Creative pathologies: French experimental psychology and Symbolist avant-gardes, 1889--1900

This dissertation demonstrates the significance of a historically specific mode of reasoning---experimentalism and in particular the paradigmatic pathological method of French experimental psychology---for Symbolist visual aesthetics. In doing so, it examines how experimentalism and the avant-garde came to be yoked together, explores how Symbolism reoriented Naturalism, and provides an intellectual basis for the expanded canon of alterity that emerged in the late nineteenth century.;The belief that the human mind could be known and understood through experimentation on pathologies, rather than through introspective exploration attracted the attention of a number of avant-gardes as they sought to transform Symbolist theory into practice. To illustrate and analyze this important connection, I examine the art and theories produced within two intersecting communities of Symbolist artists, writers and thinkers active in the 1890s: the Nabis, in particular Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard, and the Schwarze Ferkel group including August Strindberg and Edvard Munch. The writing, criticism and art of these individuals, rarely considered together, provide well-documented and substantial instances of the range of formal responses to alterity and experimental psychology in France among Symbolist artists on the threshold of the twentieth century.