======================================================================
=                         Annie_Payson_Call                          =
======================================================================

                            Introduction
======================================================================
Annie Payson Call (1853-1940) was an American author of advice
literature on nervous health and mind-body composure. Based in
Waltham, Massachusetts, she wrote for 'Ladies' Home Journal' and
published widely read books from the 1890s to the 1910s.


                         Biography and work
======================================================================
Call grew up in New England in an intellectual environment shaped by
liberal Protestant and Swedenborgian currents. Religious-studies
scholar Catherine L. Albanese places her among late-nineteenth-century
American “harmonial” writers influenced, directly or indirectly, by
Emanuel Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondence between spirit, mind,
and body. This metaphysical background framed her concern with nervous
health and repose as part of moral and spiritual discipline rather
than medical treatment.

Her early works--'Regeneration of the Body' (1888) and 'Power Through
Repose' (1891)--offer practical counsel on muscular and mental
relaxation, conscious breathing, and the quieting of will, addressed
to readers struggling with overstrain and anxiety. According to
historian of yoga Mark Singleton, Call’s writings exemplify a form of
“proprioceptive therapy” that sought harmony between body and mind
through awareness and suggestion, anticipating later twentieth-century
methods of guided relaxation and “meditative movement.” Singleton
argues that this popular pedagogy of relaxation anticipated or
paralleled later twentieth-century techniques such as guided imagery
and progressive relaxation which was presented as “yogic relaxation”.

Scholars also situate Call’s program within the broader
late-nineteenth-century culture of suggestion and “nervous”
therapeutics. There is no evidence that she trained in a medical
school of hypnosis; rather, her emphasis on muscular release,
attentive quiet, and the gentle use of suggestion for
habit-reeducation reflects the popular diffusion of ideas debated in
the Paris and Nancy schools and in Anglo-American hypnotic literature
of the period. In addition, historians have located her pedagogy at
the intersection of the late-nineteenth-century François Delsarte
movement and contemporary suggestion/hypnosis debates. J. M. Andrick
analyses the Lasell Seminary dispute over Call’s “nerve-training”
classes as a case of “Delsartean hypnosis”--a historiographical label
for the blend of Delsartean posture/relaxation work with mild
suggestion and guided imagery in women’s education, not a term used by
Call herself. Andrick further argues that the Lasell episode
illuminates how such pedagogies fed into early twentieth-century
relaxation training programs.

Call presented her techniques as means to self-control and everyday
composure. Her tone is non-technical and moral-didactic, oriented to
middle-class readers concerned with “nerves” and overstrain.


                               Works
======================================================================
Source: New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors
* 'Regeneration of the Body' (1888)
* 'Power Through Repose' (1891)
* 'As a Matter of Course' (1894)
* 'The Freedom of Life' (1905)
* 'Man of the World' (1905)
* 'Every Day Living' (1906)
* 'Nerves and Common Sense' (1909)
* 'Brain Power for Business Men' (1911)
* 'How to Live Quietly' (1914)
* 'Nerves and the War' (1918)


                               Legacy
======================================================================
Singleton identifies Call as an early and influential popularizer of
guided relaxation in the North Atlantic world, noting conceptual
affinities with later mind-body education and with some
twentieth-century Western reinterpretations of yogic rest practices;
he does not present Call as a source in Indian premodern yoga but as
part of a modern Western genealogy of relaxation pedagogy that
subsequently was presented as 'yogic'. Albanese reads Call as
representative of what she calls 'American harmonial religion'’s
emphasis on composure and practical spirituality rather than as a
clinical authority.


                              See also
======================================================================
* Yoga nidra - modern guided-relaxation protocols that some scholars
compare to Western relaxation pedagogies teached by Call and her
philosophical environment.


License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Payson_Call