Reflections on being a parapsychologist

For some, involvement in the field is certainly a scholarly pursuit of the first magnitude due to its great intellectual challenge. Perhaps this is why such philosophers as C. D. Broad (1962) have been concerned with the field. Several writers have stated that the intellectual and methodological difficulties of parapsychology make the field particularly challenging, especially as regards critical thinking. F. C. S. Schiller (1927) argued that for anyone "who wished to apprehend the real method of science and to appreciate its real difficulties, there is no better training ground than Psychical Research" (p. 218). J. B. Rhine (n.d., p. 3) commented on the value of parapsychology as a discipline in which to learn to evaluate new claims and criticisms, a context that provides an excellent opportunity to develop a scientific mind. Similarly, years later John Beloff referred to the educational value of parapsychology in this way:

   It teaches us ... how difficult it is to arrive at any definitive
   conclusions about it. It raises for us, in its most acute form, the
   eternal question: 'What can I believe?' ... Atone instant it will
   open up for us exciting vistas of new worlds to be conquered; at the
   next, it will cause them to vanish again in a haze of doubts. It
   forces us to reckon with the almost bottomless duplicity of out
   fellow creatures, and yet it forbids us to take refuge in any easy
   cynicism no matter how fantastic the case under consideration. In a
   word, it plays tug-of-war with us so that we can enjoy neither the
   peace of mind of the committed believer nor the complacency of
   the skeptic (Beloff, 1990, p. 55).

However, there are other reasons. For me it is a question of reminding myself, and others, of the potential of humankind. It is greatly satisfying to participate in research as well as to teach students about what may be the most exciting possibilities of the human mind. It does not matter if we are talking about ESP scores in the lab or reports of spontaneous cases. Regardless of the final explanation we will be learning something about the abilities of the mind to process information in what now seem to us to be unconventional ways. This will certainly extend our current knowledge. Furthermore, I see parapsychology as part of the emerging field of positive psychology, a psychology devoted to growth and strengths, to positive abilities. Unfortunately, however, like other related areas of psychology, those who identify with positive psychology do not acknowledge the contributions of parapsychology (e.g., Aspinwall & Staudinger, 2003).

Probably one of the most frequent motivations to be in parapsychology is the search for different forms of transcendence of physical limitations. The question here, and one for which such critics as James Alcock (1987) take us to task, is the use of parapsychology to demonstrate or to suggest that human beings have a component beyond our material constitution. There is no question that this has been a driving force in parapsychology. In his seventeenth-century work Saducismus Triumphatus Joseph Glanvil (1682) saw poltergeists, apparitions, and other phenomena as evidence of a spiritual world. In his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Myers (1903, Vol. 2, p. 257) concluded that psychic phenomena "prove that between the spiritual and the material worlds an avenue of communication does in fact exist." Others such as William McDougall (1911), J. B. Rhine (1947), Joseph Gaither Pratt (1964), Charles T. Tart (1979), John Beloff (1990), and Ian Stevenson (1981) have emphasized how ESP and other phenomena are indicative of the existence of the mind independent of the body. In J. B. Rhine's words: "The psi researches show the natural human mind can escape physical boundaries under certain conditions ... Accordingly a distinct difference between mind and matter, a relative dualism, has been demonstrated by the psi experiments ..." (J. B. Rhine, 1947, p. 205). More recently, Charles Tart (2002) argued for the importance of the spiritual implications of parapsychology.