Talking back to the spirits: the voices and visions of Emanuel Swedenborg 1
Page updated 02/06/2008
Talking back to the spirits: the voices and visions of Emanuel Swedenborg
History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 21, No. 1, 1-31 (2008)
Simon R. Jones and Charles Fernyhough
Simon has written an outline summary for INTERVOICE about his recently published paper on the findings the voices and visions of Emanuel Swedenborg:
Over 300 years ago, Emanuel Swedenborg, the famous mystic, scientist, inventor and theologian, experienced three decades of voices and visions. Swedenborg understood these voices to be from angels, devils, and other spirits, and built up a detailed model of the spiritual world based on this. In this paper we examine what Swedenborg experienced, and how these experiences were viewed by himself, his contemporaries, and 19th and 20th century psychiatry.
Swedenborg himself famously said he was “well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels . . . and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections. But by all this I am not deterred, for I have seen, I have heard, I have felt”. Many of those who met him agreed he was a sane man. However, many of his more distant contemporaries saw him as mad. 19th century psychiatrists diagnosed him as insane. 20th century psychiatry has labelled him as being schizophrenic or epileptic.
However, Swedenborg was able to carry on a fruitful and productive life, despite these voices and visions.
We show how the idea of ‘hallucinations in the sane’ which appeared in the mid-1800s in France, has been resurrected in the work of Romme and Escher, and argue that Swedenborg can be seen as having ‘hallucinations without mental disorder’. We conclude by asking what we can learn from Swedenborg’s experiences and from those who experience voices and visions today.
Simon R Jones,
Department of Psychology, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK, s.r.jones@durham.ac.uk
To view the abstract and for details on how to purchase and view the full article go here.
For more about Swedenborg and other notable pople who heard voices go here.