Whether it is spirit photography, hysterical fits, or automatic messages, all shared must be regarded as both hallucinations of the imagination and repressions of the unconscious mind. The uncanny of death induced by scientific peculiarities of new telecommunications technologies led to widespread exploration of ghostly phenomena in religion, science, and art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This utilization of automatic techniques, in the areas of spiritualism, psychoanalysis, and surrealism, after revolved around producing an uncanny or ghostly other: the “other” being repressed within the individual (self). It was this inquiry into the uncanny that first attracted Breton to access the unconscious through automatic practices adapted from the methodology of telecommunication technologies. Instead of using these technologies in their practice, spiritualists adapted some of the principles of these devices into themselves, so their bodies could serve as an autonomous conduit between the living and dead. With technologies that either suspended time visually, or allowed people to communicate with others almost instantaneously through coded electrical messages, a new belief system developed as responses to these new modes of communications. During the nineteenth-century, death was a present theme in writings about spiritualism and mediums, which revived interest in metaphysical texts due to quickly developing media and communication technologies during the Second Industrial Revolution.
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