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| 2025-07-23 | 2025-07-23 | Hélène Smith |
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Hélène Smith was a famous French medium studied by Théodore Flournoy, known for her claims of automatic writing and psychic travel to Mars. |
Hélène Smith was a famous French medium, whose real name was Catherine-Elise Müller. She was extensively studied by the Swiss psychology professor Théodore Flournoy from 1894 to 1898. Smith was known for her claims of automatic writing, where she would produce texts in various languages, and for her alleged psychic travel to Mars, whose landscapes she painted and whose language she claimed to speak and write.1
Flournoy attributed her abilities to Cryptomnesia and Glossolalia, arguing that the content she produced originated from forgotten memories and unconscious processes rather than genuine psychic phenomena. Despite this, her case was highly influential in the early study of psychical research.1
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Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎