Enchanted Modernism: “Magical Thinking: a Symposium,” University of London, May 11-12, 2007

Abstract

“I see dead people … They don’t know they’re dead!” So run the famous lines from M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Sixth Sense (1999). These fearful words, addressed by a clairvoyant boy to the child psychologist examining his “hallucinations,” herald a now-famous twist towards the end of the film in which the psychologist is himself revealed to be dead, a revenant in fact, although he did not know it. For researchers and commentators in a wide variety of disciplines and cultural arenas it has become known that the great “twist” in life, as in death, is that between knowledge and belief, between evidence and faith, there exists a chasm within which deeply-rooted human behaviours, such as ghost-seeing, percolate and can come to dominate our experience of the world. The foreknowledge of our own personal death, and its consequent denial and obfuscation in everyday thought-processes has become a standard reference-point in debates focusing upon the concept of magical thinking. This concept, equally at home in the...