Psychical research and the origins of American psychology

Abstract

Largely unacknowledged by historians of the human sciences, late-19th-century psychical researchers were actively involved in the making of fledgling academic psychology. Moreover, with few exceptions historians have failed to discuss the wider implications of the fact that the founder of academic psychology in America, William James, considered himself a psychical researcher and sought to integrate the scientific study of mediumship, telepathy and other controversial topics into the nascent discipline. Analysing the celebrated exposure of the medium Eusapia Palladino by German-born Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg as a representative example, this article discusses strategies employed by psychologists in the United States to expel psychical research from the agenda of scientific psychology. It is argued that the traditional historiography of psychical research, dominated by accounts deeply averse to its very subject matter, has been part of an ongoing form of ‘boundary-work’ to bolster the scientific status of psychology.

Are you afraid of the dark? Notes on the psychology of belief in histories of science and the occult

“…Eschewing constructive dialogues with their targets of attack, opponents offered little dispassionate and constructive methodological critiques and favoured popular magazines and pamphlets rather than formal scholarly channels to get their polemics across. Epistemological positions, methods, aims and arguments of psychical researchers were misrepresented by reliance on generalized allegations of fraud and insinuations of methodological incompetence, the latter being tacitly explained through claims of metaphysical bias (Sommer, 2012, 2013a, Chapter 4; Taylor, 1996). …”

“…Later, popularizers of professional psychology merely continued an overwhelmingly polemical war, relying on an Enlightenment standard rhetoric using fuzzy but immensely loaded terms such as ‘mysticism’, ‘superstition’, ‘sorcery’, ‘enthusiasm’ and similar catchwords to discredit intellectual interest in alleged occult phenomena. This strategy served to construct a public image of the ‘new psychology’ particularly in the US and Germany as inherently progressive and unified, and not least as practically useful in the combat of the supposed social and cultural dangers of spiritualism and other ‘epidemic delusions’ (Coon, 1992; Leary, 1987; Sommer, 2012). …”

From catalepsy to psychical research: The itinerary of Timothée Puel (1812–1890).

“…As Andreas Sommer has noted, before the emergence of professionalized psychology in Britain, it was the prominent scholars at the center of the SPR leadership that “represented British psychology at the first four International Congresses of Psychology” (Sommer, 2014, p. 39). This was hardly exceptional, as most of the first worldwide psychological congresses served as conduits for “unorthodox” English and French strands of psychological experimentation, as Sommer (2013) shows in the German, English, French, and North American contexts, though his work focused on elite figures and founders of modern psychology (missing side-players like Puel). More attention needs to be paid to the history of psychology before these two tendencies were disentangled from one another in order to, as Sommer explains, close a gap that has existed in history of science and medicine scholarship on the “occult,” and to stimulate further work informed by fundamental historiographical revisions that have escaped authors still adhering to simplistic science-occultism dichotomies when writing about past actors and developments deviating from present-day western standard epistemologies.…”

“…Several historians have suggested that dynamic psychology/psychiatry is partly built on a reappropriation of subconscious phenomena and processes discussed in the context of animal magnetism, hypnotism, and psychical research, like psychomotor automatisms, psychosomatic hyperesthesia, uprushes of genius, or outbursts of creativity (Brower, 2010; Ellenberger, 1970; Gauld, 1992; Méheust, 1999; Rausky, 1977). This legacy even extends to experimental psychophysiology (Evrard, 2016a; Lachapelle, 2011; Plas, 2000; Sommer, 2013), sometimes by pointing to, as a negative heuristic, the methodologies psychologists should no longer use, or phenomena they should not look for (Méheust, 1996; Nicolas, 2002). Puel’s experimental psychology questioned the extent of the psychological field: Haven’t we thrown the baby out with the bath water?…”

Hearing the inaudible experimental subject: Echoes of Inaudi, Binet’s calculating prodigy.

“…Finally, can Binet be grouped, as a result of his work with such subjects, with other early psychologists-for example, William James and Hugo Munsterberg (Sommer, 2012)-as an investigator of undifferentiated "psychical" re search? (He had previously investigated "ani mal magnetism" [Binet & Fere, 1887], and only came to dismiss its most surprising effects as resulting from suggestion after his work with Inaudi [Plas, 2012, p. 94; see also Brower, 2010].)…”