Spiritualism and Psychical Research

Cathy Gutierrez

Introduction

Spiritualism as a religious movement self-consciously sought

an alliance with science that would eventually lead to its

own downfall. Despite Spiritualism’s resemblances to many

prior instances of mystical experience or ghostly contact,

the movement is traditionally dated to 1848, when two young

sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, attempted to communicate

with a poltergeist in their home in Hydesville, New York.

Using a home-spun version of Morse code called “alphabet

raps”, the girls inaugurated what would become a trans-

Atlantic phenomenon of séances and table tippings, making

international sensations of some and endorsing domestic

attempts for all (Braude 1989, pp. 10-12; Cox 2003, pp. 6-

7). Spiritualism posited that the dead continued to exist on

an advanced plane—usually a graduated seven tiers of heaven—

where they could be contacted for advice and solace.

Progress was the hallmark of heaven: not instantly perfected

at death, spirits continued to grow in knowledge and

morality. Moreover, Spiritualism proposed that everyone went

to heaven—all religions, races, and temperaments were

destined for the same afterlife. One’s deceased kin and the

sages of history were all available to help the living. The

desire to talk to the dead caught the imagination of the

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era, and the desire to prove scientifically that this was

possible followed immediately in its wake.

From the outset the practitioners of Spiritualism wished

for this new form of communication to be embraced by the

scientific community. Spiritualism came to life in an era

when the daily implications for new technology were very

apparent but their causes were not: steam could make trains

run and forces like electricity and magnetism were clearly

present but not at all clearly understood. Only four years

before the Fox sisters’ rappings, Samuel Morse had sent the

first transmission, “What hath God wrought?” across an

electrical telegraph from Washington, D. C. to Baltimore,

Maryland. Ushering in a century of revolutionary

communications, the telegraph allowed instantaneous

international news for the first time and was the first

wide-spread, practical use of electricity. The ability to

create instant and invisible communication across space was

the cutting edge of technology: the ability to do so across

the threshold of death seemed for many simply a logical next

step.

In this case, however, it was a human who functioned as

a telegraph between the lands of the living and those of the

dead. The new quasi-religious position of medium was well-

suited for the young republic: eschewing credentials and

training, Spiritualists believed that in theory anyone could

become a medium between the worlds. This, too, was

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predicated on vague notions about electricity. Women were

thought to be especially apt for the mediumship because they

were believed to be negatively charged, and as the spirits

were positively charged, women were generally more

attractive vessels of communication. Alphabet raps proved

too laborious to sustain—and probably too boring to watch—

and new methods of communication developed wherein the

medium would enter a trance state and arise with the spirit

of the dead speaking through her.

Heaven functioned as a model for earth, and although the

dead were not perfect they were still culturally superior

and provided guidance on all aspects of living.

Spiritualists fervently believed that their endeavour would

be allied with science and staked claims to a number of

scientific and pseudo-scientific pursuits. The body and its

discontents, technology to prove or perfect communication

with the dead, and the rise of psychology all provided

fertile ground for Spiritualist explorations.

Mesmerism and Medicine

Franz Anton Mesmer, a German doctor, in the eighteenth

century developed a theory called “animal magnetism” that he

desperately wished to be accepted by the medical

establishment of his day. Mesmer argued that a magnetic

fluid ran throughout the universe, accounting for the

rotation of planets in their orbits as well as the pull of

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the ocean’s tides. According to the theory, this fluid also

flowed in human beings and ill health could be attributed to

it becoming blocked in the body. Mesmer repeatedly sought

the imprimatur of the Parisian Academy, with his method

undergoing sustained testing by commissions that included

Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier. Despite the fact

that Mesmer had literally hundreds of cures to his credit,

the commission concluded that animal magnetism amounted to

the combined effects of touch and imagination (Crabtree

1993, pp. 23-32).

Mesmer was by no means alone in his search for a single

cause and it attendant single cure. According to John Harley

Warner, specificity in describing diseases and locating

their aetiologies comprised the primary medical innovation

of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, “The systems of

medical practice . . . embodied the remnants of the

Enlightenment hope that some unifying medical principle

would be found, a law of disease and treatment that would

prove as fertile for medicine as the law of gravity had for

the physical sciences. A unified, rationalistic explanation

of pathology characterized such systems, which often

distilled the apparent diversity of disease phenomena into a

single pathogenic process” (Warner 1997, p. 40). Mesmer’s

search for a solitary panacea, however, would be eclipsed by

a proto-psychological development that erroneously bore his

name and completely overshadowed his hopes for scientific

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acceptance.

Both Mesmer and his early pupils had noticed an

occasional trance state that occurred while ministering

animal magnetism; akin to sleep walking, the patient in this

state could move and speak but would have no recollection of

the episode when returned to his waking state. While Mesmer

ascribed these occurrences to strictly natural phenomena,

many of his students and competitors would embrace “magnetic

somnambulism” as the therapeutic instrument rather than as

merely a by-product of animal magnetism. Moreover, and much

to Mesmer’s chagrin, many were intrigued by the paranormal

implications of this second state, and magnetic somnambulism

became popular among Swedenborgians, Freemasons, and other

mystically-minded groups in France and Germany (Crabtree

1993, pp. 67-72; Monroe 2008, pp. 67-72).

Unlike many post-Freudian constructions of the

unconscious as antisocial, earlier experimenters with

magnetic sleep found the second state to be more refined and

morally apt than the waking one. The marquis de Puységur, an

early student of Mesmer’s and a later rival, noticed among

his patients that not only did inducing magnetic sleep help

their physical and emotional problems, it also brought out a

more perspicacious and even articulate self. Puységur

recognized a special relationship between the magnetizer and

the patient under magnetic sleep that he called being “en

rapport”. A predecessor to hypnotic suggestibility, rapport

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required upstanding morals on the part of the magnetizer.

The Spiritualists relied upon the trance state for

mediums to enter into contact with the denizens of heaven.

However, Spiritualists dispensed with the need for a

magnetizer, inducing these states without external aid or

authority. The second self was also understood by

Spiritualists differently from Mesmer and his generation:

trance states produced not an alternative consciousness of

the subject but rather the portal for the spirits of the

dead. Many voices travelled through the instrument of the

entranced body but none were intrinsic to the medium’s core

self. Spiritualists were so adamant that the voices were not

epiphenomena of the waking subject that they often used

speech acts as a litmus test of the medium. If a medium were

understood to be too young or too uneducated to discuss

science and politics, then surely this was the spirit world

talking through her. The popular medium Cora Hatch would

submit to external testing of this ilk. A committee asked

her questions about the divinity of Jesus and the

functioning of gyroscopes. The judges’ incredulity that a

young woman could answer such questions lent the air of

objectivity to Spiritualist claims (Fornell 1964, p. 81).

Spiritualists routinely supported animal magnetism as a

psychical cure well through the American Civil War and

extended their interest in medicine to a host of emergent

and alternative practices. Hydropathy and homeopathy were

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championed by believers and Spiritualist newspapers

frequently serialized new books on the topics. Andrew

Jackson Davis, one of the foremost leaders of Spiritualism

and arguably its most cogent theologian, wrote columns and

books on health and served his final years as a country

doctor. Davis forwarded a single-cause theory himself, this

one explicitly tied to mystical endeavours: the health of

the body was exclusively dependent on the spiritual

knowledge of the subject (Davis 1909, pp. 48-54). While

Christian Science turned to a faith-based model for health,

Spiritualism proposed a knowledge-based system: moderation,

physical exercise, and the harmony of the soul and body

would produce a long and plentiful life.

Machines

Spiritualists ardently believed that science would prove the

truth of their claims. As the telegraph revolutionized

communication across the nation and then the Atlantic, so

too did photography provide a new and apparently miraculous

way to communicate across time and space. Spiritualism

conscripted both of these new technologies and tried their

hand at developing their own. While mediumship was modelled

originally on the telegraph and that metaphor retained

currency for decades, the use of people as the instrument of

communication was still subject to human error.

Spiritualists sought out and built machines designed to

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eliminate that margin, often with the help of the spirit

world which they believed contained both the finest minds of

history and was itself temporally ahead of the mundane world

in the march of progress.

In 1855 the most prestigious chemist in America

converted to Spiritualism. Dr. Robert Hare, professor of

chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, was attempting

to disprove the claims of Spiritualists when he was

accidentally convinced of their veracity. Unfortunately

Hare’s conversion ultimately cost him his reputation as a

scientist but the initial event and the 1856 publication of

his book, Experimental Investigations of the Spirit Manifestations, gave

the scientific community and the general public pause. Hare

began building machines to test the objectivity of

mediumship: using a treadle like a sewing machine attached

by pulleys to a circular plate with the alphabet printed on

it, the medium would spin the wheel in a complicated version

of a Ouija board. Hare would also quiz the spirit world

about erudite matters and expect a high level of knowledge

from certain spirits. The alleged spirit of his father, for

example, was able to spell out Latin phrases from Vergil as

he would have in life (Hare 1856, p. 53).

The quest for scientific verification of spiritual

claims seemed to come to complete fulfilment with the advent

of spirit photography. Photography seemed to most people to

be the perfect objective medium: a photograph reproduced

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reality, and when ghosts started appearing in photographs,

Spiritualists were delighted to claim them as proof of the

continued existence of the dead. Spirits, they argued,

existed just outside of the light spectrum the human eye

could see. Cameras were depicted as mechanized eyes, the

perfected technology of seeing. People’s inability to see

ghosts was eclipsed by the camera’s supposed ability to

capture them.

In 1861 William H. Mumler stumbled into history by

accidentally creating the first ghost photograph. Mumler was

learning the process of wet-plate photography when he

developed a self-portrait with another figure in it.

Attributing the event to his own inexperience, Mumler showed

a Spiritualist friend the photo as a joke. Shortly

thereafter he found himself and his “discovery” being

extolled in Spiritualist newspapers up and down the eastern

seaboard. Mumler converted to the cause and became a

specialist in spirit photography, charging the then-

exorbitant rate of ten dollars a sitting. In 1869, Mumler

was also the first to be brought up on charges of fraud for

his spirit photographs. Despite the prosecution bringing out

P. T. Barnum to declare spirit photography humbug and

demonstrating ten different ways the photographs could be

altered with wet-plate photography, Mumler was acquitted on

all counts. In addition to Mumler, the trial raked

Spiritualism over the coals, with the real battle being

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whether the movement was a threat to the tenets of

Christianity (Cloutier 2004, p. 22).

Photography shifted the ground of Spiritualist

communication with the afterlife. Mediumship, dominated by

women and requiring no formal training, became accompanied

by a masculine profession that played to the wealthy and

their love of novelty. As Mumler had set the terms, he

served the dead, and did not control them. Trance mediumship

implied that the spirits of the dead wished to be in

constant contact with their living kin and to offer advice

and solace to the living. In spirit photography, one was not

assured of even getting a ghost one knew: in fact, in some

of its more embarrassing lapses, sometimes one would not get

a ghost at all but an identifiable living person. In

photographs, the dead were silenced and the domestic bonds

that séances continued were not guaranteed. The apparent

objectivity provided by the camera came at the cost of an

on-going and reciprocal relationship with the dead.

Not all Spiritualist machines were designed by humans;

heaven, being both benevolent and more advanced

technologically, sometimes sent ideas for machines to

Spiritualists. The most famous case was that of the Reverend

John Murray Spear, a colourful figure who fought for

progressive politics on every front. Known as the Prisoner’s

Friend for his work on prison reform, Spear was a

Universalist minister who converted to Spiritualism after

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reading Andrew Jackson Davis’s work. In 1853, Spear

undertook the construction of the New Motive Power near

Lynn, Massachusetts. This machine was to be a gift from the

spirit world for the betterment of humankind. Following the

instructions given to him by a spirit association called the

“Electrizers”, whose spokesman was the spirit of Benjamin

Franklin, Spear endeavoured to build a machine 170 feet tall

with copper and zinc costing an astonishing two thousand

dollars. The New Motive Power had body parts that related to

human ones and was designed to be brought to life.

As recounted in the Spiritualist weekly paper the New

Era, an unnamed woman performed ministrations to the machine

and underwent pains similar to labour. This “Mary of the New

Dispensation” was to give birth to a mechanical messiah at

the intersection of the spiritual and the technological.

Some at the scene even claimed to see the machine move a

little on its own. However, since full vivification was not

accomplished and reports of the birthing process cast it in

unsavoury and even salacious light, the machine never

brought forth the expected benefits it and was eventually

destroyed by an alleged band of unbelieving Spiritualists

(Hardinge 1870, pp. 227-228; Buescher 2006, pp. 120-127).

Other machines sent from the spirit world included

perpetual motion machines, weather machines, and even

weapons designed to end war because no one would wish to go

up against them. Spear spent his final years attempting to

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sell a magical sewing machine, and in one of the more

successful collaborations in 1873 the spirit world taught

Amanda Theodocia Jones a canning process that revolutionized

the field. From the whimsical to the extraordinary, however,

Spiritualist machines spoke to believers’ fervent desire to

ally science and religion in the pursuit of progress. With

the wisdom of heaven at their service and with the wonders

of magnetism and electricity changing their daily lives in

myriad ways, Spiritualists were convinced that technology

was the natural partner of spirituality and that the two

would march into the future together.

Consciousness Debates

Mesmerism was resurrected for scientific investigation

largely by the Scottish doctor James Braid who coined the

term “hypnosis” and used it to distinguish a therapeutic

trance state from Mesmer’s claims that animal magnetism

could cure any disease. In his 1843 work, Neurypnology; or, the

Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Braid carefully disentangles the

universalist claims as well as the mystical overtones of

Mesmerism from hypnosis; he personally attributes a number

of cures to his new method and was largely responsible for

getting the scientific community to reconsider magnetic

sleep in its new guise.

Spiritualism had always flirted with diagnoses of

madness. When women in particular fell into dissociative

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states and had multiple voices speaking through them, such

run-ins were inevitable. Moreover, when those voices

declared a final judgment null, the non-existence of hell,

and the salvation of all races and religions, the ground was

fertile for conflict. For most of the nineteenth century

women could be summarily institutionalized by their husbands

with no legal recourse. Letters snuck out of asylums to

relatives or the press were frequently the sole form of hope

to have a patient’s case reconsidered. Furthermore, a new

nosological entity called “monomania” appeared in the first

half of the century, a diagnosis whereby a patient could be

declared mad in one respect only—she could be fully

functioning in all other manners but have a single symptom

of madness. In America, monomania was diagnosed almost

exclusively with religious beliefs: if a woman disagreed

with her husband on religious tenets or embraced the

Shakers, Millerites, or Spiritualists, she ran a serious

risk of being institutionalized against her will.

Spiritualists understood the threat of nascent

psychology to its movement and launched a counter attack

against claims of madness. Altered states of consciousness

offer an interpretive battleground for determining whether

religious phenomena imply possession, insanity, or

mysticism. Spiritualists fervently argued against early

constructions of an unconscious, claiming that belief in a

“subliminal mind” would hamper mediumship and even court

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insanity. Some even agreed that hysteria and mediumship came

from the same source, but insisted on a theological rather

than pathological understanding of that—the hysteric was a

thwarted medium. Ian Hacking has noted that psychological

diagnoses require cultural “hosts,” and that the designation

of schizophrenia (here meant as the nineteenth-century

version of dissociative identity disorder rather than its

current diagnostic definition) died out with Spiritualism

(Hacking 1995, pp. 135-136).

Certainly the pioneers in psychology understood trance

states to be the root and the cure for many pathologies.

Jean-Martin Charcot, in charge of a wing of hysterics at the

Salpêtrière asylum, could both induce and relieve the

symptoms of hysteria in his patients using hypnosis. His

students included Pierre Janet, who would become major

player in discussions of hysteria and multiple

personalities, as well as a young Sigmund Freud and Josef

Breuer. All three would continue to employ their teacher’s

use of therapeutic hypnosis and Janet would forward the

theory that a traumatic memory stuck in the “subliminal

mind” caused hysterical symptoms.

Freud and Breuer’s famous Studies on Hysteria in 1895 would

add that the affect associated with the traumatic event were

also repressed; all agreed that hypnosis could help unseat

the memory and Freud and Breuer went as far as to define

hysteria as unwilling hypnosis. While Janet asserted that

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hysterical symptoms referred only back to the self, he does

still bear traces of the esoteric legacy of Mesmerism when

he argues that crystal gazing, talking in one’s sleep, and

automatic writing can affect the repressed memory. Freud

would eventually abandon hypnotism in favour of the talking

cure, a phrase provided to Breuer during their explorations

into hysteria by one of his patients. Dreams, slips of the

tongue, and primarily free association would become Freud’s

replacement for hypnosis—the embedded memory and its

attendant emotions could be pushed into consciousness by

language. The return of the memory would itself cure the

hysteria, dislodging the problem that had taken hold of the

body and delivering it back to the mind.

In all of these cases, however, the early

psychotherapists maintained that phenomena like hysteria and

hypnosis referred to a part of the psyche that was not

otherwise accessible to consciousness but pertained solely

to the subject. Janet’s subliminal mind would compete with

Freud’s unconscious that was teeming with antisocial drives

and sexual impulses, but both located alternative states

firmly within the self. While Spiritualism’s claims that

experiences during trance states referred to beings outside

of the self—contact with the dead—Freud’s construct of the

unconscious as their source would hold sway for the better

part of a century. Freud himself, a confirmed atheist,

mentions the Spiritualists in passing in The Future of an Illusion,

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that while still deluded by religion, he did admire them for

attempting to empirically verify their claims.

The moment, however, was not yet over for science

entirely eclipsing Spiritualist and related claims about

religious explanations for altered consciousness. The first

American reviewer of Studies on Hysteria was fairly unimpressed

by the book, writing that it was largely a rehash of Janet’s

earlier work and that sexuality was improbable as the

centrepiece of the psyche. He and his British counterparts

would provide a critical bridge into the twentieth century,

before science and mysticism were critically exclusive

discourses and before discussion of the brain overtook

explorations of the mind.

Enter William James

According to Christopher White in his book, Unsettled Minds,

mid-century Americans were undergoing a crisis of faith that

made many amenable to the language of psychology in

spiritual pursuits. While more traditional, Calvinist-

influenced Protestantism focused on the total depravity of

all sinners, more liberal Protestantism emerged in response

to this constant state of spiritual anxiety. Characterized

by a belief in universal salvation (or at least the denial

of exclusive claims of salvation), a positive evaluation of

human nature, and a hope for the mutual efforts of science

and religion, these groups broke the ground for psychology

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to coexist with spiritual articulations. Spiritualists,

Universalists, Swedenborgians, and other liberal strains

contributed to this transition. White writes, “Psychological

sciences were becoming the alembic transforming older,

theological formulas, the methodology that uncovered the

original essence of religious truth. The natural world and

human nature were revealing new things, tearing down and

building up. If properly understood and used, our mental

faculties in particular could produce certainty about God

and spiritual matters” (White 2009, p. 37).

William James was born into a privileged and erudite

family that allowed him to experience first-hand the

confluence of science and religion in Europe and America.

Widely known for his spiritual bent, the elder Henry James

espoused a Swedenborgian mysticism that flourished alongside

Romanticism. Individual conscience rather than imposed

morality and a utopian vision of the future marked James

senior’s religious perspective and influenced his son.

Science was still expected to uphold the claims of religion,

and when William James was considering his educational

options both he and his father assumed a complicity between

the two endeavours. As William experimented with a number of

vocations ranging from art to medicine, he found himself

torn between the purely materialistic explanations he wished

to reject and the lure of religion for which he could find

little empirical evidence. The seriousness that he applied

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to this quandary resulted in existential despair and a

depression that lasted two years.

The breaking point arrived with Charles Darwin’s 1859

publication of On the Origin of the Species. According to Paul

Croce, in Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Darwin’s

work rent the father and son on the subject of religiosity

and caused William to forever give up on the quest for

certainty in either scientific or spiritual matters. Coming

out two years before William entered Harvard to study

chemistry, Darwin’s watershed theory disturbed more than the

harmony of the James family: it drove science and religion

into opposing corners. The prospect that humans evolved

rather than were created whole by a divine being rattled

many to the core as well as the implications the work had

for ethics. Croce writes:

Darwin’s account of the origin of species was also disturbing to

religious believers because it seemed to deny morality. The means

for species change, Darwin argued, was the “struggle for life,” the

amoral and sometime ruthless way living things survive and reproduce

by controlling limited resources and adapting to gain a dominant

position in their environment. (Croce 1995, p.104)

James would embrace a fundamental uncertainty as his stance

in negotiating the new science of psychology at the

crossroads of physiology and consciousness. Initially housed

in the Philosophy Department at Harvard, James worked

diligently to create acceptance for this new hybrid

psychology against the protests of the theologians and the

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natural scientists. Employing laboratory experimentation and

empirical data, James navigated between mechanistic and

material explanations for states of the mind and human

agency. He found among his colleagues similar endeavours

abroad.

Psychical Research

Spiritualism had arrived early in England when the American

medium Mrs. Hayden impressed Lord Dunraven in 1852.

Subsequent investigations of the phenomena associated with

Spiritualism generated positive responses and attracted the

attention of Charles Darwin’s son George—a Fellow of the

Royal Society—and noted psychologist Frederic W. H. Myers.

This atmosphere in which the aristocratic and the learned

fostered the scientific examination of spiritual claims made

for a very different atmosphere than the Spiritualism that

flourished in America. In 1882, scientists and philosophers

from Trinity College in Cambridge founded the Society for

Psychical Research.

Professor Henry Sidgwick, England’s foremost philosopher

of utilitarianism, founded the society with the earliest

members including Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, Mark Twain,

and Lewis Carroll. William James would become its first

American president in 1894 and would found the American SPR

in 1885. Later presidents would include Sir Oliver Lodge and

the philosopher Henri Bergson. The publication of the

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Proceedings of the SPR began in 1883 followed by a Journal the

following year. The first circular asked for members to aid

with collecting information on clairvoyance, haunted houses,

dreams, and spectres; it also suggested methods to test

transference, or mind reading, by using cards with different

colours and shapes on them. From the outset the SPR was

leery of paying mediums, thinking that the use of

professionals would compromise whatever evidence they found.

The significant overlap between psychical research and

psychology, at least in terms of those interested in the

fields, illustrates several decades of fruitful converse

between them. In 1889, Frederic Myers and Henry Sidgwick

attended the first International Congress of Experimental

Psychology in Paris, of which Charles Richet was the

secretary, Charcot the president, and attendees included

Francis Galton, father of eugenics, and William James. The

SPR asked to conduct a Census of Hallucinations, a series of

questions about sensations that did not have a physical

cause to explain them. They collected the results of these

questionnaires for three years and from all corners of the

world. The results indicate that psychology was not yet

disjunct from its religious predecessors. According to Renée

Haynes in her history of the SPR:

Nevertheless the authors conclude that ‘between deaths and the

apparitions of dying persons a connexion [sic] exists which is not

due to chance alone’; and very cautiously hazard the suggestion that

if telepathic communication with the living has a non-physical

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cause, this shows that the mind is independent of the brain, and

thus makes more probably the idea of communication with the dead

(Haynes 1982, p. 43).

The SPR began investigating Spiritualist claims and brought

mediums in to be tested. In 1885, the society hired Mrs.

Leonora Piper to be is test subject. For William James, Mrs.

Piper became his “white crow”, the evidence he required to

confirm the possibility of Spiritualism’s claims: not all

crows need to be white in order for a white crow to exist,

but at least one must be shown to exist. Mrs. Piper’s

consistent results and above-reproach reputation made her an

ideal candidate for study. The proper test subject made the

issue much more palatable to many SPR members but questions

remained about the referent of trance communication. Both

Myers and Sir Oliver Lodge enjoyed the respectability

conferred by Mrs. Piper and came to consider Spiritualism as

an appropriate object of inquiry, but whether the contact

came from spirits, a subaltern self, or interpersonal

psychic communication were still speculations.

In 1890, William James’s Principles of Psychology was

published, adding America to the fray for defining the

parameters of psychology and consciousness. James was

obviously open to many of the claims made by Spiritualists

and sponsored the printings of some of their works. He also

recognized that Spiritualism was able to achieve real

psychological healing. However, his theories of the

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unconscious were closer to twentieth-century psychology than

to theology. Eugene Taylor writes:

James’s conjecture was that this altered state was somehow related

to sleep and dreaming. Hypnotism, he thought, evoked and enlarged

upon the hypnagogic state… [in which] all abstract thought becomes

highly pictorial; mental images rather than ideas are the rule;

dream sequences, colorful visions, and constantly transforming

pictures related more by association than logic dominate the field

of attention (Taylor 1996, p. 38).

Debates about the construction of consciousness and the

aetiology and uses of alternative states continued at the

juncture of psychology and psychical research. Charcot and

his school continued to proffer that the hypnotized state

was pathological in its onset and needed curing, some

through therapeutic hypnosis and others, like Freud, through

linguistic associations. Myers, however, was willing to

consider that dissociative states may be not only “natural”

but even beneficial. His theory of the subliminal self

incorporated many of the same tenets as Charcot, Richet, and

the French school, but the dissociative state included for

Myers that possibility that the second self could be

preferable to the waking state. The dissociative state was

by no means necessarily pathological: Myers incorporated

into his theory the possibility that supernormal cognition

may be inferred, and he theorized that multiple selves, none

of which should claim primacy as the “normal” self, were

possible.

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Echoing his predecessor Puységur, Myers conjectured that

a dissociative state with higher intellectual and moral

aptitude was entirely possible. For his template, he

alighted upon the daemonian of Socrates: surely the father

of science and metaphysics would not fall into a base state

but rather ascend to an enlightened one. And Myers was

willing to argue for the applicability of his theory not

just in the historical record but in therapeutic reality.

Regarding a very famous case of a double personality, Félida

X., whose waking sense was morose, physically troubled, and

fractious, Myers argued that she should be allowed to stay

in her alter, a cheerful personality that did not exhibit

any of the unpleasant aspects of her first one. Myers takes

umbrage with the concept of “normal” here, insisting that

what is usual is not necessarily what is better. In

advocating multiple possible selves with no necessary core

personality as well as dissociative states referring to

higher, not lower, instincts, Myers attempted to medicalize

and legitimate many of the theological claims that

Spiritualism and its related currents had articulated

(Gutierrez 2009, pp. 169-171).

Freudian constructs of the psyche, devoid entirely of

theological content and pointing toward baser impulses,

would dominate much of the twentieth-century understanding

of the unconscious. However, dynamic psychology itself—

wherein the act of therapy took place between patient and

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doctor—was also soon to be eclipsed. For the Spiritualists

and the fin-de-siècle SPR members, therapeutic

psychoanalysis would have looked bleakly materialistic: with

no referent greater than the self, and nothing found there

other than “common unhappiness”, psychology was a

disenchantment of the mind. By the late twentieth century,

the idea of a mind became disenchanted, replaced by

neurophysiology and even higher order of strict materialism

centred on the brain and advances in pharmaceutical cures to

mental discomfort.

The Society for Psychical Research continues today and

many of their current publications are aimed directly at the

meta-materialism of the brain. A 1988 pamphlet published by

the SPR articulates the new directions for this conversation

and points toward a new scientific landscape for

explanations—physics. John Beloff writes,

Thus, from the physicalist standpoint, mind is an epiphenomenon;

brain alone is what actually determines everything we do, say, think

or feel. … psychical research alone attempted to challenge the

physicalist position on strictly scientific and empirical grounds. …

Some [parapsychologists] maintain that, when physics has attained a

yet more advanced stage, psi phenomena will be understood as

physical phenomena of a special sort. Some of the bolder theorists

have even suggested the direction which this development might take,

making quantum theory their point of departure” (Beloff 1988, pp. 2-

3).

The hope for new answers to be found in theoretical physics

24

is a direction taken by many contemporary theorists and

believers interested in paranormal phenomena and supra-

material explanations for extraordinary experiences. As

science turned toward making religion an object of

investigation, many still maintain that science will

ultimately corroborate their claims.1

The Paranormal Today

Popular culture was not far behind in the pursuit of

consciousness. The sixties’ counter culture was open to

explorations of alternate states, the possibility of the

paranormal, and the expansion of consciousness through the

use of hallucinogens. A landmark of that coalition, the

Esalen Institute, was founded in 1962 with a mission to

explore parapsychology, mind-expanding drugs, and

creativity. Michael Murphy, co-founder along with Richard

Price, had long been enamoured of Frederic Myers and the SPR

as well as some of Freud’s writings on telepathy. The

possibility that the frontiers of consciousness could be

explored best on an experiential and recreational basis

shifted the discussion again to the religiously minded who

expected eventual scientific confirmation of their claims

about the paranormal.

In 1968, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder published

Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, in which they made the

1 For a detailed exploration of the SPR and its legacy, see Asprem, thisvolume.

25

sensational argument that the Soviet Union and the Eastern

Block had been avidly testing the use of extrasensory

perception for the purposes of espionage. The claim that the

Soviets were heavily immersed in the paranormal stoked the

Cold War flames in America and psi investigations took on a

new cast as a necessary branch of military defence. In 1972,

the Central Intelligence Agency launched its first foray

into developing ESP as a tool for spying. While the CIS had

long been interested in paranormal claims, it took the

initiative of Doctors Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of

Stanford Research Institute to secure a working relationship

between psychical research and the American military. This

collaboration would come to focus most heavily on remote

viewing, a phrase coined by the psychic Ingo Swann while he

was working at the American branch of the SPR.

Remote viewing refers to when the subject’s

consciousness moves outside of its body and observes distant

geographical locations (later some would add that one could

remotely view the future as well but initial investigations

were centred on space, not time). Swann convinced Puthoff of

the possible efficacy of psychic seeing with his own ability

to identify objects in boxes or otherwise obscured from his

physical sight. Puthoff enlisted Targ, a fellow physicist

who had been interested in the paranormal, and they devoted

a then-sizable grant from the CIA to examine psychic

espionage. Two methods were developed for remote viewing:

26

first was the use of a “beacon”, or a person in the field

looking directly at the object in question with the remote

viewer describing it back in the lab. Then Swann suggested

“coordinate” remote viewing, in which the viewer was

supplied the longitude and latitude of the object. While

this latter method obviously had more potential as an

espionage tool, it also had more potential for chicanery as

maps and photography could be employed to fake results.

However, the Scanate Project—scanning by coordinates—was

put into place with Swann and another psychic, Pat Price, as

the primary research subjects. Project Stargate, as the CIA

had dubbed the paranormal investigations, achieved mixed

results until he untimely death of Price in 1975 which

largely ended the CIA’s sponsorship of remote viewing

experiments. Various other government agencies continued

paranormal investigations in one guise or another until

Project Stargate was officially closed in 1995 when the CIA

declassified the work done at Stanford and the information

was made available through the Freedom of Information Act.

Since then both Puthoff and Targ have published histories of

the Scanate Project as well as their recollections of the

participants and the experiments. Both remain convinced of

the existence of psi abilities and the efficacy of remote

viewing.

In 1979 and 1980 Michael Murphy and a cadre from the

Esalen Institute travelled to the Soviet Union to examine

27

first-hand the situation of the paranormal explorations in

the U.S.S.R. According to the foremost historian of Esalen,

Jeffry Kripal, “What the Esalen associates discovered on

their trips in 1979 and 1980 was certainly less grandiose

than what Ostrander and Schroeder had claimed to find in the

late 1960s, but they found something real nonetheless. They

found that the Russians were steeped in the supernormal, and

that these interests often pushed them to combine their

Marxist materialist doctrines and their mystical convictions

in strange, and often humorous, ways” (Kripal 2007, p. 330).

The paranormal allowed metaphysics to flourish inside the

closed Communist rhetoric of being opposed to formal

religion.

At the time of this writing, a recent experiment has

been conducted by Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at

the University of Hertfordshire, employing the social

networking tool, Twitter, to test remote viewing using

random volunteers from the internet. In June of 2009,

Professor Wiseman went to four different locations and asked

participants on Twitter to describe what he was seeing. He

then issued a photograph of the location as well as four

decoy photographs and asked them to vote on which was the

real site. According to the Wall Street Journal on June 10,

2009, over seven thousand Twitter volunteers participated in

the experiment. Professor Wiseman notes that the results

were not promising for remote viewing—the vast majority of

28

participants failed to correctly identify the location. The

results for the use of technology and social networking for

global, real-time experiments, however, was extremely

promising.

Religious beliefs and spirituality have recently come

under the scrutiny of science as an object of study. New

branches of evolutionary psychology, among others, now

question the purpose of religious ideas in the development

of contemporary humanity with answers ranging from religion

is an outmoded understanding of the world to a necessary

step in ethics and social cohesion. Believers in the

paranormal continue to invest hope, mostly in quantum

physics, that science will one day verify what they have

claimed all along—that the ways of the world and human

experience exceed what can be captured in the limits of

rationality.

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