THE EYE AND THE MIND

MARY CHEVES WEST PERKY, IMAGINATIVE PHENOMENOLOGY, AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF REVERSE HALLUCINATION

D. GRAHAM BURNETT

History and Theory 63, no. 3 (2024)

Revisiting the remarkable experimental work of the pioneering early twentieth-century psychologist Mary Cheves West Perky (1875–1940), this article argues for the historiographical significance of her counterintuitive findings concerning the human imagination and the phenomenon of “reverse hallucination.” By means of an exhaustive and forensic archival inquiry, this article reconstructs Perky's heretofore (essentially) unknown biography, providing new insights into the context and broader importance of her research, both with respect to the history of the human sciences and in relation to the history of American artistic modernism. At the same time, these pages recursively deploy her distinctive perspective on the way the perceptual experiences of reality inosculate with projective fantasy, activating her findings as a component of a nontraditional disciplinary practice.

Mary Cheves West Perky, Pennsylvania German Pie Dish, c. 1937, oil paint on paperboard, 51.5 × 38.5 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.25090.html