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Reflections on being a parapsychologist
Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2003 by Carlos S. Alvarado
It may be argued that the emphasis on conventional hypotheses is a strategy some parapsychologists have used to legitimize our field. Whether or not this is true, it is important to be aware of the strategies parapsychologists have used to establish their field, in addition to our understanding of their research efforts, as McClenon (1982) has said. In fact, legitimizing strategies are the internal means that researchers use to render the field more acceptable in the face of so much criticism. One of these devices relates to the way our current research or concerns are depicted in light of our past. Sometimes our current work is validated by comparing it to previous work, even to the extent of distorting the record. An example here is the way in which J. B. Rhine and Louisa E. Rhine discussed the work they conducted while they were at Duke University. In one of her papers L. E. Rhine (1967) argued that it was only during the modern period that ESP was established enough so as to be used as an alternative explanation for mediumistic communications, something that could not be done in the 1920s. But as I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Alvarado, 2003), ESP explanations were certainly taken seriously in the old days. Such a point of view was clearly not a development coming only from the experimental work conducted by the Rhines and their associates. Another example: both J. B. and Louisa Rhine argued that the unconscious nature of ESP only became evident because of experimental work conducted during the 1940s (J. B. Rhine, 1977; L. E. Rhine, 1971). While it is true that this work may have supported the idea, the concept that psi is an unconscious function had been clearly articulated before the Duke work, as can be seen in Myers's (1903) work. But the Rhines discussed the idea as if it had been an original invention coming out of their work, possibly to enhance the importance of the developments related to the Duke work. The reinvention of concepts and the rewriting of history have been important in the construction of a modern identity for parapsychologists.
Another way psychical researchers have traditionally tried to deal with their phenomena has been to draw analogies to other processes of the physical world. The purpose here has been to show that psychic functioning is part of the natural world (on the use of metaphors see Williams & Dutton, 1998). The concept of physical and biological radiations has been applied throughout the history of mesmerism, Spiritualism, and psychical research to explain ESP, PK, healing, materializations, and other phenomena. In his recent history of telepathy Luckhurst (2002, pp. 75-92) chronicled some of the early attempts to present this phenomenon as a force of nature similar to light, electricity and magnetism. Early exponents of this movement included William Barrett, who speculated of telepathy's similarity to electrical induction (1876), and William Crookes, who drew an analogy with such radiations as X rays (1897). Invocation of the analogies to radio (Warcollier, 1938) also served this function.
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