The Otherworldly Self: The Porous Boundaries between

Psychical Research and Scientific Psychology

Second Great Awakening: 1790s-1840sReligious Revival Movement, withLarge Camp Meetings and Itinerant Preachers Stressed Personal Experience for Spiritual RebirthReforming Tendencies (led to suffragist, abolitionist movements)

Collection of the New York Historical Society, New York, City, negative no. 26275

Spiritualism – in NY State, 1848

The Fox House

The Fox Sisters

Margaret Kate Leah

Typical Séance

Séance Participants, courtesy of the Connecticut State Library

Table-Tilting

“The Medium and

Daybreak” 1875

SpiritualistPublication

The Mumler Case: Spirit Photographs?

Mrs. French with her spirit son

                           

         1.Mr. DOBBS, at the request of his Affianced,

sits for his Photograph. Unconsciously happens in at MUMLER'S.

2. Result--Portrait of DOBBS, with his Five Deceased Wives in Spirituo!!!

Harper's Weekly, May 8, 1869

Spirit Photograph, with a Medium, from Lombroso, After Death What? (1908)

FOUNDING MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH (1882)

Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick & Frederick Myers

By 1895, the SPR claimed 900 members, with 6 different committees.

Eleanor Sidgwick

Mathematician andmember of the SPR

The SPR claimed that their research did not “imply the acceptance of any particular

explanation of the phenomena investigated, nor any belief as to the operation in the

physical world, of forces other than those recognized by Physical Science.”

Amateur Thought-Reading Illustrated London News(1889)

from Noakes, 2004

Experiment inThought-Transference

From “Third ReportOn thought-transference”

Society for PsychicalResearch

(1882-1883)Upper right drawing

original

From Noakes, 2004

Automatic Writing with a Planchette

Dynamometer: Measuring muscle force

Frederick Myers, Society of Psychical Research—1890s

• Subliminal Self: layer of the self just below consciousness, evidenced by trance, hypnotism and automatic writing.

Emanations from this self were not abnormal, and could even be supernormal, or from a wiser self, beyond the everyday, narrow self (examples were Joan of Arc and Socrates).

“Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows”

Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918)

CESARE LOMBROSO(1835-1909)

Experiments with Cardiographs, and Recording CylinderFrom, Lombroso, After Death, What? (1908)

Table Levitation Luminous Bands in Séances

From Cesare Lombroso, After Death, What? (1908)

Leonore Piper, Medium

(1857-1950)

Mina “Margery” Crandon (1888-1941) and Walter Prince (from Amer. Soc. Psych. Res.)

Debunking “Margery” the Medium

Prince, Bird, MargeryHoudini (left to right)

Bird on floor from Spirit shove

Overview of Founding of Psychological Societies

• British Society for Psychical Research, founded 1882

• American Society for Psychical Research, founded 1884

-- in 1887 formed a committee on experimental psychology.

• American Psychological Association founded in 1892.

Exposure of a medium masquerading as a materialized spirit from Graphic (1879)