If England had its William Crookes and France its Charles Richet, then Albert von Schrenck-Notzing was the German key figure of physical mediumship. The Munich physician and baron brought something new to the field: the camera. He photographed the alleged ectoplasm, tied up and meticulously controlled his mediums – and yet, or for that very reason, became the most contested figure of the whole tradition. His case shows, in exemplary fashion, how close serious method and possible deception lie in this field.
Who was Schrenck-Notzing?
Albert Freiherr (Baron) von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929) was a physician and psychiatrist in Munich. He first made his name in a thoroughly sober field: hypnosis and suggestion research. He studied how memories can be shaped and falsified by suggestion, and an expert opinion in an 1896 murder trial leads some to count him among the very first forensic psychologists. This matters for understanding his later work: Schrenck-Notzing came to mediumship research not as a naïve believer but as a specialist in precisely the mechanisms – suggestion, deception, self-deception – that threatened his subject.
From hypnosis to materialisation
Around the turn of the century his interest shifted to the most spectacular phenomena of the séance: materialisation, the alleged emergence of a malleable substance from the medium's body. In 1914 his main work appeared, Materialisations-Phänomene (in English 1920 as Phenomena of Materialisation) – a thick book illustrated with numerous photographs. Here lay his innovation: where Crookes still described, Schrenck-Notzing documented with apparatus. The camera was to capture what the eye could barely grasp in the half-dark.
His theoretical caution is striking. Unlike the Spiritualists he did not interpret the ectoplasm as the work of the spirits of the dead. He coined the term "ideoplasty": the medium, on his hypothesis, shaped images with the powers of its own unconscious into a real but unknown substance. A remarkably modern, psychological explanation – an attempt to grasp the phenomenon without an afterlife.
Eva C. and the ectoplasm
His most famous study subject was Eva C. – the pseudonym of Marthe Béraud, the medium already investigated by Charles Richet. For years Schrenck-Notzing worked with her, in Munich and at the Paris home of her companion and co-organiser Juliette Bisson. The result was the iconic, now often reproduced images: Eva C., with bright, ragged shapes issuing from her mouth or hands, faces appearing within them.
The criticism – honestly considered
It was precisely these photographs that proved Schrenck-Notzing's undoing. The criticism is weighty and cannot be waved away:
- The "Le Miroir" cut-outs. Several of the "materialised" faces look flat and two-dimensional – and on the reverse of one image the lettering of a magazine could be made out. Critics, among them the SPR researcher Donald West, identified the faces as portraits cut from the French illustrated paper Le Miroir, in places with visible fold marks.
- Smuggled pins. Schrenck-Notzing himself admitted that on several occasions Eva C. had secretly brought pins into the séance room – with which fabric shapes can be fastened.
- The replication. The stage magician Carlos María de Heredia showed that such "ectoplasm" can be convincingly reproduced with simple means – a comb, gauze and a handkerchief.
How telling these objections are in detail remains contested to this day – and by no means settled in the sceptics' favour. The Le Miroir identification concerns individual photographs, not the whole body of material, and has itself been questioned; many of the shapes are not readily explained as flat paper cut-outs. Schrenck-Notzing also worked with considerable controls: physical examination of Eva C. before sittings, sewing her into tight-fitting clothing, observation at close range. He read the manifestations as formed by the unconscious (ideoplasty) – a resemblance to printed images, he argued, therefore does not prove a smuggled cut-out. An unambiguous proof is lacking in both directions: neither has the fraud been shown without gaps, nor the genuineness. So it remains an object lesson in the limits of even careful observation in the dark.
The Schneider brothers
Richer and harder to explain is his second great chapter: the Austrian brothers Willi and Rudi Schneider from Braunau am Inn. Schrenck-Notzing took Willi into regular investigation from 1919, the younger Rudi from 1925. Here he tightened the controls considerably – the phenomena (movements of untouched objects, cool gusts of air, touches) were to occur under conditions that ruled out fraud:
- The medium was tied up and marked at hands and feet with luminous pins or phosphorescent strips, so that every movement remained visible in the dark.
- Controllers held the medium's arms and legs and checked one another – the "German school" of hold-control described in the overview article.
- Invited witnesses from science and the public were to confirm the sittings independently.
Towards the end Schrenck-Notzing even worked on an electrical control system that would have automatically registered any movement of the medium – the logical continuation of the German idea of making physical mediumship measurable. But before the planned programme could be carried out, he died in 1929 after an appendix operation. The method of electrical control was left to others.
What happened after his death
The Schneider mediumship remained a flashpoint afterwards. In the early 1930s the Paris researcher Eugène Osty used infrared beams at the Institut Métapsychique to capture Rudi Schneider's invisible "substance" – with sensational but, to this day, contested results. A little later a photograph produced in Harry Price's London laboratory, seeming to show a free arm, fed suspicion of fraud. As with Palladino, no clear verdict stands at the end here either: repeatedly controlled, never fully cleared up.
Context
Schrenck-Notzing is the most ambivalent figure of the field – and instructive for that very reason. On the one hand a serious physician who brought physical mediumship into the laboratory, photographed, tied up, measured and tried to explain it psychologically rather than spiritistically. On the other the still-contested Eva C. case, in which some see a thoroughly deceived researcher and others one whose findings cannot be dismissed so easily. Both belong together: his work is no proof of the phenomenon, but no mere scandal either – it is the most honest reminder of how hard this field is to control. For the larger arc, see the overview of physical mediumship and the portraits of Crookes, Richet and the Paris Palladino séances. What the same method – holding, measuring, control – looks like today is shown by the researcher Eckhard Kruse; the most recent great chapter is the Scole Experiment.
Sources:
• Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Materialisations-Phänomene, 1914; Phenomena of Materialisation (Eng. 1920).
• Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Experimente der Fernbewegung, 1924.
• Donald J. West and other SPR researchers on the Eva C. criticism.
• Encyclopedia.com / Wikipedia, "Albert von Schrenck-Notzing" (biographical overview).
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the series on the history and science of mediumship.