Hélène Smith (1861 – 1929, CH), medium, artist

The Swiss medium Hélène Smith, born Catherine-Elise Muller, channeled her visions through images, sounds and typtology. Théodore Flournoy, a Swiss professor of psychology, researched her mediumship over five years through trance séances. These psychiatric sessions yielded many automatic-writings, which proved to be highly influential for the Surrealists. The most enigmatic aspect of Hélène Smith’s mediumship was her linguistic production, which included Sanskrit, ‘Martian’ and ‘Uranian’ alphabets. Flournoy claimed that Smith’s revelations were the result of latent memories and knowledge disfigured by the subliminal work of imagination or reasoning
– a process he called ‘cryptomnesia’. Her use of Sanskrit seemed to be of visual and non-auditory origin due to Smith’s unconscious memorisation of Sanskrit grammar, while all the sounds used in her ‘Martian’ language seemed to stem from French.
Over time, Hélène Smith’s visual and acoustic landscapes ceased to be understood within a romantic framework and were relegated to the sphere  of psychopathology. Her dream-images were thus stripped of their visionary
and novelistic status, becoming mere neurotic symptoms under the scrutiny of
a pathologising male gaze.