Does it matter that some eminent scientists and intellectuals have firmly believed in ‘psychic’ phenomena? Or should we just accept vocally dismissive statements on these matters by scientifically distinguished disbelievers?
This is one of several questions I touched upon in my latest article, which I was invited to contribute to a thematic issue of the International Review of Psychiatry on the subject of ‘Mind Beyond the Brain’. Specifically written for mental health professionals interested in practical aspects of patient belief in the transcendental, my article uses the example of a particularly controversial area of research – experiments with ostensible spirit mediums – and sketched widely forgotten debates regarding mediumship among founding figures of modern psychiatry and psychology.
While pioneering psychiatrists like Emil Kraepelin and Henry Maudsley, for example, pathologized occult beliefs and practices without much ado, their Swiss colleague Eugen Bleuler was among the few prominent medics who begged to differ. His materialist convictions notwithstanding, Bleuler advocated serious research with mediums, and openly confessed belief in the reality of certain occult phenomena.
Views on the subject by the principal founders of modern experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt in Germany and William James in the US, were also diametrically opposed. Whereas Wundt openly declared any remotely sympathetic approach to mediumship and all things occult an expression of mental illness, James experimented with mediums, advocated systematic research, and defended these investigations against polemical assaults by other psychologists and intellectuals. Like Bleuler and others, James also publicly stated that, in his view, some mediumistic phenomena are facts of nature while rejecting the ‘spirit hypothesis’ to explain them.
Counterparts in other disciplines abound. A particularly striking case is biology, where the co-originators of modern evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, also wildly disagreed. Though he briefly visited a spiritualist séance, Darwin remained in the camp of scoffers at occult beliefs, while Wallace openly took up the torch not just for investigations of mediums, but became a missionary for the cause of spiritualism as a supposed new religion.
The trouble with scientific authority
Whose expertise should we trust, then?
‘Arguments from authority’ have always been popular in debates between believers and disbelievers. Unfortunately, they are of precious little value, as even the most eminent scientists and philosophers are not immune to bias, and have used their intellectual standing to shape public opinion – even when lacking research expertise in the controversial areas they publicly dismiss or embrace.
It should therefore go without saying that we can’t just buy into the verdict of a famed intellectual on controversial and inherently polarizing issues, just because it happens to be in line with our own presuppositions. Instead, we need to do our own research to appreciate the specific grounds for belief or disbelief by our historical actors.
In the case of William James, anyone who carefully studied the published and archival primary sources, and wider historical contexts of ensuing controversies regarding psychical research, will agree that he was an open-minded yet scientifically rigorous investigator. What’s more, he was usually cautious to distinguish his personal beliefs from his perspective as a man of science and a philosopher.
In the seminal Principles of Psychology, for example, James noted in regard to mediumship that his own experiments so far had convinced him of the reality not of spirits, but of telepathy among the living. At the same time, he candidly stated this was his “bare opinion” on the question, which he recorded “not, of course, in order to convert anyone to my view, but because I am persuaded that a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology, and think that my personal confession may possibly draw a reader or two into a field which the soi-disant ‘scientist’ usually refuses to explore” (James, 1890, vol. 1, p. 396).
Censoring James
As I state in my article, attempts by certain authors to virtually write occult preoccupations of iconic figures including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud out of history have been remarkably successful overall, and I briefly mention a comparatively recent instance which concerned James. In 2022, Oxford University Press issued a book with the title The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, co-authored by David B. Yaden, a cutting-edge psychedelics researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and the prominent neuroscientist Andrew B. Newberg. As the title suggests, the book is far more than just a nod to James’s classic 1902 study of transformative encounters with the transcendental, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Yaden and Newberg’s book is an important contribution to the growing empirical and clinical literature which suggests that some spiritual experiences – including such that involve ‘paranormal’ or ‘psychic’ elements such as alleged visions of the dead – can be beneficial for mental health in some people, and may even be utilized for therapeutic ends. In line with James’s pragmatist stance, which focused on tangible outcomes of such subjective but often profound experiences rather than on fruitless metaphysical debates, they also hold that beneficial effects alone say nothing definite about their ultimate origins. As scientists, Yaden & Newberg therefore certainly honour James’s legacy as a pioneer of human-centred approaches in medicine and the mind sciences.
So far so good.
Apart from references to some of James’s writings, Yaden and Newberg also offer a chapter with a short intellectual biography. Still, of course this is not actually a book about James. And as far as the treatment of evidence for the ‘paranormal’ is concerned, it is here that the authors are fundamentally at odds with their hero, as they make no secret of their unenthusiastic if not orthodox stance on these things.
One can of course argue about the authors’ grasp of the empirical literature on extra-sensory perception, mediumship and related scientific bones of contention since James’s day, but that’s not my real gripe as a historian of scientific naturalism. And, obviously, it would have been perfectly fine to simply state their disagreement with James on the ‘paranormal’, and leave it at that.
What is not okay is trying to make your scientific hero fall in line with your own convictions against the historical evidence. The authors freely admit that James was certainly interested in these things, but a veritable retroactive censorship of his conclusions and attitudes occurs throughout the book, culminating in the dumbfounding statement that he “found no evidence of psychic phenomena” (Yaden & Newberg, 2022, p. 28).
This is not just downplaying James’s many published disclosures to the contrary, but straight-up denying a plain historical fact. The authors are either unaware of, or wilfully pass over, the overwhelming consensus in current James scholarship regarding his unorthodox convictions, as documented beyond reasonable doubt, for instance, in Essays on Psychical Research. This first comprehensive collation of James’s texts on the ‘paranormal’ was not published by occult enthusiasts, but as part of the indispensable Works of William James series by Harvard University Press, in 1986.
The first academic monograph specifically dedicated to James’s explorations of the occult, K. D. Knapp’s William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity (2017) also left no doubts about his convictions, though in my view rather makes an anachronistic mess of things.
By providing the wider historical contexts in which I feel James’s heretical writings should be read, my chapter in the Oxford Handbook of William James, which has been freely available online since 2020, consciously responded to that book. So did my introduction to Mind-Dust and White Crows, the latest collection of James’s texts on psychical research (which the authors could not have seen of course, as it only appeared last year).
By writing James’s actual beliefs out of history, I fear Yaden and Newberg have done a grave disservice to a goal they share with James, that is of freeing their field of research from social and academic stigma. Insofar as transcendental experiences are bound up with alleged occult goings-on, as they are often reported to be, such censorship is keeping impartial scientific investigations of the ‘paranormal’ since James’s day in the intellectual gutter. And in my view, the obscuring of such important but hidden continuities can only acerbate the polarized misinformation on these contested matters, and the associated stigmatization of those who report such experiences.
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The only stigma I feel is my sense of ignorance of this aspect of James research. Although that is about to change. Thanks! You’re Oxford handbook article, fascinating and really helpful.