Enchanted Modernism: "Magical Thinking: a Symposium," University of London, May 11-12, 2007
"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 twis...
| Published in: | Journal of religion and popular culture |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
University of Saskatchewan
[2007]
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| In: |
Journal of religion and popular culture
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | "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 disciplines of social anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory, refers to the range of strategies, behaviours, and cultural interventions which format the interface between thought and the other, desire and fulfilment, and cause and effect. |
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| ISSN: | 1703-289X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of religion and popular culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3138/jrpc.17.1.006 |