Psychical research: Sommer excerpt #5

Historian Andreas Sommer writes: Hermann Helmholtz was the teacher of several famous physicists including Heinrich Hertz and Max Planck, but he also trained the founder of experimental psychology – the science of the ‘soul’ (a literal English translation of psyche) – in Germany, Wilhelm Wundt. Some psychologists still debate the question whether the ‘father’ of their profession was Wundt in 1879, or William James at Harvard a few years earlier. More important for our purpose is a check of how the maximally opposed attitudes to the ‘paranormal’ by the founders of modern academic psychology have been portrayed in histories of the discipline.

Since histories of psychology are still often written not by trained historians, but by psychologists invested in promoting the ‘naturalistic’ public image of psychology, it may not be very surprising that Wundt’s rejection of the ‘empirical occult’ has been adopted without question. Occasionally, even professional historians have praised him as a hero of modern science vanquishing self-evident paranormal charlatanry. Reviews of the scholarship on William James, on the other hand, found that his life-long involvement in parapsychological research had either been downplayed or passed over by most scholars until about the late 1980s.

 

While James’s advocacy of psychical research will become evident enough during the remainder of this essay, it’s probably no overstatement to say that Wundt consciously cultivated a deep hatred of all things ‘occult’. In fact, Wundt had practically inaugurated the birth of his institute for experimental psychology in 1879 with a polemical attack in the same year on fellow Leipzig scientists who investigated the hotly debated American medium Henry Slade. Spearheaded by astrophysicist Karl F. Zöllner (a friend of William Crookes in England), these investigators included the man Wundt himself would later call “the founder of experimental psychology”, the widely revered physicist and philosopher Gustav T. Fechner.

Later, Wundt literally rewrote history when he portrayed Fechner as being overwhelmingly skeptical of paranormal phenomena, by selectively quoting from the dead man’s diary. The full diary would only be published in 2004, but relevant passages, which shone a rather different light on Fechner’s actual attitudes than Wundt’s selections, were printed in a German psychical research journal as early as 1888. In his tribute to his teacher, Wundt also briefly mentioned correspondence with Fechner in response to Wundt’s 1879 attack on spiritualism, but did not reveal its contents. Little wonder, as Fechner’s letters included a detailed critique of Wundt’s arguments and misrepresentations of the experiments. Wundt also swept Fechner’s attempts to publicly set the record straight under the carpet, concerning misrepresentations of parapsychological research in general and Fechner’s views in particular. These included a book by Fechner on these topics and his public protest to made-up skeptical statements attributed to him in an interview with the secretary of the Seybert Commission for the ‘investigation’ of spiritualism at the University of Pennsylvania. However, Fechner’s interventions had practically no effect and psychologists have essentially ignored these contexts up to the present day.

The cultural and political climate in which Fechner and colleagues had conducted their parapsychological investigations was of course still hardly conducive to a calm, dispassionate reception of their findings by fellow intellectuals. After all, with Wundt’s foundation of German experimental psychology, they took place toward the end of yet another political key event, which would only reinforce the ‘naturalistic’ foundations of modern university sciences during their infancy: The so-called Kulturkampf (‘war for culture’), waged by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church in Germany throughout the 1870s. The crisis reached a peak in 1876 in Marpingen, a small village in Baden, where three eight-year-old peasant girls claimed to see apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Soon, crowds of pilgrims began flocking to Marpingen, where the ‘Virgin’ began making dangerous political statements. Hardly surprisingly, the result was a brutal crackdown on the child visionaries and their followers by the police, and this and similar events only served to polarize debates about the supposed pathology of visions and other supposed revelations from the beyond, which were lumped in with spiritualism.

Declared opponents of spiritualism and its calm, dispassionate investigation also included a growing number of philosophical materialists, most notably the founders of Communism including Karl Marx – who, incidentally, explicitly refused to base their ‘dialectical materialism’ on science. One of Marx’s few scientific friends in England was the zoologist and self-appointed secular Great Inquisitor of the paranormal, Ray Lankester. A patron saint of the modern Skeptics movement, Lankester is often credited for having exposed the medium Henry Slade as an evident impostor before he was investigated by Zöllner and Fechner.

Let’s assume for the sake of brevity that Lankester really did catch Slade red- handed in the act of fraudulently producing ‘spirit writings’ as often claimed. What matters for our present purpose is not to obtain certainty whether Slade – a professional medium who charged hefty fees for his seances – was the real deal or nothing but a fraud (thankfully, we don’t have to rely on his case). What should be acknowledged is that Slade wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting a fair hearing, no matter the concrete evidence either way. In fact, when Lankester famously sued Slade for fraud in England, the court proceedings show that the rule of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ was not observed. For example, there were eminent intellectuals on the defense for Slade, and while Lankester certainly made a strong case, he did not prove fraud beyond reasonable doubt. Still, Slade didn’t just get a slap on the wrist, but was sentenced with the maximum penalty of three months prison with hard labor.

Henry Sidgwick        

Among Slade’s defenders were not just devout spiritualists like the biologist Alfred R. Wallace, but another major Victorian intellectual, Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick. A doubter of survival and the physical phenomena of spiritualism, Sidgwick was widely admired for his skepticism in the proper meaning of the word – doubt or suspended judgement informed by active and calm consideration of all sides of an argument. A tireless promoter of women’s rights, Sidgwick became a reformer of British secular education after resigning his Fellowship at Trinity College at Cambridge University in the late 1860s because of religious doubts. Fellows were required to pay only lip-service to Anglican dogmas including belief in the biblical miracles, but having lost his faith, Sidgwick felt it was his duty to resign from his highly prestigious and well- paid position. Impressed by his integrity, supporters at Trinity would eventually create a lectureship for Sidgwick, which came without any theological stipulations. Later, Sidgwick occasionally worked with Huxley and other agnostics to achieve the admission of students by universities regardless of their religious faith.

In 1882, Sidgwick became the first president of the SPR after its foundation by Tyndall’s former assistant, William Barrett. Early members included (apart from the already-mentioned) J. J. Thomson and another future physics Nobel laureates, Lord Rayleigh, as well as dozens of now less famous members of the Royal Society, and even one of Helmholtz’s famous students, Heinrich Hertz in Germany. However, the wider context spelled out below makes it easy to understand why Hertz would remain the only famous professional German scientist among the early members, and why, as Hertz had emphasized to his friend Oliver Lodge, he would categorically refuse to conduct parapsychological investigations himself.

Contrary to the often-claimed ‘disenchantment’ of the modern world, there has been a clear continuity of serious interest in the paranormal by British scientific elites wide into the twentieth century. And as I have tried to show, even though physicists like Crookes, Barrett and Lodge were among the most active investigators, the strongest and most conscious efforts by early SPR members to contribute to scientific knowledge was not in the realm of physics, but to the fledgling science of experimental psychology. Apart from Sidgwick and his wife, the mathematician Eleanor M. Sidgwick, by far the most industrious early workers in this regard were two close friends and former students of Sidgwick’s, Edmund Gurney and Frederic W. H. Myers.

A nephew of the man who coined the term ‘scientist’ (William Whewell), Myers is known for also having invented a famous word, which, however, most scientists today may utter in a tone of enlightened contempt at best: telepathy. Myers’s Wikipedia page shows perhaps a little too clearly that whatever is at stake for modern Skeptics, concern for historical evidence is not it. The entry is an almost exhaustive list of ‘scientific’ critiques and rumors spread about Myers, along with several false claims and misrepresentations of his work, all with the evident purpose of making him appear like a hapless victim of an obsessive ‘will to believe’. The entry also mentions but immediately downplays the fact that Myers’s theory of the ‘subliminal self’ (of which more in Part 2) influenced Théodore Flournoy, the founder of Swiss experimental psychology, and Wundt’s competitor in ongoing claims of having ‘fathered’ the psychology as whole, William James.

What’s missing, however, is the acknowledgement that Myers – along with the Sidgwicks and other SPR figures – practically represented British psychologists at the early International Congresses of Psychology, the main platform on which the methods of fledgling experimental psychology were negotiated, from its first session in 1889 until Myers’s death in 1901. And while it is true that several ‘enlightened’ psychologists either ignored or actively denounced Myers, both Gurney and Myers became James’s closest collaborators in experimental psychology. They corresponded frequently, James replicated some of their experiments in automatic writing and hypnosis, and cited these studies in his Principles of Psychology and other canonical texts. Not least, between 1889 and 1897, James would collaborate with Myers and the Sidgwicks on an international survey of ‘telepathic hallucinations’, which we will discuss with other evidence in Part 2.

And as far as such ‘enlightened’ critics of Myers and psychical research go, of the early university psychologists who aggressively battled his and James’s unorthodox science, not a single one was a materialist. On the contrary, major early university psychologists, such as Wundt in Germany and G. Stanley Hall in the US, routinely asserted that spiritualism and its open-minded investigation posed a fundamental threat to “true religion”.

 

But let me complicate things even further: While empirical approaches to occult phenomena prior to the nineteenth century have been rather consistently motivated by religious apologetics indeed, Victorian psychical research was by no means the exclusive domain of religious or even spiritual folk.

Myers’s and James’s principal collaborator in France, for example, was the future Nobel prize winner in physiology, Charles Richet. After inspiring Charcot’s interest in hypnosis, Richet would later be a major force behind the foundation of the International Congresses of Psychology. But far from being a spiritualist, Richet – the doyen of French psychical research from the 1870s to his death in 1935 – shared Charcot’s ‘medical materialism’. Although he held survival researchers like Myers and Oliver Lodge in high esteem and would somewhat soften his stance late in life, Richet was convinced that the mind would die together with the brain, and therefore rejected the survival hypothesis throughout his long career. It is true that Richet published volumes of empirical evidence for the occurrence of a wide range of paranormal phenomena, and he even claimed the coinage of ‘ectoplasm’ – the word for the weird substance out of which spirits are claimed to materialize in seances. But his work was explicitly atheoretical, and he considered the marvels of whose reality he convinced himself not as evidence for a spirit realm, but as fundamental scientific anomalies with unique potential to expand human understanding of the physical world.

The historical novelty of this strictly positivist approach, which investigated and accepted parapsychological phenomena as facts of nature but programmatically rejected spiritualist interpretations, can hardly be exaggerated. Especially in continental Europe, this non- and often anti-spiritualist approach was shared by other pioneering psychical researchers, and would characterize the work of practically all leading continental investigators in the twentieth century. These would also include Marie and Pierre Curie, who were rather uninterested in evidence for personal survival, but more than intrigued particularly by the physical phenomena produced by spiritualist mediums.

Einstein rejected off-hand spiritualist beliefs together with evidence for the physical marvels which interested J. J. Thomson, Lord Rayleigh and the Curies so much, but occasionally participated in tests of clairvoyance and telepathy. Though he usually avoided taking a stance in public, the archival evidence suggests that Einstein was more than just interested in certain psychic phenomena, and once he even wrote the preface to an experimental study of telepathy – in which he urged scientific psychologists in particular to pay open-minded attention to psychic phenomena.

Einstein never joined the SPR, but two of the most iconic modern psychologists – Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung – did. Jung’s parapsychological interests and convictions are well known, but despite his belief in psychic phenomena he did not adopt the ‘spirit hypothesis’. This was the subject of an article by Jung in the SPR Proceedings, which he concluded by stating “I am personally convinced of the reality of such facts, but I cannot accept them as evidence for the independent reality of spirits”.

 

Freud, who had studied hypnosis under Charcot, is known for his own promotion of ‘medical materialism’, and his epoch-making work was significantly motivated by a similar wish to reduce religion to pathology. Still, Freud would also become a believer in telepathy, which he almost certainly interpreted not as a spiritual phenomenon, but within the prevailing positivist and physicalist frameworks of continental European parapsychology. However, he was far more hesitant than Jung to put his convictions on public record. A letter by Freud to his disciple Ernest Jones, who was worried that Freud’s paranormal belief may jeopardize the ‘scientific’ image of psychoanalysis, speaks volumes:

 

When anyone adduces my fall into sin, just answer him calmly that conversion to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking and many other things, and that the theme of telepathy is in essence alien to psychoanalysis.

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.