The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1864

Allan Kardec

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The music magazine of the Siècle, June 21st, 1864 brought the following article:



With the title - An orphan in shackles - Mr. Pontécoulant has just published excellent news in favor of a good cause. It seems that the director of a detention center conceived an ingenious idea to make music penetrate the cells of the inmates. He thought that his duty was not only that of punishment but also correction. To be sure about the character of the prisoner hurt by the punishment he went straight to music. He started by creating a singing school. The inmates that showed good behavior considered a reward to take part in the choral. The prison was therefore transformed. Among the one thousand prisoners one hundred were chosen to take part in the first rehearsals. It had a very reassuring effect on those men. Any breach of regulations could keep them away from the school; they organized themselves in order to keep up with their obligations, that up until then was neglected.



In order to better explain the importance of such choral I remind you that they are commonly imposed to be quiet. They think but do not speak. They could forget their languages for not using them in those circumstances. Easy to understand that such spoken and sung plays are to them like a gift from heavens. It is the time to hear voices, break their solitude, to be moved and to exist. I repeat, the results are excellent. From seventy singers that formed the choral this year sixteen found remission. Isn’t that convincing?



I forgot to say that the experiment was carried out in Melun. It is a test to be encouraged, an example to be followed. Who knows those hardened hearts may feel the ice breaking and still like something! By learning to sing they also learn to not slander any more. Their isolation becomes populated, their minds are calmed and their tasks become lighter. Then, when their time is done, sometimes reduced thanks to their dedication and good behavior, they are out and away from rage and bad behavior. One day I visited the health clinic of Dr. B…, accompanying one alienist. During the journey he said: - The showers, the showers! The only thing I know is the showers and the tight jacket! It is the panacea… Any other palliative is useless when dealing with a furious mad person. Then screams at the end of the garden drew our attention. – Look, he said, I see one that will have to endure one of two processes, perhaps the two. Wanted to follow him? You will see the effect. The poor miserable guy floundered in the hands of the guards. His mouth was only curses and his eyes only fire. Appeasing him without the support of the strongest means seemed impossible. Suddenly a voice was heard on the other side of the garden. It came from an isolated pavilion that gave the impression of having been raised on its own, with its virgin vine and weeds falling from the roof in a flowery thorn bush. The voice sang the romance of Saul, from Desdemona. I stopped to listen. I don’t know if the impression I had was due to the place and the occasion but I affirm that I had never before felt so much touched. I later on learned that the voice belonged to a woman of the world that had lost her reason as the result of her own misery. The mad person then stopped suddenly, no longer struggling or saying blasphemies.

-The voice! The voice! He said… Shush! He then listened, only showing ecstasy. He had calmed down.

  • Then? I asked the astonished alienist, what now of your famous subject?
  • Let us see. Say that riff as if the animals were about to be gathered.
He would rather have been turned into pieces than taken back his brutal statement. Systematic persons are like that. Facts are nothing to them. Whatever contradicts them is treated as exception. Do not try to fight them because they have a fixed idea and when all arguments have been used they will turn their faces the other way. No concessions! They are either convinced or not. In several homes of the mentally ill, in particular Bicêtre, they understood the benefit that can be obtained with music and they use it successfully. The masses are sung by patients there. With the exception of rare incidents, everything follows the program without the need of any repression of misconduct. There is a more horrible disease than madness. I mean cretinism. Mad persons have the moments of lucidity, sometimes only affected by a mania. They talk reasonably well about every subject, with the exception of the one that makes them fantasize. One says that he is made of glass, recommending that they only be touched with extreme care; the other points to a person and says: do you see that guy? He believes to be a child of God but I am Jesus Christ! A third one invites you to his great hunting expeditions in his huge territory; he even hears the wolves, the servants, the bands that greet him and the prey that screeches; he is happy in his dream; it is almost always an ambitious person that has fallen more or less close to the target. All of those curable and incurable have a point of reference to the imagination. But what is left to the others, the ones with cretinism? Those remain squatting at a corner wall, on a stone, deformed faces like horrible balls of flesh, never showing any spark of intelligence, not even showing animal instincts. They are completely lost, body and soul, aren’t they? Are they lowered too much in their humane dignity, are they too much degraded? The have ears but don’t hear, have eyes but don’t see, their senses are extinct. These are like living-dead. They uselessly tried to bring anything back on them, through force and kindness. It was desperation.



Then they started singing simple notes in their presence until they repeated them mechanically. Simple and short songs were sung, that they repeated. Now they sing. Singing is a joy to them. They are controlled by music. It is both their punishment and reward; they obey; they are aware of their actions. They work. There you have them half-way into mental rehab.



There are regions in which that cruel disease reproduces incessantly. Is it the air or the water that does that? On morning, after a long hunting expedition at night, I had just entered the shanty of a shepherd in the Pyrenees looking for refreshment. I found a debilitated man, a drained mother and three weak children, one of which tucked in a pile of rotten straw. When I examined that miserable creature the father said: - oh this one has never lived; he was born like that. Cretinism here sweeps one out of three persons. I am paying for my debt. Does he recognize you, I asked.

Not me, not his brothers; he remains in the position that you see and only wakes up from that torpid state at sunset and when I gather the disperse herd; he then agitates and seems to enjoy, as if something was making him happy.

-And what do you think may be causing that? I asked. I don’t know, he says.

-Which signs you use? A. – The riff of every shepherd.



The kind old man stood at the door, brought his hands in a shell around his mouth and initiated his song of calling the herd. A strange thing happened. The ill boy rose up like a spring, screaming something inarticulate. We could guess that he wanted to speak. I explained that music acted upon his muscles with great power. The father understood and then said in a strong slang: - I know songs; I will pass them to him.



Two years later I saw those people again, bringing them a hurt chamois. The boy had become meek. I published this story before others thought that music could be used in healing processes in similar cases. My report was considered a fable. Later on experience made its way with the mentally ill but it did not preclude my alienist from sustaining that there is nothing better than force and shower. He was convict of that.”

-o-



We do not know if the author of the article, Mr. Chadeuil, is anti-spiritualist but it is certain that it is strongly anti-Spiritist considering all the sarcasm thrown towards the belief in Spirits on every occasion he found in his Musical Review. In order to deny a doctrine that is based on facts and accepted by millions of people has he seen, observed and studied? Has he scrupulously sought information from all available sources? His own articles demonstrate ignorance about what they discuss. On which basis then can he affirm that it is a ridiculous belief? In his personal opinion the idea of people communicating with the Spirits is ridiculous like every other idea with some importance was considered ridiculous by people, even the most enlightened. These are, no doubt, the application of his remarkable and true words from his article:



Systematic persons are like that. Facts are nothing to them. Anything that denies them is treated as an exception. Do not try to fight them because they have their fixed idea and when all arguments have expired they will laugh on your face.”



Isn’t that the story of the speck and the log once again? It is true that we don’t know if the reflection is his or Mr. Pontécoulant’s.Regardless, he cites it as a praise therefore he does accept it. But let us leave Mr. Chadeuil’s opinion aside because it does not matter and let us look at the article in itself that attests an important fact: the influence of music upon criminals and mentally ill. The influence of music onto customs has been acknowledged at all times. Its application to criminals would be an undisputable progress and could only bring satisfactory results. It excites the sleeping fibers of sensitivity, predisposing them to receive educating impressions. But is that enough? No. It is like harvesting in blank land that requires the plantation of new ideas, provoking a profound impression into those deviated minds. It is necessary to break the barrier of hearts to only then speak to the souls. They lack a faith in God, in their own soul and in the future; not a vague, uncertain faith that is incessantly bombarded by doubt, but a faith based on certainty, the only one that can become unbreakable. Music can undoubtedly predispose to but not give that faith. Yet it is not a support that can be neglected. Such initiative as so many others that humanity and civilization cannot but applaud constitute commendable solicitude towards the well-being of prisoners. There still remains, however, to attack the evil on its root. One day the full support that can be found in the Spiritist ideas will be acknowledged, an influence that has already been demonstrated through the many transformations that it has led to in the most rebellious minds. Those that have investigated this doctrine in depth and meditated about its inevitable consequences are the only ones that can understand its breaking power imposed onto pernicious tendencies. The reason for such a power is in the fact that the doctrine touches directly the very causes of those tendencies that are in the imperfection of the Spirit, whereas most of the time people seek such causes in the imperfection of matter. Spiritism presently, as a moral doctrine, is no longer in the condition of a simple theory. It is practiced by a large number of those that accept its principles. It is possible to affirm that according to what happens and given the produced results there will be a reduction in the number of crimes and offenses proportional to its propagation. That is what the near future will demonstrate. In the expectation that the experience may happen in a large scale it daily happens in an individual basis. The Spiritist Magazine has already provided innumerous examples of that; we will only remind you of the letters from two prisoners published in the issues of November 1863 and February 1864.



We leave up to our reader the appreciation of the fact described above regarding madness. It is undoubtedly a strong criticism to the alienists that only know the showers and the straitjackets. Spiritism comes to cast an entirely new light onto mental illnesses, demonstrating the duality of human beings and the possibility of acting separately upon the material and the spiritual creature. The continually growing number of doctors that accept such principle will certainly bring significant changes to the treatment of those kinds of diseases. Letting aside the Spiritist idea, per se, the confirmation of the effect of music in similar cases is already a step forward in the spiritualist avenue, from which the alienists have so far kept a distance in detriment of patients. The effect produced on those with idiocy and cretinism is even more characteristic. The so called mad people have almost always been intelligent people before; that is not the case with cretinism that seems to have been attributed an absolute thoughtless mind. Experimental Spiritism here also demonstrates that those patients are advanced and not retarded minds that are, however, inhabiting imperfect bodies.



Given the equality in intelligence, the difference between the mad person and the one showing cretinism is that the former is born with normal brains that later one are disorganized whereas the latter is a Spirit incarnate in a body whose brain is atrophied since day one, never allowing a free manifestation of thoughts. It is like a strong and energetic person whose freedom of movement was removed.



Such constraint is a true punishment to the Spirit because the capacity to think is there but at the same time the person feels the abjection imposed by the disease. Let us then suppose that in a given time one can disconnect the organs from the mind: the Spirit would recover its freedom and the one with the highest degree mental illness would become an intelligent person. It would be like a prisoner leaving prison or a musician before a perfect instrument or still like a mute person recovering the ability to speak. What is then missing is not the faculty of thinking but the neural networks that allow the manifestation of the thoughts.



In a normally formed child the exercise of the faculties of the Spirit leads to the development of the corresponding organs that offer no resistance. In those patients, however, the action of the Spirit is incapable of producing any development that remained in a rudimentary state, like a fruit that was aborted.



The total cure of a person with idiocy is then impossible; all that can be expected is a slight improvement. That is why nobody knows any treatment that may be applied to the organs; it is the Spirit that must be addressed. Studying the faculties and discovering the kernel one must exercise it through the Spirit and if the resistance is broken an at least partial manifestation becomes then possible. If there is an external media capable of reaching the organs is undoubtedly music. It is capable of vibrating those dormant fibers like a huge noise that comes to the ears of a deaf person. The Spirit shakes with that, like from a memory, and the provoked activity doubles the efforts to overcome the obstacles.



To the one that only sees an organized machine in a human being, without taking into account the intelligence that presides over the activity of that physical organization, everything is problem and obscurity in the vital functions as everything is uncertainty in the treatment of diseases. That is why, most of the time, the problem is not faced head-on; more than that: everything is darkness in the evolution of humanity, everything is trial and error in social institutions and that is why the wrong path is followed so frequently.



If you just hypothetically admit that human beings have a duality, the presence of an intelligent being, independent of matter, pre-existent and that outlives the body that is only a temporary envelope, and everything is explained. Through positive experiences Spiritism turns that hypothesis into reality, then revealing the law that governs the relationships between the Spirit and matter.



You may then laugh, oh skeptical, at the Doctrine of the Spirits, born out of the vulgar phenomena of the dancing tables, like the electrical telegraphy came out of Galvani’s dancing frogs, but understand that by denying the Spirits you are denying yourself and that the greatest discoveries were laughed at.



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