La psiquiatría y el fenómeno de las «apariciones» a finales del siglo XIX

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, the flourishing of occultist societies and periodicals in Germany was more than noteworthy. For this reason, the silence of psychiatry in the face of cases of apparitions of ghosts which were often made public is striking. By taking as a reference two of these cases, an attempt is made to understand the reasons for such silence. The thesis of the article is that a discipline that was seeking to legitimate itself scientifically decided not to «contaminate itself» with matters that science and medicine considered doubtful. It was only from the time of the First World War that such phenomena began to be a subject of interest, insofar as they could be considered exemplary pathological cases.