SPR - Key Persons
A Leonard sitting might contain a striking cross-reference or ‘cross-correspondence'. Florence Barrett sat with Leonard following the death in 1925 of her husband William F Barrett, the physicist and co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research. She had not planned to do so, but was intrigued by the experience of another Leonard sitter, who reported having had the ‘vivid impression' of Barrett communicating.25 At the sitting, ‘Barrett' stated that he had sent her a message from a place a very long way off. A friend named Mrs Jervis, who had been unable to keep an appointment for afternoon tea with Barrett because of his death, later told her that she had received a letter from Leonora Piper, a medium in America with whom she was acquainted, saying a communicator had stated, ‘Tell Mrs. Jervis I am sorry I could not keep the appointment.'
Meeting and falling in love with Annie Marshall had a profound impact on Myers's emotional life, and her tragic death added depth and impetus to his survival researches.15 They met at irregular intervals over the years in London, where she attended several séances with him; also in the Lake District, where they walked on the grounds of the Marshall famil y homes at Hallsteads and Old Church. He provided her with moral support as she struggled to cope with her mentally-ill husband while at the same time bringing up their five children. Myers was particularly helpful to her in 1876 when Walter Marshall had finally to be confined to a psychiatric hospital because of his manic behaviour and reckless financial dealings.
In July of that year, Myers left for a tour of the Norwegian fjords with his brother Arthur. While he was away, Annie became increasingly guilt-stricken over her part in the confinement of her husband. She committed suicide on 29 August, cutting her jugular vein with scissors and then throwing herself into the lake. Myers was shattered. He subsequently idealized her memory: Annie became for him a symbol of the type of woman who, like Dante's Beatrice, elevated her lover, by her beauty of body and soul, into the higher spiritual realms. There is no evidence that the relationship was at any time a physical one: indeed his poetry and prose suggest the reverse.16 Myers remained on good terms with Walter Marshall and his family until Walter's death.17
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, the second of seven children.1 His father was an artist, his mother a descendant of an aristocratic family. Doyle entered a Jesuit college in Lancashire, then attended Stonyhurst College where he founded a school magazine. He left the school at sixteen, rejected Christianity and became agnostic.
Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, earning his MD in 1881. He enlisted as a doctor on a ship and practised ophthalmology in Southsea, near Portsmouth. At this time he began to publish short stories and by the 1990s had achieved success with his Sherlock Holmes character, enabling him to leave medical practice for full-time writing.
Doyle supervised a hospital in South Africa during the Boer War (1899-1902), then wrote two books about it, one of which earned him a knighthood. In 1914, he formed a volunteer unit serving behind the lines. In 1916 his eldest son was seriously wounded, dying two years later. By 1918 Doyle had also lost his brother (a brigadier general), two brothers-in-law and a nephew.
Doyle produced some 240 fictional works in the genres of historical, fantasy, adventure, science fiction, mystery and others, and some 1,200 non-fictional works on such topics as legal cases, travel, memoirs, and spiritualism. His works are listed in full here, most with links to full texts. LINK
In his last decade Doyle lectured on spiritualism in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, France, South Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Kenya, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. In 1929, he suffered a heart attack, the first of several, and died on July 7, 1930, aged 71.
Bobby Newlove died in 1932, aged ten, having contracted diphtheria. He was the son of the stepdaughter of a Mr Hatch; the family lived in the Lancashire town of Nelson. Some weeks after the boy's death, Hatch contacted Charles Drayton Thomas who was having sittings with Leonard for research purposes; the family had read his book Life Beyond Death and asked if, in his work with Leonard, he might produce evidence of Bobby having survived death.
In eleven sittings, a large number of statements were made about Bobby and the manner of his death. Of these, 100 were specific and correct with regard to the actual circumstances: for example, the Jack of Hearts fancy dress costume he had once worn, gymnastic exercises he practised and the equipment he used. Thirty eight more general statements were vaguely relevant, and 26 were poor. Only seven were actually wrong.23
Of particular interest in this case were repeated statement that Bobby had picked up the infection from playing near pipes that produced contaminated water, in a location he did not normally frequent. This circumstance was hitherto unknown. Thomas and the family were able to discover a spot that closely corresponded to the descriptions: a local person confirmed that Bobby and other children came to play there and had broken the pipe that carried spring water from the hills, causing water to accumulate in pools. The water was found to be contaminated and a risk to health.
Job Titles:
- Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral
Bruce Greyson is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. He is also the former director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. His work has focused on understanding the near-death experience, particularly the long-standing changes on personality and outlook. He developed the Greyson NDE Scale as a measure of the depth of a near death experience, which is widely used. More recently he has become interested in the veridical aspects of such experiences.
Greyson has published widely and is frequently interviewed on the subject of near-death experiences. He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Near Death Studies from 1982 to 2007. He is co-author of Irreducible Mind (2007).
Jung came into contact with spiritism and the occult at an early age, through his family's interests.32 In 1898, he studied the clairvoyance of his cousin Hélène Preiswerk for his medical thesis on ‘the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena'.33
Jung understood psi phenomena in terms of his concept of synchronicity, the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time, especially those that arise during analysis in the context of transference or countertransference.34 Typically, he considered, an archetypal image forces itself into the psyche of a subject and emerges in external reality or in the psyche of a close relative. As a non-causal conception of the psyche and existence, synchronicity is very different from Freudian conceptions centered on principles of causality and action/reaction.35 We speak of synchronicity where no causal link can be found between two facts that correspond between an internal state and external reality.
Carlos Salvador Alvarado was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 9 March 1955. His Puerto Rican father was pursuing a PhD in urban planning at Harvard University, which he never completed because he was called back to the island to take up a government position there. Carlos grew up in Puerto Rico and received his BA in psychology from the University of Puerto Rico in 1978, then returned to the United States mainland. He was awarded an MSc in parapsychology by John F Kennedy University (Pleasant Hill, California) in 1981, an MA in history by Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) in 1989, and a PhD in psychology by the University of Edinburgh in 1997.1
Alvarado contributed significantly towards promoting education in parapsychology, collaborating with his wife Nancy L Zingrone. He wrote extensively on the histories of psychology, psychiatry, and psychical research. Other interests included out-of-body experiences and other anomalous phenomena. His research was funded by the BIAL Foundation, the Perrott-Warrick Fund in Cambridge, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and other organizations.
In addition to his many print publications, Alvarado contributed twenty articles to the Psi Encyclopedia.2 For information on his professional positions and awards, see the section Professional Posts and Honours, below.
Alvarado was stricken with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, late in 2020 and died 16 July 2021 at his home in Carrboro, North Carolina, aged 66.
Alvarado was Research Assistant to Stevenson at the University of Virginia from 1982 to 1986 and was Assistant Professor of Research in Psychiatric Medicine at the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia from 2003 to 2015.
Alvarado was the Chairman of Domestic and International Programs at the Parapsychology Foundation (PF) from 2000 to 2008, volunteering occasionally from 2008 through 2014, and in January 2015 was named the PF's first Research Fellow. He was Scholar in Residence at Atlantic University, Virginia Beach, Virginia, from 2010 to 2013, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Rhine Research Center Durham, North Carolina, from 2011 to 2014. From 2016 to 2020, he served on the Scientific Board of the BIAL Foundation.28
Alvarado, C.S., & Zingrone, N.L. (1994). Individual differences in aura vision: Relationship to visual imagery and imaginative-fantasy experiences. European Journal of Parapsychology 10, 1-30.
Alvarado, C.S., Zingrone, N.L., & Dalton, K. (1998-99). Out-of-body experiences: Alterations of consciousness and the five-factor model of personality. Imagination, Cognition and Personality 18, 297-317.
2. See here for a list of Alvarado's contributions to the Psi Encyclopedia.
Job Titles:
- Founding Member of the KPU
Robert Morris received a BSc in comparative psychology and animal social behaviour at the University of Pittsburgh in 1963. He gained a PhD in psychology at Duke University in 1969. This was followed by two years research on avian social development at Duke University. He had been interested in paranormal phenomena from an early age, and during this time he also worked for evenings, weekends and summers at the Rhine Research Center, then known as the Foundation for the Research of the Nature of Man (FRNM). He later worked alongside William Roll at the Psychical Research Foundation (PRF).
From 1974 to 1980 Morris taught psychology at the University of California, including parapsychology courses. From 1980 to 1985, he was senior research scientist at the School of Computer and Information Science, Syracuse University.
In 1985, he was appointed the first Koestler Chair of Parapsychology in the psychology department at the University of Edinburgh. Under his direction this developed into an active research department which made landmark advances in such areas as the ESP ganzfeld technique, distant influence studies and understanding the geomagnetic psi relationship.
By supervising doctoral students at Edinburgh and elsewhere, Morris is credited with having trained a generation of academics in the UK who went on to establish parapsychology programs in the UK and abroad. (See Parapsychology PhDs in the UK)
Morris died in August 2004 aged 62. His successor as Koestler Chair is Caroline Watt, a founding member of the KPU and formerly one of his doctoral students.
Charles Richet dedicated his book Our Sixth Sense to his ‘illustrious friend Henri Bergson, the deepest thinker of modern times'.15 Bergson, by contrast, never reciprocated: a single mention of Richet referred to his work in neurophysiology.16 It seems that he remained discreet to preserve his reputation. The only exception was when he allowed himself to be elected president of the London based SPR in 1913. The same year, he joined Richet and other psychical researchers in an exclusive discussion group, the so-called ‘club of thirteen' which met on the thirteenth of each month in Richet's house, although little is known about its activities.
Alvarado wrote about Charles Richet, a French physiologist and Nobel prizewinner who experimented extensively with mediums and psychics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alvarado's book Charles Richet: A Nobel Prize Winning Scientist's Exploration of Psychic Phenomena 13 described Richet's work and views in detail.
Christine Simmonds-Moore is a British psychologist and parapsychologist based at the University of West Georgia. Her research interests include the psychology of paranormal belief and disbelief and clinical approaches to exceptional experiences.
Christine Simmonds-Moore was awarded a PhD in psychology from the University of Northampton, and a postgraduate diploma in consciousness and transpersonal psychology from Liverpool John Moores University. After several years of teaching she moved to the US. Currently she is associate professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia, where she teaches parapsychology, research methods and anomalistic psychology. Her research interest centres mainly on anomalous and exceptional experiences, focusing on the relationship between psi and schizotypy, synesthesia, and transliminality. In addition to the psi question, Simmonds-Moore is studying the relationship between mental health and anomalous experiences.
With Christine Simmonds-Moore, Alvarado and Zingrone ran a large online survey exploring the relationship between exceptional and synaesthetic experiences and schizotypy (which is characterized by unusual patterns of thinking that can predispose to schizophrenia). Over half (54.4%) of respondents reported one or more synaesthetic experiences. There was a significant positive relationship between increasing synaesthesia and the number of exceptional experiences.24
David H. Lund has argued that ‘the appeal to the merely possible existence of super-psi, independently of positive evidence that super-psi is in fact being exercised in the case in question, fails to show that the survivalist interpretation of these cases is not the most plausible one',43 but this point appears to be consistent with Braude's own emphasis on considering the ‘needs, interest, history, and behavior of the principal figures' in the particular case at hand. It appears that Braude and Lund simply come down in different places regarding how much motivation for living-agent psi they see evidenced in their surveys of the case material.
David Rousseau has criticised Braude's neglect of the evidence provided by near-death experiences (NDEs), to which Braude devotes only six pages in Immortal Remains 44 and even less in his BICS essay. Rousseau argues that the hypothesis of need-motivated super-psi cannot explain - and in fact is incompatible with - NDEs involving very young children and committed atheists, as neither group desires, pre-NDE, to have their survival-suggestive experiences.45
Doris Fischer's dominant alter ‘Margaret' appeared to dislike Doris, and subjected her to various torments. Likewise, Feda appeared to have a low opinion of Leonard, expressing scorn of her opinions, likes and dislikes. She was also cavalier with regard to Leonard's personal property. Troubridge writes: ‘Feda, according to Mrs. Leonard, has twice presented to casual sitters Mrs. Leonard's wedding ring, has once thrown it in the fire, from which a distressed sitter rescued it, and once ordered another sitter to bestow it upon an itinerant organ grinder.'38 When Leonard placed a fur coat over her knees at the start of a sitting, instead of the blanket she habitually used, Feda ripped it up, objecting to the presence of ‘dead animals'. On another occasion, she insisted that Leonard give her costly ruby ring to a domestic servant.39 According to Troubridge, Leonard tended to comply with Feda's whims, as otherwise Feda would punish her by not appearing at sessions, effectively threatening her livelihood.
Both ‘Margaret' and ‘Feda' claimed to have co-consciousness of their hosts' thoughts and activities in the periods when they were inactive, while both Fischer and Leonard had no memory of anything that occurred while these personalities were dominant.40
Like some other child controls, Feda's pronunciation was childlike - she habitually substituted an L for an R - and she did not respond to attempts to correct it. She habitually referred to herself in the third person and called regular sitters by childish nicknames such as ‘Twonnie' and ‘Raddy'. (A recording of Leonard speaking in trance as ‘Feda' can be heard here.)41
Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (‘Nora') was a member of the wealthy and exceptionally distinguished Balfour family. Her uncle, Lord Robert Cecil, later the third Marquis of Salisbury, was prime minister for three periods between 1886 and 1892, being succeeded from 1902 to 1905 by Eleanor's brother Arthur (giving rise, it is alleged, to the phrase ‘Bob's your uncle'). Arthur was later (1916-19) foreign secretary in Lloyd George's coalition government and occupied various other senior positions. He became first Earl of Balfour in 1922. Another of Eleanor's brothers, Gerald, a classical scholar, became a cabinet minister and in 1930 inherited Arthur's title. Yet another brother, Francis Maitland Balfour, an embryologist of outstanding promise, died tragically young in an Alpine climbing accident. Her brother-in-law, Lord Rayleigh, was an eminent physicist; and her husband, Henry Sidgwick, was the leading Cambridge philosopher of his day (Arthur was his pupil) and a pioneer of higher education for women. All these family members except for Salisbury were to become presidents of the SPR.
Eleanor's father died in 1856, and she and her seven siblings (two boys and five girls, all younger than her) were largely brought up by their widowed mother in a deeply religious but far from intellectually narrow household. All were encouraged to pursue their intellectual interests. Eleanor showed a particular interest in and aptitude for mathematics, which she studied privately. She was well-read in English literature, and fluent or competent in several foreign languages (the family travelled abroad a good deal). Her mother also believed in charitable work and the value of acquiring practical skills: for a while she shared the duties of cook in a large house.
After 1869, when she began to act as hostess and housekeeper for her brother Arthur at his houses in Scotland and London, Eleanor's intellectual and practical gifts gradually became apparent to a widening circle. Through Arthur she became involved in the movement for the higher education of women, and in the investigation of psychic phenomena, and met her husband-to-be and close collaborator in these endeavours, Henry Sidgwick, whom she married in 1876. It appears that for a while she studied for a mathematical qualification that would have enabled her to read for the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. Her coach, NM Ferrers, a celebrated mathematician and teacher, soon to become Master of Caius College, was known to hold the opinion 1 that had she continued ‘she would have been a high Wrangler' (in other words would have passed at the level of a high first class honours degree)2 but she gave up the idea in view of the extra calls on her time entailed by marriage.3 Nonetheless a few years later her name appeared jointly with that of her brother-in-law Lord Rayleigh on three papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, concerning the recalculation of the standard units of electrical measurement, work for which her meticulous accuracy in recording readings and her mathematical talents in checking calculations were well suited.
Her principal lines of endeavour, however, remained in the higher education of women and in psychical research, in both of which areas she accomplished far more than most people, however able and hard-working, could have achieved in a lifetime devoted to either. She became treasurer of the Newnham College Association in 1879 and remained as treasurer of Newnham College until 1920 - no light task during a time of rapid advancement and expansion.4 She was vice-principal of Newnham from 1880 to 1882 and principal from 1892 to 1910, a position which entailed heavy responsibilities and considerable administrative ability. All this was in addition to a good deal of nation-wide activity on behalf of women's education.
During the same period and beyond she was also centrally involved in the affairs of the SPR. This was founded in 1882, and although she did not officially join until 1884 - according to Ethel Sidgwick 5 it was felt unwise to link the aspiring college too publicly with ‘what was likely to be regarded as a cranky society' - in practice she was never uninvolved, particularly, of course, since her husband was its first president. Between them they did a great deal to shape not just the activities of the Society, but what might be called its tone.
Yet in many respects they were very different characters. Though not without a certain dry humour,6 Eleanor was a quiet, reserved, somewhat shy person, slight in build and wholly unassertive. She disliked giving talks and lectures, but would always do so when it was required. Even in private committee meetings she said little, though what she did say came to carry great weight. Henry, on the other hand, was a brilliant, though never domineering, conversationalist, a wit, a practised lecturer, a member of many committees, and an enthusiastic participant in many debating societies. But in important matters they had much in common. Both were driven by a strong sense of duty and gave generous support to the causes they supported. Both shared the same dominant aspirations and were largely agreed as to how they should be pursued. Thus in psychical research both emphasized the need for careful assessment of evidence, for the continued accumulation of data, for caution in interpreting those data, and for exploring all sides of any question. The SPR, they always insisted, should hold no corporate opinions.
Job Titles:
- Founder of Psychoanalysis in Italy
Servadio, a founder of psychoanalysis in Italy, identified certain conditions he believed were optimal, if not actually necessary for the production of telepathy: the process was entirely unconscious, aided by sleep, hypnotic states and drugs, and involved a powerful emotional investment on the part of the patient.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Religious Studies at the Pontifical Catholic University
Everton de Oliveira Maraldi is a Brazilian psychologist with research interests in the psychology of non-ordinary experiences, spirituality, religion and health.
Everton Maraldi is a professor of Religious Studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a research associate at the D'Or Institute for Research and Education (Rio de Janeiro). He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Coventry University (Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Lab) and University of Oxford (SCIO-Scholarship and Christianity in Oxford), UK. In 2023, he was elected president of the Parapsychological Association (USA). He has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Guarulhos University, as well as master's and doctorate degrees in social psychology from the Institute of Psychology of the University of São Paulo.
Maraldi, E.O. (2014). Medium or author? A preliminary model relating dissociation, paranormal belief systems, and self-esteem. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 78, 1-24.
Maraldi, E.O., & Zangari, W. (2015). "In trance": A quali-quantitative study on the role of dissociative and somatoform experiences in religious beliefs and rituals. Boletim Academia Paulista de Psicologia 35, 382-408.
Maraldi, E., & Farias, M. (2019). Assessing Implicit Spirituality in a non-WEIRD Population: Development and Validation of an Implicit Measure of New Age and Paranormal Beliefs. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. 10.1080/10508619.2019.1661198
Maraldi, E.O. et al. (2020). Anomalous and dissociative experiences in a religious context: an autoethnographic approach. Phenomenological Studies - Revista da Abordagem Gestáltica 26/2, 147-61.
Menegatti, M., Maraldi, E., Peres, M., Leao, F., & Vallada, H. (2018). How psychiatrists think about religious and spiritual beliefs in clinical practice: findings from a university hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Revista Brasileira de Psiquiatria 41. 10.1590/1516-4446-2017-2447.
Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901) was one of the principal founders of the Society for Psychical Research, established in London in 1882. His book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published posthumously in 1903, analyses phenomena associated with what he called the ‘Subliminal Self', such as automatic writing, precognitive dreams and the trance states of mediums, and is regarded as a major theoretical contribution to understanding this kind of anomalous mental experience. Myers closely followed the work of continental pioneers such as Sigmund Freud, whose thought about the unconscious he anticipated in some respects, and whose writings he introduced to the British and American reading public.1 However, he departed from the mainstream in considering much anomalous mental phenomena to be normal aspects of human consciousness, not pathological symptoms requiring treatment, and also possible indicators of the continuation of that consciousness after death.
Myers read and admired Darwin, but like many people of his generation he was disturbed by the implications of evolution theory for religious faith, and he sought empirical evidence that personality and consciousness survive the death of the body. In this he was disappointed by the results of much of his early research with mediums while believing that, on occasions, a small number produced genuine paranormal phenomena. However, he found from other events and experiences - such as telepathy, hypnosis and automatic writing - evidence which encouraged his growing belief that the mind and personality might, in some form, not be totally dependent on and constrained by the body; and towards the end of his life he received communications through mediums which convinced him personally of the reality of survival.
Frederic William Henry Myers was born on 6 February 1843, at Keswick in the Lake District in England. His mother was a member of the wealthy Marshall family, owners of flax mills;2 his father was the curate of St John's, Keswick. After his father's early death his mother moved with her sons Frederic, Ernest and Arthur to Cheltenham, where Myers distinguished himself academically at Cheltenham College, as he also did when he went up to Trinity College Cambridge, aged seventeen.
By the time Myers was 22 he had achieved two first-class degrees, in classics and moral science, as well as a glittering array of university prizes and a fellowship at his college. He was obliged to return one of the prizes, the Camden medal, following accusations of plagiarism, although it has since been argued that these were based on a misinterpretation of his motives.3
In the 1860s and 1870s Myers gained some reputation as a man of letters and poet, but held no illusions about possessing real literary talent. A seminal event was his passionate, though platonic, relationship with Annie Marshall, who was married to a cousin of his, and who committed suicide in 1876. In 1880 Myers married Eveleen Tennant, a much admired beauty and the daughter of the society hostess Gertrude Tennant.4 They had three children, and Eveleen herself became a distinguished photographer of her family and celebrity friends.
Myers possessed a strong social conscience in certain matters. He was an early campaigner for votes for women and for their higher education. He became a permanent inspector of schools in 1872, holding the post until shortly before his death.
In 1882, he joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) along with his close friends and fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick and psychologist Edmund Gurney.
Myers was an athletic man of drive and energy: he swam beneath the falls of Niagara and across the Hellespont, for example. But he suffered from heavy colds, influenza and occasionally pneumonia through his life, and towards the end of it from Bright's disease. While wintering abroad to gain respite and medical attention he died in Rome on 17 January 1901. His extensive work for the SPR culminated in 1903 with the posthumous publication of his masterpiece, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.5
A similarly productive series of the proxy type was initiated in 1936 by Thomas at the suggestion of ER Dodds, an Oxford classics professor and sceptic of survival. The sittings were held on behalf of a Mrs Stanley Lewis who wished to try to contact her father Frederick William Macaulay, who had died three years earlier. Feda made a number of statements that closely corresponded to the dead man's interests and life circumstances, in particular certain family jokes. In one instance, she mentioned various names of people that had been connected with the Macaulay household, including ‘Race … Rice … Riss … it might be Reece but sounds like Riss'. Macaulay's daughter found this especially significant, as her elder brother had had a school friend named Rees, and was insistent that it should be pronounced correctly.
In another instance, Feda repeated the word ‘baths', which she understood would have special significance to the family: ‘His daughter will understand, he says. It is not something quite ordinary, but feel something special.' Mrs Lewis wrote:
Gabriel Marcel was born in Paris on 7 December 1889. His mother died when he was four years old, and he was reared by his father, a government official and other family members. He received a licence en philosophie from the Sorbonne in 1907. In World War I he was head of France's Information Service. He married Jacqueline Boegner in 1918 and they adopted a son.
Marcel converted from atheism to the Roman Catholic Church in 1929. He did not hold a formal university position in philosophy, but produced philosophical works, as well as plays and criticism. He presented the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1949-50 and the William James lectures at Harvard in 1961. He presented the 1955 Frederic WH Myers Memorial Lecture to the Society for Psychical Research. He was interested in the topic of survival of death and attended the first international parapsychology conference in Utrecht.1 He knew many of the scholars at the Institut Métapsychique Internatíonal, the leading French organization devoted to psychical research, and did work with René Dufour, an important French psychical researcher. Marcel became co-chair of the Methodological Committee of the IMI in 1962.2 He died in Paris on 8 October 1973.
Marcel's views on the nature of psi are primarily found in his early Metaphysical Journals and in his introduction to the book, Mors et Vita. He denied that psi and ordinary sensation should be understood in terms of a ‘transmission theory'.9 Rather, he holds that the thoughts of one person are ‘immediately imposed on him',10 a process he likens to ‘vision'.
Job Titles:
- Experimental Psychologist
Gertrude Schmeidler was awarded a PhD in psychology at Harvard University in 1935. A lecture on ESP by Gardner Murphy set her on a new career path, and she was given funding to investigate the topic by Murphy himself. In 1947, Schmeidler obtained a professorship in psychology at City University, New York. There, she conducted numerous ESP and PK experiments aimed at understanding the sheep-goat variable, including a successful series with Ingo Swann. Many of her students' degrees included work in parapsychology.
Schmeidler, G. (1970). High ESP scores after a swami's brief instruction in meditation and breathing. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 64, 100-103.
Schmeidler, G., Edge, H. (1999) Should ganzfeld resarch continue to be crucial in the search for a replicable psi effect? Part II. Edited ganzfeld debate. Journal of Parapsychology 63, 335-388.
Hans Driesch (1867-1941), a German biologist and philosopher, advocated vitalism, a notion of biology in which human consciousness and other life phenomena are not explained solely by the laws that govern physical and chemical processes. Driesch published extensively on psychical research, considering psi phenomena to be important empirical support for vitalism. His work initiated the development of holistic biology and systems theory; some of his pioneering ideas continue to be relevant today.
Hans Driesch was born on October 28, 1867, in Bad Kreuznach (Germany).1 He grew up in Hamburg, where his father traded gold and silverware. Driesch studied biology in Jena under Ernst Haeckel. In 1899 he married Margarete Reifferscheidt, with whom he had one son and one daughter.
For his biology work Driesch frequently visited marine biological stations to conduct experimental work on sea urchins and other marine organisms, becoming a leading expert in experimental biology. His findings led him to reject his original mechanist notion concerning the functioning of living organisms; instead, he came to adopt a ‘vitalist' notion of life, according to which the development and functioning of organisms cannot be attributed to physics and chemistry alone. In 1899 Driesch presented this for the first time, highlighting that life possesses autonomous development dynamics that set it apart from processes occurring in inorganic matter.2
During the following years, he turned increasingly to writing about biological questions from an analytical and theoretical perspective. As a result of his published treatises he was invited to hold the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1907 and 1908. These lectures were published in an elaborated version as The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, his most significant biological treatise and probably best-known English work.3
Thereafter, Driesch's interests turned even more towards theoretical problems of life and philosophy. After holding positions as a private lecturer, associate and later ordinary professor of philosophy at the university in Heidelberg, and a brief interval as a full professor at the university of Cologne, he was appointed full professor for philosophy at the university of Leipzig in 1921, becoming one of Germany's most influential philosophers of this time. From 1921 onward, Driesch increasingly covered psychological and parapsychological topics as well. His lectures might be visited by up to 700 students, requiring the university to hire a larger public hall or set up speakers in an additional lecture room.4 As a philosopher, Driesch supervised more than 110 PhD theses.5
In 1933, Driesch was forced into premature retirement by the German national socialist regime. He died in Leipzig in 1941.
Driesch wrote more than 20 German-language books and hundreds of shorter biological and philosophical treatises; he also published numerous articles and nine books in English. Many of his writings have been published in different languages, including Chinese.
8. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the founder of so-called ‘organismic' biology and general systems theory, was strongly influenced by Driesch and originally called his approach ‘methodological vitalism' (Bertalanffy, 1928). Adolf Meyer-Abich, who endorsed the holistic approach developed by Jan-Christiaan Smuts, was the most important promoter of holism in Germany. He held Driesch in high esteem as well and stated that holism would ‘stand on the shoulders of vitalism' (Meyer, 1935, 28); author's translation). For a more detailed discussion of the relations of organicism and holism to vitalism, see Nahm
18. Driesch (1927a); also published in English: Ethical principles in theory and practice: Driesch (1930b).
30. Driesch (1933). For a recent exposition of living-agent psi, see Sudduth
Ian Stevenson (1918-2007) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist based at the University of Virginia, who devoted much of his career to psychical research. He is best known for his pioneering work on the phenomenon of past life memories among young children, as described in his landmark study Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and other publications.
Ian Pretyman Stevenson was born in Montreal, Quebec, on 31 October 1918. From birth, he suffered from bronchitis, which in infancy led to bronchiectasis, the permanent inflammation of the bronchial tubes.1
Stevenson's father was a Scottish lawyer turned journalist who wrote for the Toronto Star newspaper. His English mother possessed a large collection of books on metaphysics, comparative religion and alternative healing; she became a devotee of Theosophy when Stevenson was young. Stevenson read many of his mother's books. These subjects had their appeal, but because he could see no way to approach them scientifically, Stevenson took no serious interest in them at the time.2
Stevenson began his university studies at the University of St Andrews, but when he returned to Canada for the summer of 1939, World War II was in the offing. His medical condition made him ineligible for military service and he switched to McGill University in Montreal for the fall term. At McGill, he studied physics, chemistry, and biology, along with history. After receiving his BSc in 1940, he enrolled in McGill's medical school. He completed the four-year program in three years and graduated at the top of his class in 1943.3
In the early 1970s, Schmeidler turned her attention towards understanding psychokinesis (PK). Working with the American Society for Psychical Research she tested the PK abilities of well known clairvoyant Ingo Swann. Swann repeatedly produced significant PK changes in continuous, automatic recordings of temperature variations of graphite samples. Extensive controls included insulating the thermistor in a thermos twenty-five feet away and counterbalancing hot-versus-cold instructions in a rigid pre-set manner. Additional analyses indicated that the PK effect operated by changing the temperature in a field around the target while producing opposite changes in some area distant from the target. It also transpired that the size of the effect was determined by psychological variables rather than by physical variables such as distance.7
Job Titles:
- Clinical Psychologist
- American Psychologist
- President of the Rhine Research Center
James Carpenter is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and parapsychologist. His psi research has focused on identifying the relationship between psychological variables and ESP scoring. He is best-known for his innovative First Sight Theory, which posits that psi phenomena are integral to normal perception and action.
James Carpenter attended Duke University in order to be able to study with JB Rhine at the Parapsychology Laboratory, where he worked during summer holidays as an undergraduate and graduate student. After graduating, he received an MA and a PhD in clinical psychology from Ohio State University, then taught psychology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Carpenter currently runs a private practice in North Carolina. He continues to carry out psi research and has published more than a hundred articles and book chapters.
Carpenter has served as president of the Rhine Research Center, in Durham, NC. He has been a board director and president of the Parapsychology Association, and received its Scientific Contributions Award. He has served as board director and secretary of the American Academy of Clinical Psychology, and is a fellow of that Academy, estimating that he has conducted at least 80,000 psychotherapy sessions.
Job Titles:
- Member of the American
- Professor
James Hervey Hyslop (1854-1920) was a professor of philosophy, a psychologist, and, during the last fifteen years of his life, a dedicated psychical researcher. In 1904, he organized the American Institute for Scientific Research, which was to be devoted to the study of abnormal psychology and psychical research. This incorporated the American Branch of the Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), following the death of its head Richard Hodgson in 1905. At this time, Hyslop dropped the study of abnormal psychology in order to focus solely on psychical research. The ASPR was then reorganized and operated independently of the English SPR. Hyslop moved from the Christian fundamentalism of his youth, to agnosticism during his college years, to seeker of truth and scientific observer during his teaching years, and finally, during his research years, to believer in a spirit world and the survival of human personality after death
Jan Ehrenwald was a Czech-born American psychoanalyst who actively studied the emergence of psi phenomena in therapy.
1) The extension hypothesis: psi phenomena are compensatory extensions of a ‘minus function', deficient motor and sensory faculties.
2) The symbiotic or gradual decline of psi faculties in the child, who must renounce the mother-infant relationship in order to learn under social and family pressure to formulate his demands by means of language.
3) The psi syndrome, of which ESP and PK are aspects. The psi syndrome is vital for the survival of the infant, who communicates to its mother information that far exceeds what can be conveyed by gestures or cries. Only the mother can decode these signals and understand the baby's feelings.
Job Titles:
- Senior Educational Administrator
John Thomas, a senior educational administrator, sought evidence in relation to his wife, who died in July 1926. The success of his early enquiries in the US encouraged him to carry out experiments in England, a study for which he later earned a doctorate. His approach was thorough and meticulous: he often had someone else sit with Leonard as a proxy on his behalf, ensured they were accurately recorded,13 looked for verifiable sources for the medium's statements among his own records, and discarded unverifiable points, no matter how seemingly persuasive. Of a total of 2,964 specific points that the communicator made, 2,358 were correct, a remarkably high proportion; 196 were incorrect, 231 inconclusive, and 179 unverifiable.
Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980) is considered to be the founder of modern parapsychology. An American botanist-turned-psychologist, he was the first to systematically apply experimental investigations in the field of psychical research. This work began in 1930 when he joined the psychology department at Duke University and later opened a new parapsychology laboratory there. When he retired from Duke in 1965 it moved off campus and became an independent international research center, since 1995 known as the Rhine Research Center, still located in Durham, NC.
Kenneth Ring is a retired American psychology professor who has researched and written extensively about near-death experiences - their content, perceived meaning and implications.
Kenneth Ring was born on 13 December 1935 in San Francisco.1 He majored in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, further studied social psychology at the University of Minnesota and UCLA, and earned his PhD at the University of Minnesota in 1963. By this time he had already started as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, where he taught until 1994. After another two years there as professor emeritus, he relocated to the San Francisco area where he still lives.2
2. Ring (2020b). All information in this section is drawn from this source except where otherwise noted.
4. Ring (1984), 263. For an interesting contextualizing review, see Grosso
Lily Talbot sat with Leonard in March 1917, giving no name or address, and later sent an account to the SPR (she had not sat with a medium before)18 She first heard descriptions of different people, only some of which were intelligible. Then, she writes,
Feda gave a very correct description of my husband's personal appearance, and from then on he alone seemed to speak (through her of course) and a most extraordinary conversation followed. Evidently he was trying by every means in his power to prove to me his identity and to show me it really was himself, and as time went on I was forced to believe this was indeed so.
All he said, or rather Feda said for him, was clear and lucid. Incidents of the past, known only to him and to me were spoken of, belongings trivial in themselves but possessing for him a particular personal interest of which I was aware, were minutely and correctly described, and I was asked if I still had them. Also I was asked repeatedly if I still believed it was himself speaking, and assured that death was not really death at all, that life continued not so very unlike this life and that he did not feel changed at all.19
Then came a description of an old leather notebook of his, which Feda was insistent she should find and then look for something important on page 12 or 13. This talk did not much interest her; she thought she had thrown the notebook away. But to her annoyance, Feda persisted for some time, offering suggestions as to how she might identify the notebook and the extract, and referring to ‘Indo-European, Aryan, Semitic languages', ‘A table of Arabian languages, Semitic languages', ‘table', ‘diagram' and ‘drawing'. Talbot was not inclined to comply, but mentioning it to her niece that evening was urged by her to seek it out. In the end, she writes,
I went to the book shelf, and after some time, right at the back of the top shelf I found one or two old notebooks belonging to my husband, which I had never felt I cared to open. One a shabby black leather, corresponded in size to the description given, and I absent-mindedly opened it, wondering in my mind whether the one I was looking for had been destroyed or only sent away. To my utter astonishment, my eyes fell on the words, "Table of Semitic or Syro-Arabian Languages," and pulling out the leaf, which was a long folded piece of paper pasted in, I saw on the other side "General table of the Aryan and Indo-European languages." It was the diagram of which Feda had spoken. I was so taken aback I forgot for some minutes to look for the extract.20
When she did so she found on page 13 a passage copied from a book describing purported conditions of post mortem survival:
I discovered by certain whispers which it was supposed I was unable to hear and from glances of curiosity or commiseration which it was supposed I was unable to see, that I was near death …
Presently my mind began to dwell not only on happiness which was to come, but upon happiness that I was actually enjoying. I saw long forgotten forms, playmates, school-fellows, companions of my youth and of my old age, who one and all, smiled upon me. They did not smile with any compassion, that I no longer felt that I needed, but with that sort of kindness which is exchanged by people who are equally happy. I saw my mother, father, and sisters, all of whom had survived. They did not speak, yet they communicated to me their unaltered and unalterable affection. At about the time when they appeared, I made an effort to realise my bodily situation … that is, I endeavoured to connect my soul with the body which lay on the bed in my house … the endeavour failed. I was dead …" Extract from Post Mortem. Author anon. (Blackwood & Sons, 1881).21
Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall obtained a sitting with Leonard in August 1916, hoping to establish communication with her deceased partner Mabel Batten 10 (referred to in the literature as ‘AVB'.) A communicator appeared whose profile closely matched Batten's, and who, by means of table tilting, gave ‘Watergate Bay' - the name of the place she and Radclyffe-Hall had last visited together before her death. Encouraged, she and her present partner Una Troubridge embarked on a detailed investigation of Leonard's mediumship facilitated by Radclyffe-Hall's considerable income. These were intelligent, cultured individuals who were willing to challenge their personal and subjective responses. Troubridge in particular possessed an excellent memory, a good eye for detail, and knowledge of the literature of dissociation and multiple personality.
Michael Balint was a Hungarian psychoanalyst who spent most of his life in Britain. Balint too stressed the role of the analyst in causing psi to appear in interactions with patients. He considered that an analyst who is preoccupied with some personal issue, but who fails to communicate it to the patient, maintains ‘a façade of professional hypocrisy', pretending to devote his attention to his patient without in fact doing so. The patient unconsciously senses this, leading to (unconscious) feelings of frustration and even anger. In Balint's view, some patients unconsciously resolve the problem by administering a ‘therapeutic shock' through a telepathic incident, bringing the analyst down to earth.56
For Balint, to benefit from such situations requires a change of attitude on the part of the analyst. He writes: ‘Perhaps we analysts ought to accept the role of pioneers in this field, as we have had some experience of what it means to make defenses conscious. If we succeed in relinquishing the professional hypocrisy surrounding parapsychological phenomena, we might get to grips with the underlying real problem, what the true nature and function of ESP is.' 57
Montague Ullman was born in New York City on 9 September 1916. His father was a businessman of Hungarian extraction; his mother's roots were Polish.1 Ullman studied medicine, undertaking four years of hospital training including in neurology and psychiatry. He served three years in the US Army as a medical officer; after his service he began private practice as a psychoanalyst. He joined the faculty of New York Medical College in 1950 and devoted the next ten years to teaching, practicing and research.
Ullman's interest in parapsychology was aroused at the age of sixteen when he discovered the literature of psychic research. He was impressed to find the involvement of scientific luminaries such as William James, William Crookes and Oliver Lodge in the research of mediums.2 He writes:
Mr Nigel Buckmaster has been interviewed by the writer of this report. Before this experience he was not interested in psychical research, and is sure he had never read any literature on ‘out-of-the-body' experiences or 'crisis dreams'. His wife had a copy of the two-volume edition of Human Personality by FWH Myers, but nothing by Muldoon and Carrington or Prof. JH Whiteman. It is therefore interesting to compare the description of the onset of the experience in paragraph 5 of Statement I with the following passage in Professor Whiteman's description of the onset of a 'separation' experience given by him.
I seemed to be awake in bed ... Alongside I perceived, in a startling flash, a human head, turned away so that chiefly the back of it was seen, the person being instinctively named within me as myself ... I reached out with a hand (in the separated state) in an endeavour to confirm or refute this presence. For a few moments I was conscious of the warm feel of the head and hair, being too startled however to see anything further. On becoming able to see again, the person was no longer there.1
Eleanor Sidgwick (1845-1936) was the wife of Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research and its first president. A mathematician and prominent educationalist, Sidgwick made a major contribution to the Society in its early years, in both administration and research.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Philosophy in Le Havre
Pierre Janet, a professor of philosophy in Le Havre, wrote his doctoral dissertation on hallucinatory phenomena and the mechanisms of perception. Through Dr Gibert, he met Léonie, a woman who he found could be hypnotized remotely, obeying mental suggestions made from a distance of up to two kilometers. After becoming entranced, Léonie would perform a task that had been communicated to her mentally. Janet described his observations in the context of Frederic Myers's ideas about the Subliminal Self and trance states, 3 and presented them to the Society of Physiological Psychology of Paris. This caused a stir in international psi research circles, and in 1886 the British Society for Psychical Research sent a team to Le Havre, including Myers and his physician brother, Henry Sidgwick, Julian Ochorowicz, and Janet's uncle, Charles Richet, to attend remote suggestion sessions with Léonie.4
Despite their spectacular results - or perhaps because of them - Janet abandoned these experiments, alarmed by the anxious reaction they caused among academic psychologists, which he realized could only hinder his ambitions in orthodox medicine. He now distanced himself from his work with Léonie, and even took to berating those in the psi research community who cited it as evidence of a psychical process. On the contrary, he now declared, for some time he'd ‘doubted the interpretation of the facts and was disposed to criticize them myself, regarding them as a simple departure from more profound studies'.5
From now on, Janet confined his activities to the exploration of the less controversial effects of hypnosis and suggestion. Through his clinical work at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, he discovered what he called ‘psychological automatism',6 an unconscious activity that can be liberated in a hypnotic state. He viewed it as underpinning ordinary consciousness, disturbing and even sometimes invading it.7 This is close to Myers's ideas 8 and the ideas later developed by Sigmund Freud.9
Job Titles:
- Director of Information
- Science Journalist
René Sudre (1880-1968) was a French science journalist active in psi research during the 1920s. Sudre developed a psychology-based model of psi phenomena, relying on what was then known about altered states of consciousness to reject supernatural interpretations. However, he avoided the kind of trivial psychological hypotheses favoured by some sceptics. He deployed his considerable writing skills to popularize psi research and defend it from attack.
Sudre became director of information and literary critic at the newspaper L'Avenir, from 1918 to 1927. He discovered psi research with the founding in 1919 of the Institut Métapsychique International (IMI) in Paris.
Rex G Stanford was born in 1938 in Robstown, Texas.
Stanford's scientific interests were strongly supported by his parents. In his teens he read widely in science, including hypnosis, social psychology, psi research, Darwinist evolution, relativity theory and astrophysics. He also read philosophy, for instance Bergson, existentialism and eastern philosophies.
Stanford had planned to go into physics because of his interest in the fundamental nature of the world. He shifted to psi research after reading credible evidence for worldview-challenging psi phenomena. Psychological variables seemed to influence psi-task performance, so he decided to intensively study psychology and its research methods. He enrolled at the University of Texas where he earned a BA (psychology major) with high honors (1960-1963) and a PhD (1964-1967) with a cognitive psychology dissertation.
As an undergraduate, Stanford also focused on philosophy and took physiology courses to further his interest in neural function. His written discourse in a freshman philosophy course taught by Frederick H Ginascol led to an invitation to grade written materials for undergraduate philosophy courses during his remaining undergraduate years. This enhanced his skills in careful, understanding-directed, reading, and in providing evaluative written feedback to students.
His PhD (1967) dissertation was in cognitive psychology (using word-association methodologies) under Louis J Moran, a clinical psychology researcher. Moran had done cross-cultural studies of word association and understood the value of examining person-situation interactions, a major focus in Stanford's doctoral dissertation and in some of his later research. Graduate courses in philosophy of science and in psycholinguistics (philosophy department) were of special interest. He also valued a graduate social-psychology seminar under Elliot Aronson that required constructive written critiques of scientific reports published in refereed social psychology journals. Students received feedback on their critiques from the professor and from fellow students. These challenging exercises were invaluable with regard to later career demands.
Stanford's parapsychological career benefited from personal encouragement from JB Rhine and the financial support provided by Rhine's affiliated organizations (three summer research fellowships; two-year graduate study fellowship). He was inspired by Rhine's conviction that science can address the difficult problems of psi research. However, he differed from Rhine's view that psi-research methods should stay on the ‘main line' methodologically, avoiding free-response ESP-test designs. Stanford believed that methodology should be shaped by its suitability to address the questions driving the research.
Stanford carried out psi research as a research associate (1968-1973) in the Division of Parapsychology, Department of Psychiatry, University of Virginia School of Medicine, and in the Department of Psychology at New York's St John's University, as assistant professor (1973-1976), associate professor (1980-1983) and full professor (1983-2007); following his retirement he was awarded the status of professor emeritus. (Between 1976 and 1980 he held a non-academic post as director of the Center for Parapsychological Research, Austin, Texas.)
At the Parapsychological Association (PA) he was long-standing member of its council and later of its board, serving as president (1973 and 2006-2007) and chair of the committee on professional standards and ethics (1980-1987). He directed a systematic revision of the PA's code of professional-scientific ethics, which was enhanced through his first-hand discussions with ethics-related professionals from non-parapsychological scientific disciplines. He won the PA's Outstanding Contribution Award (1993), largely for an in-depth book chapter)1 reviewing research and concepts from parapsychology and psychology with relevance to the extrasensory part of his Psi-mediated Instrumental Response (PMIR) model.2 In 2019 he won the PA's Outstanding Career Award.
Rhine Feather, S. and Ensrud, B. (2018). ‘JB Rhine'. Psi Encyclopedia. London: The Society for Psychical Research. <https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/jb-rhine>. Retrieved 3 April 2024.
Alvarado described the work of geologist Robert Crookall, whose projection model of the out-of-body experience, based on an analysis of published cases, considers that consciousness leaves the body. Alvarado critiqued weak definitions, the low number of cases, and misclassifications. In his own analysis of new cases, unlike Crookall, he failed to find either a core experience or any clear difference between naturally occurring and induced out-of-body experiences.18
Sandor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and one of Freud's closest colleagues. Incidents early in his career convinced him of the reality of psychic phenomena. His first published article concerned his own experiments with automatic writing, in which, after some unsuccessful attempts, he found himself writing an injunction to offer an article on spiritualism for the magazine Gyogyàszat, with the assurance that its editor would be responsive. This proved to be the case.27
At a spiritist séance some weeks later, Ferenczi wrote on a piece of paper the name of a patient he was to meet later in the day and asked the medium to reveal what that person was doing right now. The medium sensationally replied that the individual had just sat down on his bed and asked for a glass of water, then collapsed and died. This also turned out to be true.28
Freud's public positions on telepathy were hesitant and ambivalent. In his early writings he vigorously refuted its existence,12 seeking to explain away instances of seemingly psychic operation. In one case he described a dream of a young patient that she took to be a premonition of something that later occurred in reality. He concluded that the dream had actually occurred after the event, and that it brought to her conscious mind knowledge of the event, which had previously been ‘censored'.
He also commented on a case sent by a colleague, in which two individuals appeared to interact telepathically. He considered that they had been exposed to a stimulus that had provoked a precisely similar association of ideas in each simultaneously, leading to the same thought. He concluded: ‘What promised to be a supernatural manifestation was thus easily explained on a normal basis'.
Gradually, Freud came to accept the occurrence of telepathy, albeit reluctantly, concerned that it would bring suspicion and disfavor on psychoanalysis as a scientific activity. He called it the only allegedly paranormal entity that contained a ‘kernel of truth' amid the ‘black tide of mud of occultism'15 (the term often used for psi phenomena at this time). Later in his career he showed particular interest in telepathy in dreams,16 discussing the subject directly in four papers: Psychoanalysis and Telepathy (1921), Dream and Telepathy (1921), The Occult Significance of Dreams (1925), and Dream and Occultism (1932).
His interest was piqued by the attention given to such phenomena by two colleagues, Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi. He undertook to investigate psychics personally, aided on different occasions by Ferenczi and Freud's daughter Anna. In 1910 he went with Ferenczi to visit a Berlin fortune-teller, Frau Seidler, who gave readings blindfolded. Freud observed that she appeared able to guess his thoughts by a ‘physiologic gift', and although her statements were not completely accurate he attributed the misunderstandings to distortions that must inevitably occur in the telepathic process.17 But, as always, Freud adhered to his habitual scepticism and proposed they engage in further experiments.
Stephen Braude is an American philosopher and parapsychologist whose work focuses on the analysis of historical cases of macro-psychokinesis and trance mediumship. He evaluates these phenomena in the context of what we know about hypnosis, dissociation and exceptional human abilities, and he is well-known for defending the strength of the living-agent psi hypothesis for apparent evidence of survival of death, though he believes that the evidence does slightly favor survival overall. He has also conducted field studies of subjects who claim to produce reliably impressive PK, with mixed results.
Theodore Deodatus Nathaniel Besterman was born in Łódź, Poland, on 22 November 1904 and he moved to London during his youth. He taught at the London School of Librarianship in the 1930s and served in the British army in World War II. In 1945 he became the first editor of the Journal of Documentation, a publication concerned with cataloguing and organizing academic information.
From the 1950s, Besterman devoted himself to the works of Voltaire which he translated and edited as Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. He instigated the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford University which contains his large collection of books and manuscripts. In 1954, he published a biography of Voltaire.1
Another of Maraldi's research interests concerns the history of psychological and psychiatric studies on religion and the paranormal. Maraldi, Alvarado and others review the contributions of Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy (1854-1920) to psychical research. Chief among these is the classic investigations of the trance medium Hélène Smith. Detailed discussions can be found in a paper by Maraldi and Alvarado published in the journal History of Psychiatry 12 and also in the Psi Encyclopedia.13 Flournoy also investigated physical mediums, telepathy and precognition.14
With Everton Maraldi, Alvarado reviewed writings in psychical research by Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy, in particular his classic investigation of the trance medium Hélène Smith. Their detailed discussion can be found in History of Psychiatry.9 In addition to mental mediumship, Flournoy investigated physical mediums and analysed the research literature of telepathy and precognition.10
William Brown (1929), founder of the first psychology laboratory to be set up at Oxford, devoted a section of his book Science and Personality (1929) to discussing Leonard's mediumship, following a sitting in which he was given statements from four individuals whom he was able to identify by the details they gave; they were the very ones he had particularly wished to hear from. Brown had observed occasional instances of telepathy and clairvoyance among war veterans suffering shell-shock, but he did not attempt to explain Leonard's mediumship in terms of pathology.11
William James was born in 1842 in New York City, the first-born child of the marriage of Henry James and Mary Robertson Walsh, which produced three other children, including the novelist Henry James. Inherited wealth gave their father Henry leisure to pursue interests in theology and mysticism, following the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg. William studied many topics during his youth, among them painting and the sciences. In 1865, he joined naturalist Louis Agassiz in an expedition to the Amazon, during which he contracted smallpox. Soon after, in 1869, he received an MD from the Harvard School of Medicine; however, he never practiced as a physician. In 1878, he married Alice Howe Gibbens, with whom he had five children.
During the 1870s James started teaching at Harvard. The subjects he taught included courses on comparative anatomy and physiology (1872-1873), the relationship of physiology to psychology (1875-1876), physiological psychology (1876-1877), and psychology (1877-1879).1 In 1880, he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard and continued to teach psychology and philosophy into his later years.
Taves, A. (2003). Religious experience and the divisible self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as theorist(s) of religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, 303-26.