar years, Germany’s police experimented with a wide range of new technologies and forensic techniques. Among the more unusual of these was so-called criminal telepathy ( Kriminaltelepathie): the practice of using a telepath or clairvoyant to shed light on unsolved crimes. Placing the emergence of the criminal telepath in the context of interwar crime and occultism, and the police interest in these occult practitioners in the contex…
Parapsychology on the couch
This article considers the attempts of academic psychologists and critical occultists in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to construct a psychology of occult belief. While they claimed that the purpose of this new subdiscipline was to help evaluate the work of occult researchers, the emergence of a psychology of occult belief in Germany served primarily to pathologize parapsychology and its practitioners. Not to be…
German Occultism Escapes the Shadow of Nazism
Supernormal Biology
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 p…
Hallucination or materialization? The animism versus spiritism debate in late-19 th -century Germany
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…
Parapsychology on the couch
This article considers the attempts of academic psychologists and critical occultists in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to construct a psychology of occult belief. While they claimed that the purpose of this new subdiscipline was to help evaluate the work of occult researchers, the emergence of a psychology of occult belief in Germany served primarily to pathologize parapsychology and its practitioners. Not to be…
An Object of Vulgar Curiosity
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German medical hypnotists sought to gain a therapeutic and epistemological monopoly over hypnosis. In order to do this, however, these physicians were required to engage in a complex multi-dimensional form of boundary-work, which was intended on the one hand to convince the medical community of the legitimacy and efficacy of hypnosis and on the other to demarcate their use of suggestion fr…
Crime, Clairvoyance and the Weimar Police
During the Weimar years, Germany’s police experimented with a wide range of new technologies and forensic techniques. Among the more unusual of these was so-called criminal telepathy ( Kriminaltelepathie): the practice of using a telepath or clairvoyant to shed light on unsolved crimes. Placing the emergence of the criminal telepath in the context of interwar crime and occultism, and the police interest in these occult practitioners in the contex…
That Devil's Trick
William Hughes's That Devil's Trick is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the history of mesmerism and hypnosis, treading ground that historians of hypnotism in the British context have large
Supernormal Biology
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 p…
Supernormal Biology
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 p…
German Occultism Escapes the Shadow of Nazism
Parapsychology on the couch
This article considers the attempts of academic psychologists and critical occultists in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to construct a psychology of occult belief. While they claimed that the purpose of this new subdiscipline was to help evaluate the work of occult researchers, the emergence of a psychology of occult belief in Germany served primarily to pathologize parapsychology and its practitioners. Not to be…
Crime, Clairvoyance and the Weimar Police
During the Weimar years, Germany’s police experimented with a wide range of new technologies and forensic techniques. Among the more unusual of these was so-called criminal telepathy ( Kriminaltelepathie): the practice of using a telepath or clairvoyant to shed light on unsolved crimes. Placing the emergence of the criminal telepath in the context of interwar crime and occultism, and the police interest in these occult practitioners in the contex…
Investigating the Supernatural
Journal Article Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychists in France, 1853–1931 Get access Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychists in France,1853–1931. By Sofie Lachapelle. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011. 198pp. £26.00. ISBN: 978 14214 0013 6. Heather Wolffram Heather Wolffram University of Canterbury Search …
Hallucination or materialization? The animism versus spiritism debate in late-19 th -century Germany
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…
An Object of Vulgar Curiosity
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German medical hypnotists sought to gain a therapeutic and epistemological monopoly over hypnosis. In order to do this, however, these physicians were required to engage in a complex multi-dimensional form of boundary-work, which was intended on the one hand to convince the medical community of the legitimacy and efficacy of hypnosis and on the other to demarcate their use of suggestion fr…
God save us from psychologists as expert witnesses”
This article is focused on the jurisdictional battle between psychiatrists and psychologists over psychological expertise in legal contexts that took place during the first decades of the 20th century. Using, as an example, the debate between the psychologist William Stern, the psychiatrist Albert Moll, and the jurist Albert Hellwig, which occurred at the International Congress for Sexual Research held in Berlin in 1926, it aims to demonstrate th…
That Devil's Trick
William Hughes's That Devil's Trick is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the history of mesmerism and hypnosis, treading ground that historians of hypnotism in the British context have large
The Corrigible and the Incorrigible
In The Corrigible and the Incorrigible , Greg Eghigian analyses correctional rehabilitation in Germany since 1933 by concentrating on the ‘correctional imagination’, that is, ‘the ideas, values, policies, practices, subjects and objects associated with public attempts to reform and rehabilitate criminals’ (p. 10). This approach liberates Eghigian’s study from the assumptions that have coloured the work of other historians of German penal policy, …
Crime and hypnosis in fin-de-siècle Germany
Lurid tales of the criminal use of hypnosis captured both popular and scholarly attention across Europe during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, culminating not only in the invention of fictional characters such as du Maurier's Svengali but also in heated debates between physicians over the possibilities of hypnotic crime and the application of hypnosis for forensic purposes. The scholarly literature and expert advice that emerged on…
History of hypnotism in Europe and the significance of place
Since the 1990s a number of studies, such as Alan Gauld's A history of hypnotism , Alison Winter's Mesmerized , Daniel Pick's Svengali's web , Andreas Mayer's Sites of the unconscious and, most recently, William Hughes' That devil's trick , have elucidated the scientific as well as the popular cultures in which mesmeric and hypnotic practices thrived in the nineteenth century.1 By the end of the nineteenth century – that is, the time on which the…
The Criminological Construction of Female Mediumship in Early Twentieth-Century Germany
During the early twentieth century, several prominent fraud trials that featured mediums as defendants captured public attention in Germany. Of particular note were the trials of the “flower medium” Anna Rothe in 1902 and the criminal-telepath Else Günther-Geffers in 1928, which were given substantial coverage in the German daily press. While these sensational trials focused the public on the question of the reality of mediumistic phenomena and p…
Violent Sensations
A study of sensations and scandals involving some of the most reviled and marginal figures inhabiting the modern metropolizes of Berlin and Vienna at the fin de siècle, Scott Spector’s Violent Sensations is an ambitious work likely both to stimulate debate and spur further research. Based on a wide range of archival and primary sources, including novels, scientific treatises, court transcripts and newspaper articles, Spector attempts to reconcile…
Forensic Psychology in Germany
Psycho-Politics between the World Wars
Sociology (11 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices (8 works) · History (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Psychoanalysis (8 works) · Criminology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works)